Game 472: Bloodnet (1993)

 

It's an interesting juxtaposition of themes.

     

BloodNet

United States

MicroProse (developer and publisher)

Released in 1993 for DOS, 1994 for Amiga

Date Started: 30 October 2022

    

The names on the inside cover were mostly familiar: Mark Seremet (executive producer), John Antinori (game design and writing), Frank Kern and Rick Hall (programming). F. J. Lennon is even listed under "design consultants." The official developer may be "MicroProse," but this is a Paragon Software title. In my interview with Lennon a couple of years ago, he said that Paragon, which had been acquired by MicroProse in 1992, was largely operating as an independent studio within the larger company.

    

Knowing that the Paragon folks are involved makes me suspect the game is going to be a failure, but a memorable one. I suspect role-playing will be lacking--the Paragon team never even came close to getting it right--but the themes and elements of gameplay will have moments of brilliance. On the other hand, Lennon's lack of prominence on this one (it appears he went directly from Challenge of the Five Realms [1992] to Star Crusader [1994]) makes it a bit of a wild card. The only other game I've played that was designed primarily by Antinori was the weird Wizard Wars (1988). Another X factor is the involvement of MicroProse veterans, including Laura Kampo, who is co-listed here for writing and design. Lennon, who would soon marry Kampo, credited her with much of the quality writing and plotting in Challenge of the Five Realms.

  

I should write all my entries on this game in this font.

    

The game certainly begins memorably, in both good and bad ways. It is set in 2094 in New York City, which has become horribly crowded, polluted, and dilapidated. The world is run by the megacorporation TransTechnicals, which operates the Internet and charges people for access. Technology allows people to plug directly into cyberspace with their minds, and most choose to spend as much of their time as possible there, fleeing a decaying world that barely functions. Oh, and there are vampires.

   

You play Ransom Stark, a former TransTech employee who was fired after he developed "Hopkins-Brie Ontology Syndrome," leaving him unable to distinguish the real from the virtual. Cast aside to wander the streets, he was rescued by an underground hacker collective led by Deidre Tackett, and he was given implants to block the effects of the syndrome. He now works as a freelance mercenary.

       

You want me to take a job as an associate professor?

      

These facts are relayed in the manual. BloodNet begins with a long cinematic. I bought the game from GOG, which offered me a choice between the disk version and the CD version. (The best I can figure, the CD version was released in 1994, a year after the disk version.) The CD version has its dialogue entirely voiced. It was so, so awful. (Check it out for yourself.) I would have suffered it if it had also featured written text, but between voice-only and text-only, I'll always choose the text. I thus switched to the disk version.

   

The cinematic has Stark in his favorite Manhattan bar, Abyss. He is approached there by a femme fatale named Melissa Van Helsing, who offers him $50,000 (inflation has been low for the last century!) if he'll sneak into a TransTech office and destroy records of her company's relationship with TransTech. I assumed the game would commence with this mission, but instead Stark accomplishes it in a text screen. 

    

Well, that spoiled the mood.

     

We then transition to Van Helsing's penthouse at 666 West 125th Street in New York. (I wonder why the developers chose that address. The "666" part is obvious, but the address is in West Harlem, right on top of the famous Cotton Club--not the original, but the 1978 resurrection.) Amidst some extremely awkward dialogue, Stark seems to attract Melissa's interest, and she tricks him into telling her where Tackett's hideout is.

 

We should have a sample of that dialogue:

   

Stark: I'm here for my fifty grand.

   

Melissa: You work fast.

   

Stark: Not too fast. I get the job done. Now I'm here to collect.

   

Melissa: Relax. You'll get what's coming to you.

   

Stark: That's what I'm counting on.

    

Melissa: You've got a real attitude, Stark. Too bad we hadn't met under different circumstances. I'm not usually the one to go for low-rent mercenary types.

   

Stark: Don't knock it until you've tried it. Besides, you're not exactly standard issue. What's your story anyway? You come out of nowhere, with the most unusual, captivating looks I've ever seen on any woman, then offer me a fortune for a job I could do in my sleep. I couldn't wait to get up here to see you again. You're like no woman I've ever met. I'm not sure I like what you're doing to me. 

     

Melissa: Don't knock it until you've tried it, Stark. Come here.

     

Just as the couple seems about to interface, Melissa's father, Abraham Van Helsing, shows up. He intimates that Tackett's location is what he really wanted from Stark. "For your service to me," he says, "I give you life eternal, undeath without end." He bites Stark on the neck, and Stark goes through an agonizing transformation and passes out.

     

Abraham fang-blocks his daughter.

       

Stark wakes up in a tomb, where Abraham tells Stark that he is under the vampire's command and will be part of the vampire army helping Abraham take over "Manhattan, cyberspace, and beyond." What Abraham doesn't know is that Stark's neural implant is preventing the vampire's mind control from taking hold. Stark lays Abraham out with a punch, then flees to the street, desperate to reach Tackett's laboratory before the vampires do.

      

Vampires have glass jaws. It is known.

     

Stark's neural implant starts talking to him (Stark's lack of reaction suggests this is normal), noting the changes going on in the man's body. The implant confirms that it is "slowing the rate at which [Stark is] becoming a vampire," but the strain on the implant will cause it to stop functioning within a few days. The implant suggests that Stark find a way to reverse the condition. Finally, the cinematic ends and the game takes you to character creation.

    

"I've become a vampire, it seems." This is clearly the same writer later responsible for "Somehow, Palpatine returned."

      

There are quite a few unfortunate things in the otherwise-atmospheric cinematic. The dialogue is pretty bad, particularly Stark's repeated efforts to "flirt" with Melissa. If the rest of the writing was any good, I'd think they did that deliberately to depict Stark's character; as it is, I suspect that they just didn't know how to write. Second, we have Stark's default character portrait. He looks like Puddy from Seinfeld. Patrick Warburton is a fine actor and has been in plenty of great stuff, but his face doesn't say noir to me, especially when he's smiling during what's supposed to be dramatic dialogue.

         

Shots from Stark's transition. I feel like there's a lot of meme potential here.

       

Character creation offers two options: "Quick" and "Manual." The manual method walks you through a bunch of conceptual scenarios and asks what you'd do. We've come a long way from someone stealing my sweet roll. This was the first question I got:

A serial killer stalks lower Manhattan's Dream Parlors--rooms filled with Dream Machines, Virtual Reality equipped sensory deprivation tanks that allow users to enjoy realistic simulations of any kind of experience. The parlor owners hire you to apprehend the killer. You:

   

• Link yourself to a Dream Machine that you program to simulate precisely what is occurring in the parlor you are occupying. In this way you will be able to view the killer should he enter the parlor and capture him.

• Rig the entrances to each parlor with sensors linked to a cyberspace WELL from which you will monitor them. When the killer makes his move you can alert the parlor owners.

• In an effort to deter the killer from returning, you arm yourself to the teeth and make yourself as visible as possible as you patrol the parlors.

      

I feel like I have to ask a few questions here. Is the killer killing people in the real world by attacking their helpless bodies in the tanks? Is he getting them on the way in or out? Is he entering the simulated worlds and killing them virtually? Ultimately, the third option is the only one I even understand. I'm not sure how well it reflects my preferences.

       

I swear I've seen this movie.

   

Overall, I get that the options indicate how much you favor combat, stealth, technology, or guile as solutions to your problems. This was how Challenge began, and just as in Challenge, your answers determine the values in a large array of skills and attributes. You get a pool of bonus points to make some tweaks to up to five skills, select your portrait from a group of seven possibilities. I used the bonus points mostly to bolster weak skills. I don't know how many of these skills will turn out to be useful. I've been working on a theory that a game should only have a certain number of skills per average number of game hours, but I haven't quite finalized it. All I can say is that unless BloodNet lasts about 100 hours, I suspect it has more skills than it needs. Paragon doesn't exactly have a strong history of making use of all the skills it offers in its games (cf. MegaTraveller and its sequel, Twilight 2000, and Challenge).

     

I'm going to regret those low "cyberskills" in a few minutes.

       

You find yourself in Tackett's trashed lab. "You're next, Stark" is written on the floor in blood. The interface uses a slightly angled view of the game world. I call this type of view "studio" view, but I'm sure there's a better term. Left-clicking on the floor moves the character. Moving the mouse to the top of the screen brings up the six menus: "Combat," "View," "Party," "Deck," "Computer," and "Game." You can pick up and move items on the screen by right-clicking on them. There isn't much keyboard backup except that the F1-F6 keys activate the respective menus. There doesn't seem to be a "pause" option, but a clock does keep track of game time. I don't yet know if anything is time-dependent.

     

Joke's on you; my apartment already looks like this.

    

The graphics mostly work for me. They're a bit smudgy; I don't know if this was the intended style or a reflection of technological limitations. But they fit the setting and atmosphere. The characters never look to me like they're really "inhabiting" the spaces, though; they look like they're walking around on top of a matte background. 

I start working my way around the room and testing out the various menu options. I pick up various bits of technology, most of which I don't really understand, although I'm glad to see the game gives a description of each item. My inventory shows that I'm wearing a Kevlar vest and have a laser pistol, a sawed-off shotgun, and some ammunition. He also has a set of Kevlar coveralls. I'm not sure which is better, the overalls or the vest. The "examine" option isn't much help, and there's no explicit armor class. Examining the vest tells me that it protects the torso against all firearms except the "riot stopper" and all melee weapons except holy water. Examining the coveralls just tells me that they're "coveralls fashioned from Kevlar." Does that mean they don't protect against firearms?

        

I'm having a tough time envisioning holy water as a melee weapon.

     

The search options tell me that I don't find anything. I'm not sure if it matters where you're standing when you search. You can pick up items in the room from any point in the room. I try to move around to different places to search, but Stark gets hung up on any pixel that isn't a bare floor.

    

The "contacts" file in Stark's handheld computer has 14 entries for people that Stark knows, some of them suggesting potential avenues for my next move. These include:

          

• Visit the Houston Matrix Rovers, another hacking group, to warn them that TransTech might be infiltrating their WELLs (illegal data clusters).

• Visit a motorcycle gang called the Flux Riders for intel.

• Visit Lash Givens, who recently sustained an injury on a TransTech job. He should be at the Abyss. 

• Check out rumors of vampires killing people in a shanty town on Great Lawn in Central Park. 

• Look around for a snitch named Timmy Goldfarb who might have information on TransTech.

• Find a guy named Slash McLachlin, "worth his weight in gold in combat." He's probably in a bar.

            

The "View" menu offers a map of New York on which you can fast-travel to other places. There are a couple of dozen destinations available immediately, some having to do with the contacts file. 

       

I want to know what that big glowy thing is on the Upper East Side.

     

The items in the room are an inertia sensor, a decking unit case, a radiation screen, a 4 TB memory chip, the plans for my neural implant, and a dermal filament. I don't know what to do with most of it. Some of these things seem to go in my "decking unit," and I figure I'd better get a handle on that now because my implant suggested I access Tackett's WELL with the password "hope." The manual tells me that I can enter cyberspace as long as I have a "deck" and I'm in a room with a port. They've apparently lost Wi-Fi in the future. The deck's interface has slots for various chips, including cloaks, something called a "soul box," a "looker," "essence," and memory. I replace the 1TB memory chip in there with the 4TB chip that I found, then choose the "Enter Cyberspace" option.

     

The types of chips spell out SCLEM. That's a clue!

     

I find myself spinning in place on a cloud with a bunch of objects floating around. I can't seem to do anything with the objects. I walk a few screens and meet what looks like a guy in a hovercar. I right-click on him. The "guy" introduces itself as the "File Access Table System Module for this quadrant." It asks me to enter a code. I try HOPE, but it tells me that "cyberskills are too low for [his] circuitry to interpret [my] signal." I meet several of these guys, but I can't get anywhere with any of them.

       

I, for one, am glad that in the real world, I navigate cyberspace with a keyboard and a search engine.

     

Moving around, I found a few stationary objects and pick them up. One is called "c.flyer.ego" and the other is "c.flyer.memory." Examining them tells me that they are "one of five pieces of Charley Flyer's mind, broken up in the net." I can't "use" either of them. I guess they must relate to a quest I haven't received yet. I meet another spinning dude, and when I talk to him, a long message pops up but then immediately goes away, and after it goes away, the other dude is gone. This keeps happening--the game dismisses on-screen messages as if I clicked or hit ESC, but I haven't hit anything.

      

"Cyberskills are too low?!" Son, I wwebsite as on the Internet when you were two lines of assembly code.

    

Wandering around further, I am suddenly seized by tentacles erupting from the ether. "You have been apprehended by a security cage," the game says. "Your decking unit's memory is being erased. Unsanctioned decking is forbidden. Do not return." I'm not sure what the consequences of erasing the memory are. Not having accomplished much, I exit cyberspace, save, and wrap up the first session.

       

I think my "cloak" is to help me avoid this guy. I guess I need an upgrade.

      

Already I'm wishing for a good sword and an orc to slay it with. I take to sci-fi much less readily than fantasy and to cyberpunk less readily than most sci-fi. But there are some intriguing things here, and I'll do my best. I just hope there aren't too many ways to cause irrevocable damage with my bumbling about.

 

As I've mentioned before, Will Moczarski over at the Adventurer's Guild is playing this game at the same time from an adventure gamer's perspective. His first entry should also be published today, but from now on, we won't be blogging on the same day. He'll blog every Thursday (roughly), and I'll offer my entries on Mondays. I'm going to let him have the first word, so my next BloodNet coverage won't be until 14 November. I'll either try to get somewhere with Angband in the meantime or add a fourth game to the rotation.

    

In honor of the way they do things at the Guild, I invite my commenters to guess the GIMLET rating. The commenter closest to the final score will win something I haven't figured out yet. Thematically, I suppose it should have something to do with blood.

   

Time so far: 2 hours