BloodNet: It's Christmas Time in the City

I'm off the "naughty" list.

    

BloodNet is a harbinger for a type of game that is going to become increasingly common in the 1990s. It's so plot-heavy that it's tough to write about. I can't imagine that any previous title has featured as much dialogue. (If any game came close, it was the same team's Challenge of the Five Realms.) There's no way to summarize it without losing a lot of the details. 

    

Summarizing it is particularly difficult for me now, because I'm writing over two weeks after playing the part of the game that this review covers. I got busy with end-of-semester stuff and wasn't able to stick to my usual schedule, which put me behind The Adventure Gamer's coverage. For all these reasons, forgive me if I elide a bit as I try to piece together what happened.

     

When I wrote last time, Ransom Stark had just completed a burglary at TransTech headquarters and made off with a bunch of stuff from different floors that other people wanted. The party's inventory was bursting with that stuff, plus various weapons and armor. Here we come to my first problem with the game: figuring out the best weapons. I've mostly been trying to equip people with weapons that match their highest skills, but I don't know if that's the right approach. If a character has a firearms skill of 75 and a "high-tech" skill of 64, I'm not sure that means that a 9mm pistol does more damage than a laser rifle. Normally, you'd check this sort of thing by comparing combat damage, but this is complicated in BloodNet since a) combat is so rare, and b) weapon damage is affected by type of opponent and armor. More on that in a bit.

       

I thought being a dragon would be cool, but I just look like Figment.

    

I had saved the game in Deirdre Tackett's old lab, so before doing anything else, I jacked into cyberspace. I knew I was going to have to give up my new Dragon Soul Box eventually, and I wanted to experience it.

   

The Black Aggots gang had given me the WELL code ANTIBODY, asking me to find a drug database there. Otherwise, they would have to take Van Helsing's contract to kill me in exchange for the same. I went to that address, but I could only find yet another piece of C. Flyer's mind, not any database. Granted, the latticework is so visually complicated that I could have missed it, but I clicked around almost everywhere.

       

It doesn't help that random shapes are constantly floating around.

       

I then tried to go to TTHEAT, TransTech's security hub, whose address I'd received from the Doom Pilots. I immediately got a warning about "incompatible hardware" and got booted out. Finally, I met another avatar named Dreg, an old friend of Stark's, who gave me a program for crashing cyborgs. I found yet another C. Flyer piece in there somewhere, too. I spent a while wandering from screen to screen looking for the Lost Kids and the Incubus program they're protecting, but I had no luck. I probably need another WELL code for that.

      

Why would you design your security interface to look like that?

       

With my sack overflowing with toys, I set about the city distributing them, to varying degrees of success:

    

• Central Park: I had intended to give the fiber-optic cable to the "mayor" of shanty town, Kimba West, but he was completely gone. The second screen had been taken over by vampires, who attacked when I approached. Vampires are unkillable with normal weapons, so I had to reload.

• Electric Anarchy: Phracktle K. Oss congratulated me for assassinating TransTech's security director. He gave me $10,000 and the TTHEAT password I already had.

     

It was an assassination, but it was a "nice, clean" one.

      

• Also Electric Anarchy: Auntie Matter took the one of several TransTech security badges and gave me a Wrath Ray. 

    

It's becoming clear that there are multiple ways to accomplish the same things in BloodNet. There are several quest items that you can either find or buy. Several quests give you the same information. There are also items like the Wrath Ray that you can either find, buy, or assemble from parts. This is all a good thing.

     

• Also Electric Anarchy: Phree Thaught took the Dragon Soul box in exchange for a canister of sleeping gas. Oddly, even after giving it to her, I still had the soul box in my decking unit, so I guess I didn't have to give it up after all.

   

There was a kid named Chuck hanging around with Electric Anarchy. I don't remember talking to him before. He asked for the list of Tackett's associates that I had looted from the security director, then introduced himself as one of Tackett's Lost Kids--the only one who didn't enter cyberspace permanently to guard Incubus. After Chuck programmed the WELL, Deirdre gave him an implant that made him forget its access code. He doesn't know how to retrieve that information, but he thinks that something is important about the large pendant that Deirdre was wearing the last time he saw her: "Deirdre never wore stuff like that." He joined the party. He has very poor combat skills but extremely high cyberskills. He also has 85 "Innocence," an attribute I can't imagine the use of.

        

Only in a fictional world would you find a correlation between heavy Internet presence and "innocence."

            

I couldn't equip Auntie Matter's Wrath Ray, so I took it to the Cybersurgery Group to see if Dr. Austin could implant it. He could. It goes on the head and somehow channels anger into a laser. I gave it to Stark.

       

It probably looks stupid, like an ioun stone.

   

• Doom Pilots: Sis Konfigg took the Level 4 Security Cloak she wanted and gave me the access code to the Bank of New York: NYVAULT. 

• St. Patrick's Cathedral: Mother Mary had asked me to meet her there ages ago. She was there with a Brother Complicitus, who explained that TransTech was trying to have them evicted from the last Catholic church in New York. TransTech had somehow acquired the deed. The threatening letters come from a William Dougan, assistant to Walter McCalaster. I picked up some crosses and holy water before heading out. I gave the cross to the high-faith Chuck.

        

I continue to be impressed with the game's novel approach to graphical perspective and style. Note that the "camera" in this scene seems to be pointing down from the middle of a chandelier.

      

At this point, I was just trying to complete my tour of the city's locations. The next location south was the Plaza Hotel and its Hellfire Club, to which I had received a pass in the last session. The Hellfire Club was confusing--multiple rooms with multiple NPCs. They seemed to be a mix of people cosplaying vampires and actual vampires. There were rumors of creepy practices in the back rooms.

   

A reporter named Eleanor Salem threatened to "out" me as a vampire unless I brought her a vial of blood from the back rooms. A vampirophile named Renfield (a Dracula reference) wanted to join the party, but I was full. An enemy of Van Helsing's named George Yatchisin gave me a TransTech security badge (too little, too late). In one back room, I found the aforementioned Walter McCalaster hanging around with what seemed to be some prostitutes. He just told me to leave when I talked to him.

     

An all-purpose dialogue option for Stark.

     

In another back room, there was some love triangle going on that seemed to be riffing on Gilda (1946). The woman in question was named Larisa, and she was slowly going mad. Her older husband, Braque Picaro, insisted on pumping both of them full of drugs to enhance their intimate experiences, while her younger lover, Griff Spater, insisted on using high-tech toys. Both blamed the other for Larisa's growing disaffection and insanity and wanted me to do something to "cure" her of the other's influences. I frankly didn't take good notes here and I hope it's just a silly side-quest.

       

That's going to come in handy.

       

Finally, I reached the "inner sanctum" of the Hellfire Club, where actual vampires mixed with people who thought they were just pretending to be vampires. Both types of people drank freely from the vials of animal blood scattered everywhere. I picked a few up and found that they reliably removed Stark's bloodlust without the need for an actual victim.

     

Right. "Just like a real vampire."

    

A vampire named Linda Blaue, who had converted to vampirism for her vampire lover, Gi Sang, offered me half an amulet that, coupled with the other half, could somehow lead to a reversal of vampirism. She said the other half was in the possession of someone named Wyche Gibbon. But Gi Sang, standing next to her, laughed at the idea that the amulet would work

    

One of the real vampires was Bertrand Foucault, the founder of the Hellfire Club. He said he had lived in Manhattan since 1801. "Not since the autumn of 1836 has anyone suspected that a vampire stalks Manhattan's streets," he said, so he's a bit annoyed that Van Helsing has created a bunch of new vampires, alerting everyone to their presence. "In a city of twenty million, he has actually created a vampire plague. His lack of restraint endangers all our kind." Rather than help me destroy Van Helsing, he said he wants a new machine created by TransTech that synthesizes human blood cells, allowing vampires to feed without killing. Whoever owns it could hide until things blow over. He said if I would get it for him, he'd share it with me, "and together we can wait out the storm."

      

Stark is as tactful as always.

     

I already had the device from my last visit to TransTech, so I gave it to him. Instead of upholding his end of the bargain, he immediately attacked. As he was a vampire, I was unable to damage him with any of my weapons, and he slowly destroyed my entire party. I had to reload.

   

Until I somehow get the soul blades from the Red Crosse Knights, the only weapons I have to fight vampires are a few stakes. There's something going on in combat that I don't understand. There's an option to "Choose Weapon" so that, theoretically, you can change weapons in the middle of combat, but the option never shows all of the weapons that I have. It does not show stakes when I have firearms equipped, and it doesn't even show all firearms. The only way I've been able to match the right weapon to the right foe is to reload after a failed combat and then equip myself with the right weapons before trying again. I don't know whether this is a bug in the game or whether I'm missing some interface element. One consequence of this is that I have no idea how I'm supposed to use grenades, as they are also not listed in the "Choose Weapon" dialogue.

      

Five of us take on the ancient vampire. I'm not sure what the difference is between "body" and "torso."

     

With stakes equipped, I was able to kill Foucault and then convince his contracted doctor, Gawesque, to inject me with the cells. My notes are confusing here, but I think I'm going to have to return to Gawesque every time I want a new injection, but as long as I can get back to the Hellfire Club periodically, I won't need to feed on any more humans. Plus, I have all those blood vials. I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but above a certain bloodlust percentage, the game continuously shrieks at you when you engage the icon menu. It will be nice not to have to live with that any more.

      

It would have been nice if these results were in a list rather than a paragraph.

     

All told, there were more NPCs and more text to read in the Hellfire Club alone than in most entire games. I probably only mentioned a third of the NPCs in this coverage. So it was a bit of a relief when I was back on the road again. I moved south to Bellevue Hospital and groaned to find another dozen or so NPCs in two rooms. According to a nurse, Karl Gavin, most of them had fried themselves in cyberspace. "We pump 'em full of muscle atrophy preventatives and give 'em therapy. What's the point? All the king's men aren't gonna be able to put these unlucky fools' minds back together again."

     

Another artful shot.

     

One of the unlucky fools was Charley Flyer, pieces of whose mind I'd been finding all over cyberspace. His wife Ellen sat by his side. I wasn't able to figure out how to do anything with them during this visit, but I'm not sure I have all the pieces. One of the chambers allowed party members to rest and heal--all except Stark, who apparently needs "a coffin lined with soil from his homeland." I picked up some medical devices and moved on.

       

I think the hospital room had more stuff to pick up than any room in the game so far.

      

Having now explored every location that the game has offered so far, I returned to TransTech to see if I could find William Dougan, who's been threatening St. Patrick's with his letters. Sure enough, there was a new option for his office in the elevator. (You'd think they would have locked down security after my previous two visits.) Dougan protested that he was just acting on behalf of McCalastar, who Dougan didn't like. "If McCalaster were out of the picture and I was in, I could help you." He suggested that I find a way to show McCalastar the True Meaning of Christmas and soften his heart.

        

You can almost hear Bing Crosby saying these lines.

     

Wait . . . sorry, I confused this with one of the movies Irene is watching in the background. What Dougan actually suggested was that I find incriminating evidence of McCalastar's "tawdry affairs," which Dougan could subsequently deliver to his wife, a TransTech executive, who would then likely remove McCalastar from his position.

      

I'm a little stuck at this point. My open quest items are:

      

• Try to find this Wyche Gibbon, get his half of the amulet, and see if there is any cure to vampirism found in the pieces. I'm not sure if this amulet is related to Deidre's pendant that Chuck wants me to find. If not:

• Find Deirdre's pendant and see if it helps restore Chuck's memory as to where the Lost Kids are.

• Find a way to restore the pieces of his mind to Charley Flyer.

• Figure out how to get into the TTHEAT TransTech security hub.

• Steal the Multichannel Transmitted from the Icon Robbers for the head of the Kafka Conspiracy. I think that to do this, I need to use Phree Thought's SomnaVapor, but I tried it at some point, and the game said that I would need to protect myself from the gas before it would work.

        

I thought vampires didn't breathe.

        

• Access the Bank of New York (NYVAULT), although I don't know why.

• Figure out a way to turn McCalaster's presence in the Hellfire Club brothel to "evidence" that I can give Dougan, thus saving St. Patrick's, thus getting Mother Mary's help dealing with the vampires in Central Park, which I'm not even sure is important anymore.

• Find the rest of the cyborg parts needed to download Elvis.

• I still never found the "cage key" necessary to free Banks Verbatim from TransTech's custody.

• Find that drug database for the Black Aggots. I'm out of leads on that since it wasn't in the given WELL.

• Find some way to get soul blades from the Red Crosse Knights. I think the problem was that too many of them still recognized me as a vampire despite the face paint. Maybe I have to cure my vampirism first. Or maybe I just have to kill them?

         

I have no particular leads on any of these things, so I'm just going to have to revisit past locations and see if there's anything new.

 

This is not the sort of game for which you want to take a three week break in the middle of playing. This is, rather, the sort of game that you want to play in long, closely grouped sessions. Well, nothing to do about the past. I'll see if I can regain some momentum this week and hopefully bring this to a close.

 

Time so far: 16 hours