Thursday, November 3, 2022

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

126 comments:

  1. This is part of an informal horror cyberpunk trilogy, with Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller and Ripper as sequels. Really unique point of view on the themes, and games that are far from perfect. And which share, apart from some devs, among the worst soundtracks ever done in videogames.

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    1. and btw, you got further away than I ever did even with a walkthrough. I don't miss a sword and shield, I miss just the tiniest semblance of an usable interface which tells you what you are doing or what you can do.

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    2. I note that those other games don't seem to have any RPG elements, which doesn't necessarily bode well for this one.

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    3. Wow, I didn't know they were from the same devs, really a cyberpunk trilogy from hell.

      The genre is much better represented by games like Circuit's Edge, Neuromancer and Beneath a Steel Sky.

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    4. Ripper might actually be the best game of the three, unbelievably. Depending on one's personal pain threshold for tedious puzzles, I guess.

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    5. If these games form a trilogy, why is it a trilogy and not a quadrilogy? Bureau 13 seems to share most of the same themes from my perspective of having not played any of these games beyond Bloodnet. I have heard nothing but good things about Hell though.
      @Vince, no Neuromancer absolutely belongs in the same pile as Bloodnet, interesting games ruined by botched executions.

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    6. Bureau13 has less devs in common but shares the fascination with the RPG tropes and the sense that the game does not want you to play it, yep.

      Agree with @stepped pyramids: Ripper, an FMV where actually Christopher Walken is the worst actor of them all, is the better game, but the arcade sequences are bad and some of the puzzles (the coins one) are incredibly unfair. Take 2 would later release Black Dahlia which has double the plot density and double the unfairness on those boardgame kind of puzzles. Really, I enjoyed 7th Guest but these games are too much.

      Hell is very funny but also so so clunky.

      @CRPGAddict, my feeling is that you are going to find a similar game to Challenge of the 5 realms that will end too soon to make any of the rpg elements matter.

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  2. Este é um dos jogos esteticamente mais feios que eu já vi.

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    1. Sim, o ambiente é bastante sombrio... As for the GIMLET the game will receive 43 points.

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    2. The art is all over the place. You have handmade pixel art (some cutscenes), edited digitized photos (a lot of the portraits), prerendered early '90s 3D (backdrops, cyberspace), and mushy little sprites (combat). The game over screens are particularly notable (both for dying and for reaching 0% humanity).

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  3. "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."

    Wait, this sounds more like the present than 2094!

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  4. "...Will Moczarski over at the Adventurer's Guild is playing this game at the same time from an adventure gamer's perspective."

    Great, now there's another blog I'll have to follow...

    (In earnest, thanks for the heads-up, I love me some adventure gaming, thanks.)

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  5. Count Of MontecristoNovember 3, 2022 at 12:59 PM

    The mix of rendered art and classic pixel art is horrible , with a coherent graphic look and more rpg aproach the game would be great 😩

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    1. It seems like an early attempt to do what Final Fantasy VII did with prerendered backgrounds, but both the backgrounds and the characters look way worse. Game companies were way too enthusiastic about adopting 3D back then -- look at the opening cinematic for King's Quest VI, for instance.

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    2. I don't know how it was recieved back in the day, but that cinemathic, if you watch it today, is really really awful

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  6. " 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"

    So, mostly like today, but with vampires.

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    1. Did you last visit New York in 1993?

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    2. 1997 was my first time there, as a high-school trip!

      Definitely improved since then, I must have visited it a dozen of times in pre-Covid years, for work.

      Still, it was a joke waiting to happen :)

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    3. "So, mostly like today, but with vampires."

      Elon Musk would like a word.

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    4. Well, no vampires, but I would take them over these danged werewolves any day.

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    5. One thing about living in New York I could never stomach, all the damn vampires.

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

    Just pour it into your axe-shaped ice cube tray and let it chill for a few hours!

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    1. That wouldn't work for obvious reasons, but I always did wonder why Buffy never tried a slingshot with holy water ice cubes.

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    2. I assume a water pistol full of holy water would cover the same niche but be more effective (I know one of the BtVS video games I played armed the slayer with such a weapon.)

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    3. Or a Super Soaker for the real Big Bads.

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    4. The best idea I ever heard for a demon hunter was why not fill a hula hoop with salt and carry that around. You'll never be outside your circle of salt.

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    5. I'd love me a good holy snowball fight!

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    6. Dip your hand and just slap the vampire as hard as you can.

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    7. Holy water pistols have been used a few times. The Lost Boys springs to mind as one example.

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    8. Simple. If your Holy water is in a bottle, it can be used as a blunt weapon first, and slashing or piercing one afterwards.

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  8. "They've apparently lost Wi-Fi in the future."

    "plugging in" and ubiquitous neon signs are aspects of Cyberpunk that feel very outdated today, but I like this kind of retro future. Shadowrun introduced a wireless matrix in later editions, but it never felt right.

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    1. I suppose we could imagine that some future exploit or tech makes WIFI entirely insecure (or at least too much a risk when the tech is physically integrated with one's brain), making physical ports necessary?

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    2. I have a harder time imaging a technological reason in which instead of talking to someone via IM, you'd plug into a VR headset and go spinning around a cloud hoping to find that person so you could talk in-person.

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    3. Frankly, its always struck me that the process is fragile enough that using anything that could easily be disrupted, like Wi-Fi, is a really stupid thing to do. It already tends to cause hiccups with streaming shows and what not, do you want that to be your brain?
      Easier to just stick a cord somewhere. And if someone else uses the Wi-Fi you don't have to worry about someone else streaming Law & Order 2087 and accidentally taking too much bandwidth.

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    4. I suppose it's similar to how I insist on buying wired mice because I can't stand the occasional "stuttering" that comes with wireless ones.

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    5. Bandwidth could also be used as an excuse, a wired link is simply always faster. In my industry we have a saying, there's 2 ways to do the job - wireless, or problemless.

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    6. I sort of vaguely remember Shadowrun 2E saying something along those lines - that wireless transmission was suitable for "turtles" (I think I'm correctly recalling the derisive term for people who used the FutureInternet without actually plugging it directly into their brains) but to actually do the full-on-if-you-die-in-the-matrix-you-die-for-real cyberpunk experience, you needed a wired connection, up until near the end of that generation of the game, when one of the later sourcebooks introduced bleeding-edge super-high-end wireless cyberdecks that were only available via act of god

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    7. Gosh I'm so happy I'm not the only one that can't stand wireless mice.

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    8. In several ways wireless (not wifi) is more reliable than a cable. You could easily make it work in an advanced technological setting - the matrix requires some suspension of disbelief anyway for a technically minded person. But aesthetically, a person being plugged into a machine with a cable is what says "Cyberpunk" to me. In the first Shadowrun editions, you have it right on the cover.

      I think a reason Shadowrun introduced the wireless matrix (I think 4th ed+) is to integrate the decker into the team a bit better. In earlier editions, the decker often stayed behind and supported the team from his jackpoint at home. And while the decker did his support stuff, the rest of the players played something else. In later editions, the matrix is always around and the decker does his support stuff while running with the team, only plugging in for some really important part of the run.

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    9. My recollection is certainly that if you built a Decker (or a Rigger for that matter) in 2E you were likely to be very disappointed with what your role in the story ended up being unless the whole team went that route. Otherwise, you were basically Aquaman hoping the GM would throw you a fjord out of pity.

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  9. I'm not sure how the Adventurer's Guild rates things, I have to check that later. But for the GIMLET I think this will end up about 41.

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    1. Yeah, asking my readers to guess another blog's rating scheme was a bit unfair. Let me amend that.

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  10. I watched that video of the opening cutscene, and it's incredible not just because the voice acting is bad (and it is bad, so bad), but even the RECORDING is bad. Like... from someone who'd never even heard of a pop filter. I imagine they used one of those Logitech $9.99 wand mics in a room full of filing cabinets.

    Also I'd love to see the discussion where they decided that to add voice they should REMOVE the text... huh? That just seems cruel to their players.

    I'd never heard of this game before but if it's, as Risingson Carlos suggests, a prequel to Ripper I think I can guess how good it is.

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    1. I had the same experience as Chet, I didn't even wait for the intro to finish to quit and switch to the text-only version. Unbelievably awful.

      You cannot even blame the technology, as some games of the time have great audio quality recordings.

      Removing the text for voiced versions was not uncommon though, a lot of Sierra games of those years are equally as guilty.

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    2. This was firmly in the era of "video games are the new movies", and talkies got rid of the title cards, right?

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    3. Even as late as the early 2000s, I saw a group selling a commercial game SDK, and when asked about their engine's support for text captions, they snarkily replied that you should just make your audio quality good enough that players don't need captions.

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    4. Bloodnet cannot be a prequel to Ripper, because it was released two years earlier. A prequel has to be released later (hence the "-quel" suffix, from "sequel"). The word you wanted is "prologue" or "precursor".

      I'm sorry, but in the last few days I read too many people who used the word "prequel" the wrong way. At least once, let me say it.

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    5. I don't know if the talkie version of Return of the Phantom was released later or before the talkie of Bloodnet, but despite roughly having the same quality voice-acting, it didn't have that awful popping going on. Clearly either they got better or this was done by someone truly incompetent.

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    6. Ross: The original Assassin's Creed had no subtitles in, I think, 2007! To make it worse there's a part of the game early on where you're supposed to hide in a bathroom and listen to a conversation in another room through the ductwork. (You can't hear a damn word.) The game then acts as if you heard it all and doesn't bother recapping it. 2007!

      Abacos: I think you know what I meant and interpreted my comment correctly.

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  11. Sure, what the heck, I'll play. Predicting a GIMLET of ... let's say 30.

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  12. On the plus side, Bloodnet has fewer completely useless skills than Challenge. On the downside, lots of them are covered by NPC party members (like Challenge, the game automatically selects the person with the highest skill for the check), so developing them for your PC is useless in practice, but of course you have no way of knowing in advance which skills those are.

    It also commits to the worst habits of Adventures - despite seeming openness, things have to be done in order (but you can only figure that out through trial and error) and puzzles are very badly clued (when at all). Combine all that trial and error (and reload, because error is deadly) with an unobvious time limit (the implant will give out eventually) and you get a recipe for disaster.

    My guess for the GIMLET would be 32.

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    1. Ah, I see that someone beat me to 32 guess. Let's say 31 then.

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    2. And now you beat me to 31. Thus, I'm going for 29.

      A reward about blood ? How about a coupon for a very rare steak, still bleeding ?

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    3. Is this Price is Right rules? I guess 1.

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    4. Hmm, you could send the winner some Omaha Steaks

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  13. AlphabeticalAnonymousNovember 3, 2022 at 2:06 PM

    > The game certainly begins memorably, in both good and bad ways.

    The bad ways seemed fairly clear -- but what part of the beginning was memorably good?

    My linear regression on past Paragon games predicts a GIMLET of 43+/-2, but someone already took 43. So I'll risk Chet's ire and/or patience and guess the always-significant "42."

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    1. Like I said, the graphics work for me, and the setting and story are original, at least as far as RPGs go.

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  14. I played Bloodnet, but never finished it so looking forward to the coverage. It's a fascinating mess of a game at least. I feel like it'll hit a GIMLET of the high 30's as it's interesting and unique, but not great at being an RPG by Chet's standards. So my guess is a final score of 38.

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    1. Looking at Chet's scores for Challenge and adjusting them to account for differences between the games, I think you're pretty much right. It will still score pretty high in the categories where the earlier game did well, and there really aren't that many points available for it to lose in the other categories. I hate the idea of it clearing the recommended threshold, though, so I'll guess 34.

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  15. I fondly remember Bloodnet as a cool game set in a vivid cyberpunk setting. Also, the mix of cyberpunk and vampires works really well for me. However, my GIMLET prediction is very low, let's say 30. The game will probably score high in 'gameworld' and 'encounters ' sections but will definitely suck in 'combat' which is very confusing and tedious.

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  16. Wow, I wouldn't have guessed that the contacts work like a quest log. I'll be sure to check that out. Re the writing: I had the feeling that it was intentionally tacky (like the manual) and rather enjoyed the 'bad noir' feel. I guess you may be right and it may just be bad but especially the pickup lines were so over the top that must have been irony...right?

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  17. I'll go with a 35 GIMLET. Hopefully you find something to like about this game as you get further into it, but I'm guessing its RPG-adjacent status will knock it some points.

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  18. I am so excited about this. At the very least it's an interesting game. There will probably be multiple firsts for your timeline. It might have the most text of any game you've played so far, too.

    My guess is that it will end up scoring better as an adventure game than as an RPG, but not by much.

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  19. Hmm, difficult to say based on Chet's impressions so far and without knowing the game, but sounds like it could be an ambitious concept with partly murky execution, some highs held back by several lows as a CRPG plus a bit of early 90s style not having aged that well... I'll go with 33.

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  20. Not knowing the game and going by first impression... I say GIMLET will be 28

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  21. Those cyberpunk games always seem better in theory than in practice. They want to be everything at once, you know, because of the endless technical possibilities.
    I guess the people in the 30-35 range got it right. Guess I'll go with... 28.

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  22. I'll guess a 20, less because I think it'll rate that and more from hoping for a trainwreck

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  23. To hopefully put a stop to the well-meaning emails: "Wwebsite as on the Internet" was not a typo.

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  24. I'll go with an overly optimistic 36 on this one. Looks like it'll be a fun (to read) mess that seems like it takes some cues from Shadowrun.

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  25. I am going for 37. I am terrible at rating game but I trust the wisdom of the crowd. The average rating given so far is 33,47 and the closest available rating is 37 :). [the previous message was saying 36 but Bruce shot first].

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  26. Well I already chose 42 over at TAG, but I guess since we're not allowed to use already chosen numbers I'll go with 44. Its definitely going to be something in the 35-45 range here.
    To paraphrase what I said there too, this has a very well-written story and game world, quite possibly one of gaming's best. It really feels like you're just one character of many in a fully fleshed out world...and then there's the game part, which is mediocre on the adventure side and outright trash on the RPG side.

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  27. "I'll either try to get somewhere with Angband in the meantime or add a fourth game to the rotation."
    Forgive me if I missed it, but what's wrong with Die Odyssey? I think most of us are aware of the neverending nightmare that is Angband, but I'm not sure what the problem with this title might be?

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    Replies
    1. It's in German, for one thing, and there's a lot of text. LanHawk is working on extracting it to make it easier to translate, but overall when I said I'd play non-English games in the Latin alphabet, I wasn't thinking of having to translate quite this much.

      Second, I can't find any instructions for it, and there are aspects of the game, like the spell system, that seem indecipherable without them.

      I'll have a preliminary entry out over the weekend, probably.

      Delete
    2. I looked it up, and ah, I see. It looks to be very verbose, very difficult German. I can see why you're considering a fourth game.

      Delete
  28. Gotta disagree with the number of skills having to be related to the length of the game. The upcoming Space Wreck is an intentionally short RPG with a ton of skills and many, many ways to play through it. A dozen endings and a dozen ways to reach them. All the skills are actually useful and allow you to reach different endings in different ways.

    Of course that raises the question whether a short game that can be finished in 4 hours but has enough mutually exclusive content to replay it a dozen times really qualifies as short, or just long in a different way.

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    Replies
    1. Having skills in a game that never get used is bad, but is having skills that only get used once or twice over hours of play that much better? I think the better goal is to have all the skills have opportunities to be used reasonably frequently.

      But for a large set of skills that requires pretty dense coding of each scenario to cover a variety of approaches. So in some ways it could be easier to pull this off with a short game rather than one that went on for dozens of hours.

      Delete
    2. That's a fair point. When I said a game with a lot of skills ought to be long, I wasn't thinking of games that offer multiple ways to play. They're pretty rare. But if a game truly offers a path for any "build," of course I except it from the rule.

      Delete
    3. I think a game with lots of skills, of which some are only used once or twice, can work well. The important thing is that the player gets a good idea which skills are important, and that any sensible build can complete the game. An example would be "flavour skills", maybe even with a separate point pool, like if you have a cooking skill the game acknowledges it in some descriptions.

      Delete
  29. I had to play this one to the very end back then, for some weird masochistic reason. Had it on floppies, just switched from Amiga to a 486 (1994) and a friend gave me some pirated copies.

    Maybe I played it through due to the terribly designed open world structure that punishes you with dead man walking status for not doing things in the correct order, using an item that was actually required later (or much later), losing a companion NPC that was actually needed to progress or getting caught by TransTech Security in cyberspace and losing (for good) all your decking items (some of them more than likely to progress)? Maybe I was attracted to the painful-to-look-at graphics, with no visual style at all mixing first generation 3D backdrops, poorly designed sprites and all colors ever conceived in every single screen? Or the 10 seconds loop of midi music (this one can, should and must be turned off tho)? How about the writing (instantly noticed by Chet), which goes as far as referencing Nietschze and Kafka among other authors in the worst 'these are our references' way ? Or, finally - it´s an RPG, after all - one of the worst combat engines ever designed, with a clunky mess of an interface or, instead, a quick-combat option that is actually a 'quit game' renamed since it always results in your whole party dead?

    Also, since I came across a 'warez' copy, never had a manual.

    Nevertheless, Chet, some Rot13 suggestions I highly suggest you go for. Not actual spoilers, just suggestions for a character - by the way, any character you create is horribly weak compared to everyone else you come across. No solution for this, so just start recruiting.

    Tb sbe n Zrepranel. Lbhe punenpgre zhfg fheivir nyy pbzongf, naq bgure fxvyyf pna or gnxra pner ol ACPf naljnl. Znxrf yvsr fyvtugyl rnfvre.

    Gur sbyybjvat ner ABG hfrshy va guvf tnzr NG NYY:
    Cvpxcbpxrg, Yrnqrefuvc, Vaabprapr, Oevorel
    Gurfr znggre:
    Uvg Cbvagf/Fgeratgu/Ntvyvgl, Uvtu-Grpu/Svernezf/Zryrr/Oynqrf, Snvgu/Jvyy, Bofreingvba/Whel-Evt/Ybpx Cvpx.

    Nyy bguref abg yvfgrq unir na npghny shapgvba va gur tnzr, ohg gurer´f ab arrq gb vairfg cbvagf ba gurz. ACPf jvyy znxr hc sbe vg.

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    Replies
    1. Lbh ernyyl arrq n uvtu fpber va oynqrf, naq na ACP pna'g pbire vg.

      Delete
    2. I agree and I wrote it! Listed under ''these matter''.

      Delete
  30. It looks like that game can be remade as a Shadowrun Returns campaign. It doesn't need to be 100% faithful to the original and will probably benefit from a tighter RPG system. But nobody will ever bother to do it.

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  31. AlphabeticalAnonymousNovember 4, 2022 at 9:29 AM

    > "You're next, Stark" is written on the floor in blood.

    Who wrote this, and why? It shouldn't have been van Helsing's minions, since they wouldn't have known when they set out that Stark was resisting his vampirish tendencies. So are we to think that Tackett's last act was to write out this message (as a warning?) in her own blood?

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  32. "Thematically, I suppose it should have something to do with blood."

    Or, nets?

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  33. Good luck with this one, looks hard.
    For the gimlet game I'd say 33, but it is taken so 39

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  34. I'll go with a GIMLET of 40, doesn't seem to be taken yet...

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  35. WHY would anyone name their child "Ransom"?

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    Replies
    1. It's an old "virtue" name, like "Royal," "Ernest," and "Prosper" for boys and "Constance," "Charity," and "Prudence" for girls. It originally meant something like "redemption," which of course is also used in a financial sense. Slowly, it lost its original context and came to mean only the exchange of money for something, and then slowly became specifically about kidnapping.

      Delete
    2. I should mention that there's an alternate etymological theory tracing it to "shield," but I think it's hogwash.

      Delete
    3. That's pretty cool, thanks. That also explains the similarly-named character in Thimbleweed Park.

      Delete
    4. There are far stupider sounding names than Ransom, which is just some old English-sounding name that worked well enough for a cool '90s protagonist. Pretty sure there are tons of worse named characters from the '90s, but they escape me right now.

      Delete
    5. @crpg addict: thanks. that's pretty cool information about the name.

      Delete
  36. The only thing I can really recall about Bloodnet is that Amiga Power loved it for some absolutely crazy reason, and that on the ECS Amiga (mid-tier) version all of the enemy sprites were replaced with copies of Ransom due to memory limitations so the scenes became strewn with copies of black-clad figures, some standing, some not. I couldn't find the page with a screenshot of this, so I booted it up for myself on the lowest spec Amiga that could run it, and -dang- you do not want to try running this off floppy disks if you can help it. Even with four drives at once, my spree of violence at the cafe/bar with the big 3D clock decoration took a half dozen swaps to transition between walking around and executing combat. If you only had the single internal drive, it would've been double-hell.

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    1. I tried the AGA version with one floppy drive and it kept making me switch between the same three discs. After the now comically long intro was over, it ended up getting stuck saving the game. I hope it was intended to run off the hard drive or something, because clearly the developers spent no effort making it run smoothly off floppies. At least the music was nice.

      Delete
    2. One thing that you can say about the Amiga version is that the soundtrack SLAPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OewoG_n_vFE

      well, at least until the 10th loop

      Delete
  37. I'm going to guess a GIMLET of 27, because this looks really bad, not much of a RPG, and my other guesses are taken already because I'm late to the party!

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  38. Everyone in The Adventurers Guild was betting a higher score with the Gimlet method than the Pissed method, and I followed the trend...So I guessed a really high 48 there...Guess the prize won't be for me :(

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  39. Going with a GIMLET of 24, because I see some high points for things related to mood and story, poor scores for everything else.

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  40. Isn't Van Helsing traditionally a Vampire slayer?

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  41. This game is a part of my childhood. I have a strong sense it's based on the vampire: the masquerade and/or cyberpunk paper and pencil campaigns of its makers, it has that exact feel to it.

    Even so, in terms of how it plays, it's a hybrid adventure game, and nowhere near a good one of those.

    As an RPG it's dysfunctional, deep where it shouldn't be and shallow where it should be deep. As an adventure game, you'll need a walkthrough.

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    1. I cannot predict your gimlet on this because how charming you find this game is very related to how charming you find cyberpunk tropes in general and I do not peg you as a fan.

      Game doesn't play amazing. It has an atmosphere. Let's say a Gimlet of 30

      Delete
    2. I'm leaning towards Cyberpunk 2020 here; neither the setting nor the mechanics particularly remind me of Vampire: the Masquerade.

      Delete
    3. If there's any influence on the vampire part of the story other than Dracula it didn't leap out and bite me. The cyberpunk stuff could be 2020 or from books/movies. I definitely don't see any influence from Shadowrun as some others have guessed.

      Delete
    4. @helm: i'm given to agreeing in this specific case. probably DESPERATELY needs a walkthrough, because my OTHER recollection of this is that it's incredibly finicky. do x with y at the correct time or bust, etc.

      Delete
  42. "Already I'm wishing for a good sword and an orc to slay it with."

    I wonder if trying to smash Lilarcor with an orc would have worked.

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  43. Looks like 45 is still available, so I'll take that, though I really think it'll be lower.

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  44. Final score will be 25, even lower than BAT

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  45. A game that I so wanted to like back in the 1990s. It looked so interesting, but the teenage me had no clue what to do, what was going on or even how to do it.

    I recall in one of my early games I somehow managed to arrive at Van Helsings lair and 'defeat' him in a short space of time. But the game continued and I'd no idea if I'd won or not. Cyberspace confused the heck out of me as well.

    Five years ago, I tried again and realised it wasn't just teenage me. The game is a VERY flawed gem, exceptionally confusing as to what to do or where to go, I never got very far that time either.

    I'll be watching (as I have done for the last eight years) but this game more closely than the others.

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  46. I admit, I can´t say anything about the game, I´m afraid, but I found the discussion about the importance of subtitles very interesting. Since someone mentioned missing subtitles in Sierra Games: Gobliins 3, published by Sierra Games, had a very bad audio quality in the german version and the actors spoke very fast. No subtitle options to be found. Until this day it´s the only game I couldn´t finish because I literally could not understand what I had to do at one point.

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  47. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    1. Nice try, anonymous, but you already posted this same thing from your "real" account. You are unwanted on my site, as both a reader and a commenter. Clearly, I have no way to enforce the former, but I will enforce the latter if I can.

      Delete
  48. My GIMLET guess is 27. I see it's taken already so of course I will not contest the prize should I be correct.

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  49. going to break from the backlog to read your posts on this one as it happens. i was forever curious about it.

    didn't think it was very good, [i wasn't crazy about challenge of the five realms] but the PREMISE is interesting, at least.

    plus, as you've likely encountered: my recollection is that this is a buggy mess.

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  50. ok, i'll play along: gimlet of 23. it hasn't been taken yet. i actually think this one will score higher, though. [if it wasn't taken, i would have picked around 35-39 or so.]

    i think it's going to score points just for the world it's set in - which isn't something you see very often in rpg's and given that you're liking the graphics - it might score some points there, too.

    otherwise, as a rpg, it's probably not going to score real high at all.

    very much looking forward to seeing how this all turns out.

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  51. Most of the plausible numbers are spoken for, so I'll just place a side bet on Red.

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    Replies
    1. Hmm, with vampires as a theme, both red and black could be viable options to me. From the entries (including TAG's second one yesterday) and community feedback so far, it sounds rather odd and uneven as a game experience, so I'll add a corresponding side bet.

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  52. Let's go with a GIMLET of 23. I don't anticipate the game will endear itself to you any more than it has already.

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  53. Crap, I see all the likely scores have been taken already. Ok, I'll go with 21.

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