2088: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

A brief and somewhat mysterious victory screen.

          

2088: The Cryllan Mission

United States

Victory Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for Apple IIGS

Date Started: 24 June 2018

Date Ended: 29 July 2018

Total Hours: 12
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: 34

Ranking at time of posting: 204/299 (68%)

2088 ends up owing a lot to the classic Star Trek episode "Patterns of Force," in which the Enterprise crew discovers that a Federation envoy has re-established Nazism on an earth-like planet. As usual, questions of language and anthropology (how could a species that evolved on another planet be indistinguishable from humanity?) are avoided in the service of a larger sociological point--and, of course, a cheaper budget.

In the case of Crylla, it turns out that Captain N. Scott Robertson was overthrown by his first officer, Yvonne Smith. (According to Smith's dossier in the manual, she has been suffering from PTSD since the "War of 2081.") Smith enlisted most of the rest of Houston's crew in a plot to overthrow and militarize the Cryllan government, complete with the demonization of a formerly-peaceful minority population--the aforementioned "misanthropes." She liquidated most of the ruling class by claiming that they were misanthropes in disguise (they weren't) and ultimately took supreme power for herself. 

            

The imprisoned captain outlines the mutiny against him.

Part of Yvonne's villain's exposition at the end of the game.

          

You learn the full backstory from a handful of surviving Houston crewmembers who resisted Smith. They're scattered in various facilities around the planet. Each require you to answer a copy-protection question to talk to him, and each has an item necessary for the endgame. The easiest to find of these is in the ruined city of Torphur, where on my initial visit I missed an entire underground with additional NPCs.

         

I mapped the first half of the game world but didn't bother with the second.

           

Crylla consists of two 128 x 128 outdoor maps connected by a dungeon called Cramur. (Or, more accurately, two one-way dungeons called Cramur, since you can't exit once you enter, and the dungeon's exit is at a different place on each side than its entrance.) The starting side has two regular towns, Karkala and Zenetych, the ruined town of Torphur, and a military prison in the former city of Adion. It also has an eight-level network of caves called Draque, but its only purpose seems to be grinding.

           

Meeting an enemy in a dungeon.

             

Crylla's second side has one regular city, Filene, a military prison called Euene, a "dungeon" building called Wycke, and the capital city of Nepenthe, situated on an island. Cramur, Wycke, and Draque are all explored in first-person view. The levels are small and the game has an automap.

           

An automap helps with dungeon levels that aren't all that big in the first place.

             

The outdoor areas and dungeons are swarming with humanoid enemies like soldiers, outlaws, and thieves; robotic enemies like automatons, androids, and battle robots; and monstrous enemies like polymuts and mudactyls. (The game says, sadly, that many of these creatures are "misanthropes" who have become terrified of humanity and are just trying to defend themselves.) You fight approximately one billion combats with these creatures. Thank goodness for the auto combat option.

The tactical grid is somewhat like Ultima V, but with no spells, there aren't enough options to justify wasting a lot of time in manual combat. Even grenades--the one option other than shooting--are more annoying than useful. So mostly you just watch your characters fight, although you can fine-tune the computer's actions with a few settings. After the initial few hours, you have more than enough money to keep a hefty supply of medicine, so as long as you check your character's health levels frequently and prevent them from dipping below a minimum threshold, no combat is very dangerous. You can even stop to heal in the middle of battle.

           

Watching the computer fight my battles.

          

(In a previous entry, I said that if the doctor dies, you have to start over, since only doctors can resurrect. I was wrong about that. Hospitals in most cities do offer resurrection. I based my comment on the one that didn't.)

         

Being able to fully heal during combat makes things a bit too easy.

        

You level up quite rapidly. My characters ended the game at Level 22. They get promotions every 5-7 levels, and my characters ended as lieutenant colonels. You get attribute increases and hefty hit point increases with every level. By the end of the game, some of my characters had nearly 10,000 hit points, and I adopted a policy of checking them every 5 or so combats and restoring their health if it dipped below 3,000. Even then, I ended the game with hundreds of extra vials of medicine and tens of thousands of unspent gold pieces. 

          

Since we can't make transmissions to Earth, who is doing all this promoting?

         

Combats also get easier as your equipment improves. There are six types of common rifles and lasers (sold in shops) plus five other types that you can find on the bodies of high-level enemies. By the end of the game, you're absolutely swimming in excess weapons. There are five types of armor, and you have to buy separate pieces for chest, back, forearms, upper arms, thighs, shins, and head. You rarely find armor. Rather than purchase my way through the entire scale, I just waited until I had enough for "heavy" everything.

          

Different types of armor available. For some reason, you can't sell armor.

          

Once you have enough money, you can also buy transports. First you need transport papers, which can be obtained in some dungeons or by killing guards. There are several classes; some work on land, some on water. You can buy one for each character or everyone can pile into one, but once you're in a transport, the game uses the transports' weapons in combat instead of your own. These can be pretty powerful, but transports are such a pain to get in and out of (and you can't take them into buildings) that in the end I didn't find them worth it. Enemies often have their own transports.

             

An exhaustive transport list.

         

Exiting my sea transport on Nepenthe Island. Lots of foes await me.

           

The opening stage ends when you're strong enough to assault the military prison at Adion. You use grenades to blast open the gates and to disable the force fields around the prison cells. You fight packs of guards, free a few Cryllan resistance fighters, and meet Lance Corporal Mick Yaya, who tells you part of the backstory.

          

Blowing up a shield generator.

          

Once through Cramur, you basically repeat this process in the prison at Euene. The city has been turned into a huge mad scientists' lab, where ghoulish experiments are conducted on prisoners. Most of them are insane. But Lieutenant Vidya Chang fills in more of the history and gives you another key item.

          

Dead bodies in front of mind-control chair at Euene. The game let me do a little role-playing and blow up the chairs with grenades.

          

This NPC had been in the chair a few too many times.

            

The last crewmember to find is the captain himself, N. Scott Robertson, who is imprisoned in the fortress of Wycke. You have to navigate up and down eight levels of interconnected elevators to find his cell. Once you hear his story, you have all four items necessary for the endgame: papers to enter Nepenthe, an entry card to the Broadcast Room, admission codes to access the computer, and "final transmission" codes to reach Earth.

A sea-based transport from Filene takes you to the island on which Nepenthe sits. There are a couple dozen groups of guards in the city, but they don't attack you if you don't attack them. Yvonne Smith has anticipated your arrival and has slain the entire population of the city. Bodies are everywhere.

             

Alone in the destroyed city.

              

After you destroy a door with a grenade, you find Smith in your path. She has a long villain's exposition that basically boils down to "I did it for the lulz." She's both impressed with what she was able to accomplish and contemptuous of the Cryllan population for being so easily deceived.

            

This sounds like absolutely no one I know.

            

She knows you're there to kill her and doesn't put up much of a fight. She attacks alone, and it was over so quick I didn't even get a screenshot. There ends up being no real "final battle" in the game.

            

The game gives you no option to act on her request.

            

After defeating Smith, you head up to the control tower behind here and simply "talk" to the computer. As long as you have the four items in your possession, the game ends with the simple message at the top of this entry. I'm not really sure what I've accomplished, though. Sure, Smith is dead, but there's a brainwashed, armed, and ruined civilization behind me. And what did I "transmit," exactly? A report? A request for reinforcements? Unfortunately, as we'll see, the Second Scenario doesn't really answer these questions.

The plot, though recycled, is decent. It's more than most games of the era provide. But while the game does a decent job adapting Ultima IV and V NPC mechanics, combat and exploration, the game becomes fundamentally too easy after just a few hours, and combats are more annoyances than true challenges. Too much time is wasted trying to find locations: Wycke is hidden deep among twisty mountain passages, for instance. A lot of the game feels padded.

In a GIMLET, I award:

           

• 5 points for the game world. As I said, it's a reasonably well-developed mystery, even if the "exactly like earth" trope is a bit tiresome.

          

Revisionist historians preach in the city of Filene.

          

• 4 points for character creation and development. Creation options are limited, and your characters feel more like a blob than six separate people, but development is satisfying and rewarding.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. Talking with NPCs is vital, and the dialogue is well written. But there are no dialogue options or role-playing options in these interactions.

            

Captain Robertson makes a sad point.

           

• 2 points for encounters and foes. Enemies aren't very memorable, differentiated only in how powerfully they punch. There are no non-combat encounters or puzzles in the game.

• 3 points for combat. It has some innovations, particularly in the options you can set for auto-combat, but there aren't enough tactics to make it interesting or challenging. At least it's quick.

• 3 points for equipment, consisting primarily of basic weapon and armor upgrades.

             

Checking my group inventory towards the end of the game.

           

• 3 points for the economy, strong in the first couple hours but too rewarding later.

• 2 points for a main quest with no options or side-quests.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The former two are adequate. The interface is reasonably intuitive, but I didn't like the lack of keyboard shortcuts for certain menu options, nor the way that the main window lost focus every time a message popped up.

• 4 points for gameplay. It's mostly non-linear from beginning to end. There's an obvious order but not a required one. The difficulty is a bit too easy, and nothing makes it replayable, but the length is only slightly too long for its content.

           

That give us a final score of 34, about average for its era, hovering right around the "recommended" threshold. I feel like the game needed more work on its mechanics to go along with its story.

Victory Software apparently felt the same way, because they did an unusual thing in releasing 2088: The Cryllan Mission—The Second Scenario, which is not so much a sequel as a "version 2" of the original. It shipped with the same manual, though with an addendum, and the same backstory--the crew of the Houston has gone missing on Crylla, and so on. But the addendum promises that the maps and that the story itself have changed, with different plot twists and a different resolution. There are also a number of changes to the mechanics and interface.

          

The game's production values were better than the typical "indie" title.

           

In his e-mail correspondence with me, Vivek Pai talked about some of the difficulties facing independent game developers in the 1980s. The game sold for a crazy $69.95, but most of what they made went to costs (including a full-color game box and manual), contracted artwork, and advertising. He said that they conceived of The Second Scenario primarily as a way to get rid of their stock of unused boxes from the first game, which they accomplished by printing up a bunch of gold stickers that said "The Second Scenario--an entirely new game!" and slapping them on the boxes.

I'll get to The Second Scenario eventually during a 1990 mop-up (I found out about it after completing the year), but I'm more interested in the Pai brothers' third and final title, The Secrets of Bharas (1991), which draw upon some authentic Indian themes. After that, discouraged by sales--it didn't help that the Apple IIGS never really took off as a gaming platform--the brothers made some half-hearted attempts at PC coding before ultimately scattering to various university and technology company positions.

It's good to be back on track. If I can finish Citadel this week, I'll be over a major hump. Let's see.

2088: Cultural Assumptions

Vinay Pai appears in his game to offer some tips.

       

The plot of The Cryllan Mission has resolved into a somewhat interesting mystery full of poignant metaphors. I'm a bit worried that it won't pay off, but I'm enjoying the journey so far

        

It turns out, first of all, that the residents of the various cities are Cryllans, not remnants of the lost U.S.S. Houston. Whatever they look and sound like, it's close enough to humans that they don't seem to recognize that we're not from their world. (How we're communicating at all is a mystery best left unaddressed.) The story that they tell is that Crylla used to be a peaceful, sedate, multi-cultural planet with a nurturing government and no weapons. Fairly recently, however, a revolution took place against the "misanthropes" who had previously "infested" the government, the state was overthrown, and a new government was formed. This new government values industry, ambition, and long-term planning. Some Cryllans are happy with the new circumstances; some are appalled.

             

This NPC would prefer things returned to normal.

           

This one wants to make Crylla great again.

            

One big change is in the availability of weapons and armor. The state now encourages everyone to own guns, ostensibly to protect them from "misanthropes." The misanthropes, for their part, protest that they aren't a different species; they just have a different skin color. A couple of them--refugees from a destroyed city--say that they used to be wealthy landowners, with a household full of servants, but are now looked down upon as second-class citizens. One of them, Aenur Bryllium-Se in Zenetych, makes an impassioned argument against these new weapons:

             

What are you? Some kind of communist?

        

Aside from the obvious plot holes (e.g., the language issues), this is a reasonably compelling story, particularly since I still don't know the fate of the Houston astronauts or how they might have instigated these events. 

Now, until yesterday, I was also convinced that the plot was an obvious case of real life writing the story. Doesn't it sound a lot like a story that some young Indian boys might have written after experiencing the culture clash of moving to America--particularly Texas? Their lives overthrown, their status inverted, perhaps coming from an upper-class existence back home and now suddenly lumped in with everyone with dark skin, denigrated, mistrusted? Especially coming from a country with strict gun regulation to a state that actively encourages people to open-carry? Is it any wonder that the disruptive force that has landed on Crylla is called the Houston?

               

This sounds like a mighty topical issue.

            

Alas, there are dangers in assuming too much autobiography in a fictional story. I had a brief exchange with Vivek Pai, and he said that the brothers not born in the U.S. emigrated at too young an age to remember much of India. They were more influenced by 1984 than real life; even the name of their company (Victory Software) was not simply taken from the "Vi" in front of all of their names but rather the ubiquitous brand name (Victory Gin, Victory Coffee, Victory Cigarettes, Victory Mansions) in Orwell's novel. Star Trek was also a clear influence, as was Apocalypse Now and The Killing Fields.

Whatever the case, I'm more interested in 2088 than last time. Since the first entry, I've explored the opening overland, which is 128 x 128 and wraps. I visited the cities of Karkala, Torphur, Adion, and Zenetych, and talking to every NPC that I could. The NPC names are a weird mash-up of what sounds to me like Indian, Polynesian, English, and Greco-Roman; for instance, Rala Mahana, Vanesh Wyckenry, and Brudhier Bryllium. Some women are designated with the suffix "-Se" after their husbands' last names, as in the married couple Hrishym Bolgarium and Giselle Bolgarium-Se.

Interacting with NPCs is entirely a one-way process of clicking on the various dialogue buttons--"Background," "Introduction," and "New Topic"--with any of them offering the possibility of "More Detail." Despite the different labels, clicking on them in order generally produces a progressive (if somewhat redundant) narrative, not so much individual topics. Vivek said that NPCs are so verbose and repetitive not so much as a reflection of Indian dialogue patterns but because the brothers were trying to pad the length of the game and make it more of a challenge to find the real clues amidst all the blather. So I'm 0 for 2 on my cultural assumptions.

Most NPCs, incidentally, don't talk at all. You waste a lot of time running up to icons and hitting Apple-T.

              

Off to kill a guard, I guess.

           

Karkala and Zenetych both had a full set of services: weapons, armor, food, transport sales and repair, and medicine. Janiv Masawanere, who works for the Karkalan government, told me that you have to have papers to buy a transport, and those are currently restricted to guards. Zenetych's NPCs are proud of it as a high-tech city where many of the weapons and armor currently being sold were originally invented. 

One Zenetych NPC, Hackyrn Kassimar-Se, is married to a human and doesn't seem to realize it. She says she lost her first husband in the war, but then "Yanov" came along, "one of the new appointees to manage this district."  A "Janov Kassimar" is listed among the crewmembers of the Houston. He has two children with Hackyrn, Yany and Iri. He has recently been recalled to Nepenthe, so I didn't get to meet him directly. Did the Houston crew overthrow the legitimate Cryllan government themselves? What else would have led the Cryllans to adopt so much of the humans' culture?

Torphur was a ruin of a city with only one NPC, a refugee named Broonden Mair who admitted he was a "misanthrope" who had rebelled against the new government, with the help of "dissenting outsiders" (the Houston crew?). He told me that force field generators can be destroyed with a plasma grenade.

                  

Torphur is as destroyed as Magincia.

           

The force fields in question activate at night, preventing "misanthropes" from entering the cities. The implication is that the self-same "misanthropes" make up most of the thieves, outlaws, soldiers, merchants, and other enemies attacking me in the countryside.

          

Crylla at night.

           

Adion was hidden amidst some mountains, but there wasn't much I could do there. A group of guards at the entrance said it was a "restricted" city and said I'd be executed if I proceeded. 

         

The wilderness combats remain generally easy. The only thing you have to worry about is earning enough money to offset the cost of the medicine you use post-combat. That hasn't been hard. I've mostly been letting the computer fight except when NPCs get hung up on each other. My characters all leveled up at some point, which confers attribute and hit point increases.

               

Leveling up.

             

NPCs told me repeatedly of another land lying "beyond Cramur." Cramur is a dungeon that connects to at least one other continent, where I will find the cities of Nepenthe (the seat of the government) and Eune.

I found Cramur and accidentally entered it too soon. Dungeons apparently switch you to 3-D view, until you encounter monsters, when you go to a regular combat grid. (This dual interface was featured in Ultima IV and V, which Vivek confirmed as influences.) The problem is, the entrance seems to be one-way. I can't leave from the square I entered and I can't find the exit. The monsters, meanwhile, are much tougher and more numerous than those on the surface--I think I need to be Levels 3 or 4, with plenty of upgraded weapons, armor, and grenades, before I attempt Cramur.

             

The dungeon view.

          

Unfortunately, 2088 is a bit of a bastard when it comes to character death. First, it saves the game upon every death. It also saves when entering and exiting buildings. Second, if your doctor dies, there is no way to resurrect him or any other party member. The doctor is the only character who can resurrect, and the service isn't available in towns. Not only did I have to restart after the game saved in Cramur with no way out, but my next party also became completely useless when the doctor died. (There's also no way to swap out party members; you have to reconstitute the whole party.) I guess I'd better put two doctors in my next party, then spend a while grinding.

                

This combat is not survivable at my level.

          

My enjoyment of the game increased when I realized that it does support movement by the numeric keypad. The problem was that KEGS automatically maps the keypad to the joystick, but if you disable the joystick, you get your regular keypad back. It makes it so much easier to move around than clicking on the screen. I look forward to visiting other cities and seeing how the plot develops.

Time so far: 3 hours.

 

Game 295: 2088: The Cryllan Mission (1989)

The Apple IIGS has less a "title screen" as a "title arrangement of windows."

          

2088: The Cryllan Mission

United States

Victory Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for Apple IIGS

Date Started: 24 June 2018

As much as I wasn't looking forward to an Apple IIGS game--I always have problems with the emulator--you have to love the background story of Victory Software, formed in Houston, Texas, by the three Pai brothers, whose names all begin with "Vi": Vinay, Vivek, and Vijay. They produced three titles for the under-served platform: 2088, its 1990 Second Scenario, and Secrets of Bharas (1991). Sales of the three titles capped at 2,000, but we need not feel bad for the trio, as they went on to successful careers at Intuit (Vinay) and Google (Vivek and Vijay; things must get tense when they get together with cousin Ajit at Thanksgiving). In a 2016 LinkedIn interview, Vinay described Victory as a "good failure" in which he "learned a lot." Whether the games were a "failure" because they were bad or because there just wasn't a robust Apple IIGS RPG market is something we'll soon determine.

2088 takes place in a Star Trek-like future in which the Earth-based National Space Exploration Council boldly goes where no one has gone before. The titular mission involves investigating what happened to the U.S.S. Houston, with which contact was lost shortly after it discovered a humanoid civilization in the Gamma-Chi sector, on the planet of Crylla. Why the mission is necessary is a bit of a mystery, since the Houston's captain's own logs say that the planet is about to "pass on the far side of the binary stars," which will block deep-space transmissions for at least nine months. Meanwhile, the Cryllans have been nothing but friendly and appear to have no weapons. Nonetheless, the Strategic Defense Division of NSEC has scrambled your team to investigate.
          

Creating a new character.

          
The game begins in a separate application where you create your party and send them to "training." The way the manual describes the latter process, I thought I was in for some MegaTraveller-style character backgrounds, but alas, it's not that complex. The game randomly rolls for five attributes--marksmanship, intelligence, kinetics, dexterity, and stamina--and then allows you to supplement the initial rolls with a pool of points. Certain minimums are needed for the game's four classes: soldier, science officer, nurse, and doctor. Then, once you finish, the game tells you what bonus points you earned during "training." They generally just boost the classes' existing prime requisites [entry just added to the glossary].
       

The new party. Programmers will be happy to see that the game numbers the characters 0-5

       
After creation, your six characters start on the Cryllan landscape with rifles and thermal armor, a few months' worth of food, and no money. It's not clear how they got where they are, since there's no ship nearby or anything. The party soon comes across roads, towns, and people, all of which are so indistinguishable from Earth that you start to wonder if the party ever actually blasted off.
            

Starting out. Who knew that dotted lines in roads were an intergalactic standard?

           
Given that the Apple IIGS was an "almost-Mac," the interface is similar to a Mac in that the game windows can be moved and arranged to the player's preference, and all of the commands are available from menus. (We'll see the same in the next game, Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep, for the Mac.) The game is too in-love with the mouse, requiring it for movement (you click where you want to go) as well as most commands, though a few commands are backed up with keyboard shortcuts using the Apple key.

The basic interface has something of an Ultima-esque feel. Outside, you navigate a large overland world of islands connected by bridges. Occasional enemies appear as icons in the game world. When you run into a town, you enter and open up a larger-scale map.
           

Arriving in a town.

        
If there's one original element to be found in 2088, it's the combat system. When you attack an enemy or one attacks you, you're taken to an 81-square grid based on the terrain you were standing on when you entered. Enemies face you across the field. You set an action for each character--move, attack, rest, throw a grenade, heal another character, or flee--and then hit "begin combat" to execute them all at once. In other words, it uses a Wizardry-style action/execute system with an Ultima IV/V/Gold Box-style tactical window. The grid to the right helps you keep track of who's who.
         

Setting combat options.

         
However, you can eschew all of this by letting the computer fight your combats. This is tempting in the initial stages in which everyone has the same weapons and no one has any grenades. Even better, you can set a number of preferences for computer-controlled combat that together ensure that the computer would have done what you would have done anyway. Since computer-controlled combat is over in about one-tenth of the time, this is tempting. The only drawback I see is that pathfinding is relatively poor, and characters often have trouble moving to a place where they have an uninterrupted line-of-sight to the enemy.
             

Fine-tuning auto-combat options.

         

The computer does a decent job lining people up uselessly behind each other.

        
After combat, the doctor or nurse can instantly heal anyone to full strength with something called "GammaPlasma." You have a limited supply, and I assume I'll have to buy more eventually. If a character dies, a doctor (but not a nurse) can resurrect him with something called "TanaShanti" (the Internet suggests this is Hindi for "body peace"), but he suffers with low attributes for a day or so. Combat delivers experience points, money, and occasionally equipment.
       

The doctor heals injured party members.

          
That said, who are these people? Why am I fighting them? How does their hostility jibe with the Houston's report of a peaceful, weaponless population? Did the Houston crew arm them? Corrupt them? Are they remnants of the Houston crew? The game doesn't pause for such questions.
           

Do the Cryllans just happen to have the same name structure as Earthlings? Or is Willy from Earth? You'd think that would be the first question we asked.

          
Things don't get any clearer when you enter the towns. They're like regular towns in a typical fantasy RPG with shops and NPCs, but it's completely unclear whether these are aliens or remnants of the Houston. They sell weapons, armor, food, and other goods for a currency called "terraens," which sounds a lot like they come from Earth. NPCs so far have just been normal people who complain about their work and offer a few hints about how to navigate the landscape. So far, I've found nothing about the Houston or even clues whether I'm talking to Cryllans or humans.
          

Where did the Cryllans get all these weapons?

         
I haven't gotten very far, but I figured it was time to get the blog re-started, and I was otherwise having difficulty motivating myself to play. I'm having the same issue I keep complaining about with top-down games where the terrain is a bit too large and there's no easy way to map it. (The science officer's "Terrain Scan" covers only about 40% more than the regular window.) I tried to cheat by looking for a map online but couldn't find one.
           

This would be more helpful if the regular window didn't already show, like, 6 kilometers.

          
A funny thing about the dialogue. This gets into a stereotype but it's not exactly a negative stereotype so I hope no one's bothered. I have two Indian co-workers, one close enough to call a friend, and I've noticed a particular pattern to his speech. If I say, "Hey, want to grab a drink tonight?," a typical American might answer, "Nah, thanks, my son's got a baseball game." That would be the end of it. But Ayan or Lakshman will respond with entire paragraphs, each expanding in more detail on the central theme.

         
No. No, I'm sorry, I cannot go. I would like to go but my son is playing in a baseball game. My son is very proud of his accomplishments on his baseball team, and he would be very disappointed if I were not there to watch his performance, so as much as I'd like to, I will have to ask your pardon on the drink. You must understand that it is very difficult for an Indian boy to find acceptance on an American organized sporting team, and that . . .

           

At some point I have to tell him, Ayan, man, I get it, no problem, because otherwise I'll get his whole family history, and the history of baseball besides. Anyway, I never knew whether this particular speech pattern was unique to these two men or something commonly found in Indian culture. I still don't know for sure, but I broke out laughing when I saw the NPC dialogue system in 2088, which not only features the same sort of dialogue but structures it as such. An NPC will introduce a topic and then you can click on "More Detail" and see him re-state the same topic but with a couple more details. More often than not, you can click a third time and still get no new information, but more words. At least, that's how it's gone for the few NPCs so far. It means I mentally hear all the dialogue in a typical Indian accent.

              

Rala Mahana takes a long time to say, "Listen up."

         

I'm assuming a lot in tying these observations together, since as far as I know the Pai brothers were eighth generation and fully Americanized. If not, this game may be a "first," in that I don't remember any Indian names among previous game designers (at least, not lead designers). I have some hope that even if the game turns out to be boring and derivative, I'll at least be able to identify cultural influences like Hindi source words and expansively redundant rhetoric.