I have read over two thousand books in my life, which probably explains the depth of my hatred for them.
Well, I don’t hate them, but the act of reading gives little pleasure now. My brain now seems to politely protest when I shove a new book into it. “No more, please. I’m full.” I thought I’d like books forever. But apparently I only got 2,000 “enjoy a book” coupons at birth, and now they’re spent.
I read out of duty. I read because my self-image is “someone who reads books”. I read because I have an abusive codependant relationship with books that will haunt me until the death gods take me home. But I don’t pick up a new book with a huge buck-toothed grin, like a kid in a Norman Rockwell painting, so thrilled to dive into the MAGICAL WORLD OF READIN’. Now I’m more like “I hope this one has large print and wide margins so it’ll be over soon.”
I know all the tricks. I’ve seen everything before. Anything a book can do is something I’ve had done a hundred times. I can’t immerse myself in a fictional world, or pretend imaginary people are real. I’m too aware of the craft; the language; the mechanics. Viewed up close, writing just looks unmagical: a bunch of cheap tricks.
(“Yes, writer. Open your book with the protagonist waking up in bed. Now you can describe their physical appearance as they dress in front of a mirror. Here’s the Ticking Clock. Here’s the MacGuffin. Here’s the Internal and External Conflict. What a good piper, playing your tune.”)
I’m meta-reading at this point: gazing through the page and seeing the author. I can tell when they’re bored or inspired; caffeinated or tired, writing from knowledge or troweling bullshit onto the page. I can analyze fiction pretty well, so there’s that. But the price of knowing how the magician does his trick is that you no longer believe in magic.
Sometimes books still surprise me. But that’s not the same as them being good. I value originality above everything now. I don’t care if a story’s bad, all I want is it to not feel crushingly overfamiliar. Likewise, if they made a perfect Marvel movie I’d probably grudgingly rate it a 6/10: I just don’t want more things like that, even if they’re very good.
I thought I’d make a list of all the shit that lives in my brain. Books first. Other things later.
These are not (necessarily) the best books I’ve read. They’re the ones I remember with furious intensity.
The Eyes
Foul, perverse, literary, fascinating, and unique. The Eyes is none of a kind.
Francis Bacon once said. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” The Eyes is to be tasted, chewed, digested, and then violently expelled through the closest end of one’s alimentary tract.
It’s an unfathomably dark and violent set of short stories that I first reviewed it here, and later revisited (along with its mystery author…) a decade later. It lurks in my brain, a nymph swollen upon my thoughts.
The author wrote other books. Gweel and Slaughter King are also very good in a beguiling way. But The Eyes just seems final. The end. A plunge into a place with no bottom and also no way back. It strangled the entire “extreme horror” genre in the crib. When I read someone like J.F. Gonzalez, I am overcome by futility. “Why read this? Why write this? The Eyes already exists and is better.”
It owes a debt to 19th century decadence, and 20th century surrealism. The author described it to me as a childish version of À rebours. It does not get tied down with literality and exposition. Its stories often make no sense (and when they do, it’s a loose, dreamlike sense), but they are truthful about one thing: we stand atop a mountain of bones. The title is appropriate: to read the book is to open your eyes wide, and observe a hell of our own manufacture. “The eyes have seen so many horrible things. They are the first that must be destroyed.”—Lucio Fulci
There is darkness in the world that we are kept from seeing. Messes in the street are cleaned up. Roadkilled animals are tagged with an “X” and then flung into the bush. Armies of Indian content moderators purge our social media feeds of murdered babies and burned bodies (“I log into a torture chamber each day.”) For the sake of our sanity, we are exoculated. Millions of people work overtime to stem the eternal rivers of blood bursting from the world’s arteries. Trash men. Gash men.
The problem is, the illusion machine eventually breaks down. There’s so much horror that it’s only a matter of time before some escapes containment, and touches you where you live. You can only blind yourself for so long.
This man is a family friend, recently murdered in his home. It was on the news.
I know the murderer. I must have seen him a dozen times as he jogged along the coast—shirtless, muscular, and scowling. I think I waved to him once or twice. Can’t remember if he waved back. Why did he kill my friend? I don’t know.
Search for this book if you like. You are close to The Eyes. You are close to the Eyes. Got it?
The King James Bible
This is not a joke, or an edgy ironic statement. The Bible earns its place.
It’s a source of amazement and wonder to me. I have read it many times (actually, I think I read the genealogies only once). I audited courses in Koine Greek at Macquarie University.
Few books contain so much of everything: highs and lows and good and evil. It contains laws and poetry and even porn. It contains text that defies easy classification.
It grows up with you. As a child I found the (pseudo) history at the beginning interesting. But now I think the Book of Revelation and the Prophecies are my favorite parts. It’s a journey, trekking through the Bible’s dry vastness. You’ll encounter confusing and upsetting things. You’ll see forgotten wreckage, artifacts stranded out of time. Some passages in the Bible clearly had a context that can now only be guessed at (what’s going on in Matthew 8?). Much is open it interpretation.
The one thing the Bible lacks is mirth. It never walks with a light step. It’s often weird, but only occasionally funny, and it’s a bitter, cynical sort of humor. The writer of Isaac is basically an ancient Christopher Hitchens. I feel like my mind is dissolving in corrosive bile when I read that book.
(Contrary to what you’ve heard, it’s not true that ancient people were naive simpletons who read the Bible as straight history. As far back as we can go, there were schools of thought that interpreted parts of the Bible as allegory or myth.)
More than anything, The Bible is a dense book. It’s like a huge sheet of paper scrunched into a ball. You unfold it and unfold it and unfold it and unfold it until it’s tenfold the size you thought it was and you’re still smoothing out the creases. And strangely, what’s written on the sheet is exactly what you expected you would see.
Are you a believer? The Bible will strengthen your faith. Are you an atheist? The Bible will deepen your contempt. Are you a historian? A fan of ancient literature? The Bible expands and contracts to fit whatever lens you scrutinize it with.
For a nonbeliever, this confirms the Bible’s fallibility. Why would the word of the eternal God be such a mirror to the reader’s hopes and expectations?
Why wouldn’t it? It’s the same book. The variable in the equation is you. Are you judging the Bible, or is the Bible judging you? Perhaps John Calvin knew the truth of it. Our souls were saved or damned a long time ago, and nothing more can be done.
Give it a read. Maybe you’ll find it boring and disgusting, as some do. Or maybe the still, small voice that Moses heard will speak to you.
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Still not joking.
Blow me.
I don’t care about politics and you couldn’t pay me enough to find out what Objectivism is. It sounds boring. The Fountainhead, however, is a great book, and you should ignore all of its cultural baggage.
Yes, there are times when it’s the book its critics say it is. A leaden, didactic tome by a sociopath who never entertained the thought that she might not be correct about everything.
At other times, it’s moving, passionate, and huge. It sweeps you along. It takes on the world, and sometimes wins. On balance, I’d call it a latter-day masterwork of Romanticism.
Rand’s prose is lovely.
He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone–flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.
“The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.” das the gud shit.
It’s about a rebellious young architect, Harold Roarke, who is stuck in a bucket full of crabs. They want to take away his shine, to make him like them. But why he should he worry? If he’s truly brilliant, his enemies will surely fail.
This story might seem like manna for narcissists. “Oh, he’s just like me!” But I can sympathize with what Rand is saying. Anyone who did a great thing did so in the face of people trying to stop them. For every correct decision I have made, there was someone telling me not to do it. Occasionally you do need to tell the crab bucket to go fuck itself, and trust that you’re the most brilliant person in the universe.
Like most great books, The Fountainhead could only have been written by one person, and it provides a window into that thinker’s mind. Ayn Rand was possibly the person who was most “herself” out of any human in history. That might sound ridiculous. Isn’t any person tautologically themselves, by definition? But believe me, Ayn Rand was far more Ayn Rand than you are yourself.
As far as any historian can tell, she had the “Ayn Rand” dial up to 11 from the moment her brain developed in the womb to the moment it suffered apoplexy at the moment of death. She lived without compromises. She was humorless, focused, intensely driven, and absolutely sure of right and wrong. She broke up with a boyfriend in the most Ayn Rand way possible (‘“If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face.’) She replied to a youg niece who wanted $25 to buy a dress in the most Ayn Rand way possible. (“the person who asks and expects other people to give him money, instead of earning it, is the most rotten person on earth.”)
She appears to have been an unpleasant person. She apparently died alone and unloved. But she would have died as Ayn Rand, and that means she probably did not care.
In Atlas Shrugged, a character is asked “What’s the most depraved type of human being?” Is it a murderer, or sex criminal? No. It’s “The man without a purpose.” I don’t agree. Children and animals lack purpose, and are not depraved. ChatGPT lacks a purpose (as a piece of code, it has a vague terminal value of “minimize your loss function”, but as an agent, it wants nothing). It’s main problem is that it’s not depraved enough. But Ayn Rand, at least had purpose.
Yes, it’s long and waffly and didactic in places. That’s partly a stylistic affectation from the time. It also has a tawdry propagandistic quality. But honestly, people who go against the grain deserve some rousing propaganda. They’ve got a lot working against them.
I have never seen someone so galactically certain of right or wrong than Rand. Even when you don’t agree, there’s something impressive about absolute moral certainty. Not admirable. Impressive. Sometimes, she makes me wish I shared her philosophy. Which is all the more impressive for the fact that I don’t.
In an age of masks, Ayn Rand wore her naked face. It might have been a hideous one, but it was hers and no one else’s.
Edgar Allan Poe – Tales of Mystery and Imagination
I began reading Poe when I was seven or eight—much too young.
I couldn’t understand why anyone was doing anything. Why did a man brick up his friend behind the wall? Why did a man cut out his pet cat’s eye? (Obviously there are answers: I just couldn’t see them at the time).
Strangely, this added to the maddened Gothic torment of Poe’s tales. Psychological states are often not explicable. This writer, who I barely understood, just seemed like insanity incarnate. But I soon realized that Poe wasn’t insane. He was just passionate.
In Poe, you will find all the ingredients of modern day horror. Cats. Thuds in the walls. Chattering teeth. Disturbed graves. Ancient houses. Lost love. These things aren’t Poe’s creations, of course. But he assembled them all together, and made them all part of a definite aesthetic body. Where previous gothic authors were like itches and tickles in your nose, Poe was the point where horror clearly started to become towards a sneeze.
Poe wrote more than horror. It held a plurality in his work, but he also delved into comedy, satire, adventure fiction, detective stories, etc, though typically with a twisted, morbid edge. (An underrated genre of Poe is “proto sci-fi satire”. Some Words with a Mummy and The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade belong in that category.)
Though Poe’s subject matter was deep and wide, his stories often weren’t. Read enough of him, and you’ll eventually see him repeat himself. “Mesmeric Revelation” is “Facts in the Case of M Valdemar” without the gruesome final twist. “Hop Frog” is a crueler, more anchored “Masque of the Red Death”. Like a painter, he would return to similar themes, daubing the same scenario over and over. Is the protagonist mad? Is the house haunted?
Even Poe’s crappiest work has a weird energy cantering through it. He is as captivating as a man juggling with severed heads. Would you be able to look away, even if he occasionally drops one?
I guess everyone has “their” horror author. For some, it’s Lovecraft. For others, it’s King. For me, it’s Poe.
White Fang / Call of the Wild – Jack London
I don’t consider these separate books. They’re really similar in tone, style, and narrative. Both are compulsively readable animal adventure stories that basically force you to finish them in one go, set in the freezing cold and endless arctic twilight.
They’re about the only divide that matters. Rousseau vs Hobbes. Dogs vs wolves. Tame vs wild. Nurture vs nature. The Klondike vs Santa Clara.
Can you cross the divide? Can a tame pet become a wild beast (as happens in Call), or a beast a pet (White Fang)? Which is more difficult, or more admirable? Is tameness just a thin gloss over wildness? A judge in White Fang seems like the epitome of high society, yet he unwittingly becomes party to a conspiracy that imprisons an innocent man. London, something of a limousine socialist himself, was well aware of how the wolves can wear suits.
Which is better? White Fang is a punchier and nastier. But damn it all, I like stories about tame things becoming wild. White Fang finishes his story a diminished figure. Buck ends his story larger than life.
Jack London was a vulgarian and wrote prose like a man hacking firewood for the winter, but as a storyteller, he was spellbinding.
(I would also recommend the ’80s Toei anime adaptation of Call of the Wild. It’s called Howl, Buck! or something and has Bryan Cranson in it).
Whoops, look at the clock. Let’s wrap this up.
Other Books
I actually like some of these books below as much or more than some of the ones above. I just couldn’t think of things to say!
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
(Hilarious “person being awful yet strangely sympathetic for 300 pages” classic)
Nvsqvm – Anne Sterzinger
(Hilarious “person being awful yet strangely sympathetic for 300 pages” classic)
Pleasant Hell – John Dolan
(Hilarious “person being awful yet strangely sympathetic for 300 pages” classic)
The Terror – Dan Simmons
The greatest epic horror novel of the past 10 years.
Pet Semetary – Stephen King
Starts slow. Ends like a typhoon.
So those are my favorite books, as I can remember them. Increasingly, they feel like squatters who aren’t paying rent. But at one point, they brought me great joy. Some still do.
(It’s alarming to realize that any positive experience desensitizes you to it. Draw enjoyment from a movie, and you steal enjoyment from the next one. Allow music to blaze brightly in your mind and it scorches the terrain against other music. Smash a claw hammer into your skull and you’ll feel the next blow less (this is true—I have hit myself on the head 214 times today, and didn’t notice when my last tooth fell out). The pleasure we derive from art is ultimately an evolutionary hack, like the pleasure we get from itch-scratching. Humans can’t keep scratching and scratching forever. Eventually your skin toughens and forms a callous.)
It took twenty years, but I am finally Quake-pilled.
My memories of the game weren’t especially good: a brown-gray hallway simulator with a groundbreaking but gameplay-crippling 3D engine and not even half of Doom‘s personality. Playing it again, I can see the things it did right. The pace is frantic. There are no mazes to act as speed-brakes on the carnage. Quake grows exponentially more enjoyable as you “git gud”, with an excellent flow-state and sense of physics. It has significantly stronger combat than Doom, whose enemies were (mostly) slow-moving turrets that fired shots at you while standing still. The only way id Software could make them challenging was by turning them into bullet sponges (does anyone get physically exhausted fighting Cyberdemons and Barons?), or by stacking hundreds of them into one level. Quake‘s enemies are fewer in number, but their speed and aggression is ramped up substantially.
In contast to Doom‘s large but static fights, Quake is chaotic, a neverending moshpit. A standard level has you diving to escape Fiends, dodging Voreballs, and trying to take shelter from the nearest Shambler’s lightning bolts, all at once. While I miss the sheer Normandy Landing size of Doom’s proto-Serious Sam bloodbaths, Quake conjures a greater intensity with about half as many enemies.
The Lovecraftian art style was groundbreaking, and oddly enhanced by the game’s primitive 3D blockiness. To this day, Quake has a kind of faceless, geometric horror, like Euclidean mathematics turned into dark, composting flesh. If you’re using some latter-day source port like Dark Places, I recommend playing on 640×480 with anti-aliased textures disabled (I play the original DOS game under emulation). Trust me: it improves the game dramatically. Shove your 4K superresolution and specular lightmaps up your ass. Trying to make Quake beautiful and yassified is not the path to nirvana.
What’s often forgotten about the Quake engine is how it transforms the battlefield. If an enemy’s blocking your path in Doom, you have to fight it. In Quake you can rocket-jump over that monster’s head and rain fire from a high position. Quake is ultimately a rich game, deeply-veined with tactical possibilities. There’s a reason the game is still deathmatched seriously to this day, while Doom’s primitive multiplayer is now mostly a curio.
But I’d be lying if I said Quake has the world’s greatest single-player mode. I’d also be lying if I said it has the world’s second greatest single-player mode. By the time you play the Elder Worlds sub-episode, the game is on life support. Sandy Peterson’s levels are just annoying, the spawns are horrendous, and Shub Niggurath is the worst boss since Scott Rudin. Wanting more (and better) I checked out Scourge of Armagon, a 1997 mission pack by Hipnosis Software.
Mission packs were as common in the 90s as day-glo hair scrunchies and yarler grunge rock singers. Some were lazy and borderline illegal: 3rd party companies bundling hundreds of user-made .wads from the internet onto CDs and attempting to profit off the work of fans. But others were professionally licensed and designed, and Armagon fell into that category. The levels are well-designed, probably more so than the original. It has new enemies, new weapons, new powerups, and even an ending cutscene—something id Software did not include with the actual game. It’s more of a new game over Quake than Doom II was over Doom I.
Does it have a new story? Yes. The usual “ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO RESCUE THE PRESIDENT?” mid-90s affair, which I’ve become nostalgic for. Keep it short. Why does every game need a massive story now? Who cares? Why am I watching two hours of cutscenes in a Sonic the Hedgehog game?
What matters is the game, and Scourge of Armagon redefines Quake in many subtle ways. Those little physics-based moments (like when you’d get sucked into an air vent) are now everywhere. Levels are more interactive than before: you can blow holes in walls, extend drawbridges, have buildings collapse on you, etcetera. There are nice aesthetic touches, like mutilated, writhing bodies hanging from racks on the walls. You can even make a statue of Jesus Christ come alive, and zap enemies from his eyes (this is something the devoutly religious Sandy Petersen would have doubtless vetoed).
I have to single out HIP1M3 (The Lost Mine), for being incredibly damned good. It’s atmospheric, spooky as hell, and is loaded with creative flourishes which perfectly fit the theme of it being in a mine (there are twisted mining cart rails you can climb, and a rock tumbler you have to dive through). It pisses on every stock Quake and Quake II map, and actually compares well with holy Doom classics like “Perfect Hatred” and “The Inmost Dens”.
Quake was conservative in its design. id Software wanted the game to be playable in software mode: levels were kept small and tight, and the monster count low. But by 1997, hardware accelerated-3D was clearly the way forward, and ports like VQuake and GLQuake were making inroads, so Hipnosis felt comfortable in pushing a bit more.
Typically, game designers never explored their engine’s full potential. It was left to third parties (as well as internet users) to invent weird tricks, and break rules. This might seem odd (how could Hipnosis Software have a better grasp of the Quake engine than Carmack?), but it makes sense when you consider how Triple-A titles are developed. The levels can only be designed when the game is 80-90% finished. The engine needs to be stable. The monsters and art assets need to be done. Level designers need to clearly know what they can and cannot put in the game. If you have designers work on early half-assed alpha builds, their levels often end up superseded and irrelevant. In the early days of Doom’s development, Tom Hall created some levels based on a primitive version of the Doom engine: these all had to be redone by Sandy Petersen a process that (as he later said on Youtube) took nearly as long as designing new levels from scratch. I’m not saying that the old-school Doom and Quake levels were rushed (although I wonder in the case of some of Petersen’s…) but they definitely didn’t benefit from months and months of meticulous design, like fan mods do.
The designers really liked traps. On HIP3M4, you are fighting some Scrags when the ground slides away to drop you into lava. Enemies randomly spawn in behind your back. Doors open up, revealing roomfuls of monsters. There are no Spawn traps (I can’t remember seeing any Spawns at all), but there’s a new enemy, the Spike Mine, that takes its place as the new Offically Worse Than Dick Cancer(tm). Other new enemies include the Gremlin (which, in a unique mechanic, can actually steal your weapon and use it against you), and the Centroid (which is incredibly difficult to fight on higher difficulties because he has a zero millisecond reaction time and just spams nails). Armagon’s a pretty weak boss who you can defeat by corner-peeking a pillar a bunch of times. He’s lackluster by the standards of Blood or whatever, but anything would be an improvement over Shub Niggurath in the original.
New guns? Mjolnir is a dog-ass melee weapon that I still haven’t gotten a kill with. The Laser Cannon is a weaker Thunderbolt with shots that bounce off walls (this is too unpredictable to be of any use). Both of these guns use cells, which are extremely rare and best reserved for the Thunderbolt.
Quake never needed more weapons. It needed a rebalance of the ones it already has. The shotgun becomes useless the picosecond you find the super shotgun. The nailgun becomes useless when you find the super nailgun. I cannot imagine why id Software thought this was a good idea: why have guns that the player never uses? It would have been easy to give the weak guns a niche purpose (maybe there’s some enemy that takes quarter-damage from every gun except the single-barreled shotgun?), so they retain some utility in the late-game.
The rocket launcher is still bullshit overpowered: it turns roomfuls of enemies into bloody spaghetti with a single shot, and ammo for it is everywhere. I don’t particularly like rocket launchers in games: they seem like crutches. No aim? No skill? No bitches? Just shut your eyes, spin in a circle, point your noob cannon somewhere and you’ll splash 50-100 damage onto the target, even when you miss by a mile. Quake has possibly the strongest rocket launcher in FPS history. Unless you’re fighting a Shambler (which resists explosions), you are wasting your time by using any other gun.
What would Quake would be like without the rocket launcher? Different. Surely some players are so used to it that the rocket launcher is Quake to them. And certainly there’s a fun side of the game involving rocket jumping and so forth. But I think its removal might make the game’s core combat loop a bit healthier, and less limited. I prefer not to use it, but the game assumes you will be crutching the rocket launcher 24/7/56, and gives you little ammo for the other guns.
The Super Nail Gun is an excellent weapon. It’s strong, has some skill to it (you need to track moving targets and lead your shots), and generally feels great to use. But I just never seem to have ammunition to run it. I wish the game would give me fewer goddamn rockets and more nails.
On the whole, the new content is fine. Quake will never be the world’s premium single player game, but Hipnosis’s work is a step up from the original. I played Scourge of Armagon on DOS. My first run through was a disaster: textures on walls kept corrupting, and the game would randomly crash to DOS. Then I applied the 1.06 Patch. I’m not sure if this actually fixed a bug in Quake 1.0, or if it fixed a file that erroneously copied from my Linux server. Either way, it now seems stable, although I get an occasional error message. hunk_alloc failed. I don’t know what that means. Probably the game thinks I’m too much of a hunk.
In the end, Scourge of Armagon wears you down, just like the first Quake. I liked it, but I think I was ready for it to end a few levels before it did. I’m not sure if I’ll play the other Quake mission packs. Probably time to move on.
In honor of Villeneuve’s much-anticipated new movie, let’s not watch it and play the Dune II real-time strategy game from 1992 instead.
I first discovered the genre in 1999, with Age of Empires II. Lucky break, that’s still probably the best one. I then worked backwards through Age of Empires I (1997), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994), then Dune II (1992), unwittingly playing games that had directly “inspired” (been ripped off by) the next. It was like following a river back to its point of origin—each game was clearly the sameidea, just older and clunkier and missing more features. It was like watching a painting slowly get unpainted.
Dune II is the beginning of the line. The pencil strokes on a white canvas. The darkness on the face of the deep. For years, every gaming site (and the Guinness Book of Records) claimed it was the first real-timestrategy game ever made. But history has now been revised, and now an obscure 1989 title called Herzog Zwei (on the Sega Genesis!) has the honors. RTS games are like punk rock bands. Each time you think you’ve located the first one ever, there’s an even earlier one, buried deeper in the archaeological record.
Don’t ever try to be a gaming historian, it’s fucking impossible. You can make the simplest statement of fact (“games can be played on a computer!”) and a smug asshole will “actually…” you five seconds later. The worst part about these pedantic corrections? They’re always correct. History is meaningless sand. Every fact can and will be rewritten. I once believed Wolfenstein 3D (from 1992) was the first FPS game in history. Stupid. I want to build a time machine*, so I can twerpishly say “actually, Catacomb 3-D came out in 1991″ to my ten year old self. But I’d be interrupted by a dozen other time-travelling clones of myself, each bearing their own corrections. “Actually, it was MIDI Maze in 1987″, “actually, it was Battlezone in 1980″, etc, etc. I’m just going to draw a line and declare by fiat that every game idea ever (from Pong to Fortnite to Battle-Raper) was invented in the early 1970s by a beardo with a PLATO mainframe. Fuck gaming forever. (And obviously, I would never misuse a time machine for such a purpose: I’d do the same two things we all would: save Hitler and have sex with my own grandfather.)
I am sorry for these bizarre rants. You probably think I’m on chemicals. Just remember: me being insane does not prove there are no cats living inside my hair-drier.
Dune II. What’s Dune II like?
Charming but creaky. You feel its age. Playing it is as awkward as it gets without moving soldiers using manually-typed x86 assembly pointers, but it’s clearly the template for a hundred later games. Everything that makes the RTS genre compelling is here: resource management, base-building, training and upgrading soldiers. Its paternity cannot be doubted. Dune II is the Yesugei to Starcraft II‘s Chinggis Khan.
(If you’re wondering, Dune I is an unrelated adventure game developed by a different studio.)
Dune II‘s MCGA/VGA 320×200 graphics are extravagant for 1992. When you load into a match, you are treated to the time-honored “Talking head explains the mission to you” thing (swiped from Sid Meier’s Civilization), which also become a genre cliche. The in-game graphics are exactly as bright and as colorful as you’d expect for a 1992 game set on the desert world of Arrakis (which means “very” and “not much”, respectively). There are four kinds of terrain: Sand(tm), Different Sand(tm), Gravel (where you construct buildings), and Spice (which you harvest and use to train soldiers, build buildings, and so on). It might be visual monotony (tetranomy?), but at least it’s clear and simple.
The game doesn’t have a story, it has a setting. Frank Herbert’s Dune. If you’ve never heard of Dune, let me bring you up to speed on the story: It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy blah blah something something Wookies Jar Jar Binks midichlorians #OscarsSoWhite #FireKathleenKennedy#GamerGate #ReleasetheSnyderCut
The Dune franchise was at a low commercial ebb by 1992. Frank had passed six years previously, and the questionable “revival” led by his son Brian was still many years away. In 1984, David Lynch adapted Dune into a fascinating film that left a Tsar Bomba-sized crater at the box office. Early 90s sci-fi was fearsomely hip and cool, and though Dune remained highly regarded, it was still a book from 1965 and loaded with storytelling conventions that had fallen out of fashion—the way characters have long internal monologues on the page, for example. It belonged to a different world, and was more comparable to Lord of the Rings than, say, Mona Lisa Overdrive.
I am struck by the sense that Westwood (or Virgin, who secured the rights) didn’t particularly care for Dune as a story. Instead, they wanted its galumphing “space-age Lawrence of Arabia” setting, which seems ready-made for videogame adaptation. This is like how Star Wars is compelling for its fantastic future-junkyard setting, and not its bog-standard “hero’s journey” plot. (Although this comparison gives short shrift to Dune, which unlike Star Wars has a very strong story).
You play as one of three factions, House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and House Ordos (who I don’t remember from the book, and according to Wikipedia, they aren’t in the book!). Unlike Warcraft (whose orcs and humans are largely mirrors of each other), the Houses diverge substantially in what they can do. Only the Atreides can recruit Fremen. Only the Ordos can make Deviators (who, in a clever touch, can convert enemy units to your side—this game inspired Age of Empires’ iconic “wololo” monks!). The game doesn’t let you train Sardaukar (although you do fight them in one mission), which feels like a missed opportunity.
The lore-heavy setting makes Dune II difficult for a new player. What’s a Wind Trap? If I’m under attack by Trikes, what units should I make to fight them? How many silos should I build? Warcraft is easier to grasp: it’s intuitive that peasants build farms and gather gold and lumber. It’s intuitive that an archer can shoot over a distance and is a good choice for defending a wall. Warcraft is a game of things you know. Dune II is an alien world that forces you to learn by building and trying.
Your Mentat (who can be accessed via the top-left icon) is little help: he provides flavor-text and worldbuilding but little useful information. “The Wind Traps provide power and water to an installation.” Uh, what’s “power” and “water”, in the context of the game? Why do I need these things? Most of the text seems written with the presumption that you want to know how things work in the Duneuniverse, rather than how to use them in the game.
That aside, Dune II is mechanically simple. If anything, you spend more time unlearning things that aren’t in the game: it’s primitive by modern standards, and many taken-for-granted features of modern strategy games literally hadn’t been invented yet.
There’s no “fog of war”. The map starts out shrouded in black, but when a unit scouts the black, the area stays visible forever. This allows for cheesy strategies, like sending a soldier on a suicide mission into the enemy base, you can watch everything they’re doing for the remainder of the match. There are no production queues. No waypointing. No “find an idle spice harvester” button. You have to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow. I did enjoy the fact that if you don’t have enough resources to build something expensive, you can partially build it, and then finish the job when you have more spice. That’s nice.
But the game’s most stark omission is its lack of IPX/SPX/null modem support. Dune II is single-player only, and to be blunt, the enemy player AI is not good enough for it to be single-player only.
The enemy AI in later RTS games was controlled by a script. I used to write them myself for Age of Empires II, which had a little programming language that offered great flexibility. Some fan-made AoEII AIs ran for tens of thousands of lines of code, and spent years in development.
Dune II‘s AI is a little different. In fact, it’s not really an AI at all. According to Westwood lead programmer Joe Bostic, level designers would hard-code an “end state” for the enemy’s base, and the AI would simply follow a template. This means Dune II’s AI does not surprise you, or react intelligently. It blindly follows a step-by-step sequence of rules. But as 21st century AI bros inform me, doesn’t the human brain work like that? Aren’t we all just rule-following robots? That’s right: you are exactly as intelligent as Dune II‘s AI. Westwood achieved AGI in 1992 and the world doesn’t know it.
Sadly, much of the game is decidedly unintelligent. Dune II only lets you move one soldier at a time. This is frustrating (and the game’s biggest problem): any move or attack command must be issued separately to every soldier in your army. Imagine being a general in real life, but you can’t just mass-order your men to the front. You have to go to their tent, one at a time, and crack open a beer before asking politely if they’d mind moving to a new position. War would become impossible. Universal peace would reign. It would be horrible.
It’s almost pointless building a big army in Dune II: you can’t effectively control it in battle. Even moving a single soldier requires three inputs. You select the unit, click “move” (or hit M), and then click the place on the map you want the soldier to go. Think of this as an equation: to move an army in Dune II, you must click 3(X/1) times, where X is the size of your army (and all “fractional clicks” are rounded up into whole numbers). To get eighteen Ordos siege tanks in position, you must click thirty-six times. That’s ridiculous.
By contrast, Warcraft lets you move soldiers in groups of four. The equation becomes 3(X/4): moving twelve spiders takes nine clicks. Much better. Warcraft II goes one better by eliminating the “move” button requirement: you just right-click somewhere, and the engine guesses from context whether you want to move or attack. It also lets you select nine soldiers at a time. The equation is approximately 2(X/9): so moving twelve grunts takes four clicks. Later strategy games have no selection limit. In Cossacks, you move an army of arbitrary size with just two clicks.
But this was 1992. The dark ages. A year when police beat up black people, and sex perverts became President. I forgive Dune II for not predicting the future (I can’t do that either), but it’s frustrating to lose battles that you know you could have won, simply because you can’t click fast enough.
Dune II is incredibly micro-intensive. I can’t stress this enough. You need to constantly be on the ball, hopping from base to battlefield and back again. Controlling your units is difficult at the best of times. Things just stop working in this game, for no good reason.Your spice harvesters will sit around uselessly at refineries, waiting for orders. Your soldiers will ignore enemies standing right next to them unless you tell them (one at a time!) to attack.
The game’s apparent simplicity is undermined by the fact that you must be everywhere on the map at once, giving orders, or reminding soldiers of orders you gave them five seconds ago. Frank Klepacki composed the music, but Dune II’s real soundtrack is clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick. This isn’t a game so much as a Gom Jabbar torture test for mouse springs. Remember, little Logitech, fear is the mouse killer.
The game is flat, both visually and strategically. There are no natural obstacles such as walls or cliffs. The entire planet of Arrakis can be traversed in a straight line. This makes it easier to play than Warcraft (where poor pathfinding will cause your soldiers to get stuck against stray trees and bits of wall), but limits strategy. There’s nothing to fight over aside from gravel and spice. There are no chokepoints or funnel-points or defensible positions. This, combined with the hidebound AI, ensures that every match plays out in a similar fashion.
The dense fog of choices that Warcraft II immerses you in (do you 1-hall or 2-hall? Grunt rush or tech straight to stronghold?) does not exist in Dune II. There’s simply a “correct” way to play the game: it can be solved like an equation, and once you know the equation…what do you do then?
Maybe investigate the real issue: does the game have worms?
Yes, the game has worms!
They are a bit disappointing, though. The sand vibrates a little, and then a Shai-Halud pops up, eats a soldier or two, and vanishes. You can actually kill them, if you want. Pretty lame.
So that’s Dune II. The first of its kind. Or the second, third, or fourth. Whatever it is, it inspired everything that came after. Few games are so heavily imitated. Its place in history is secure (as secure as history can be), but is it worth playing today?
I’d say so. Maybe for a few games, anyway. You might really like it, and extend those few games to many. I stopped after a few. To be honest, I am uncomfortable when playing ancient games. I irrationally feel like they’re going to break while I play them, like they’re porcelain Ming vases in a museum. But maybe you want to smash the fuck out of some Ming vases, so have at it.
