A plodding anti-religion parable set on an alien planet, Kaena: The Prophecy’s flaws seem to justify its “nobody’s heard of it” status. Despite some inspired ideas (and an intriguing erotic-techno-biophilic setting), it’s watchable mainly as a study of wasted potential. If a ever fire burned in this film, it went out long ago.

It’s a French CGI film from 2003, created by Chris Delaporte and Patrick Daher, and produced by Xilam on a budget of $26 million. It grossed just $2,173 on its opening weekend. You’d have made more money in March 2020 with an educational film titled How To Lick Every Surface At Your Local Pub.

Kaena was released on DVD, where it theoretically could have recouped its losses. Considering the DVD’s 87 Amazon reviews, far fewer than heavy-hitters like Morbius (3,488 reviews) or Mars Needs Moms (1,151 reviews), I’m reasonably certain that Kaena: The Prophecy did not Kaena: A Profit See.

I will attempt to describe Kaena’s story. My ability to do so is hindered by the reality that it’s confusing and I don’t care.

A spaceship crash-lands on an alien planet. Its crew is massacred by the natives (vicious blobs of sap called Selenites), but the ship’s sentient core survives, sprouting into a gigantic tree called Axis that extends a hundred miles into space. We then jump ahead six hundred years. A primitive humanlike race of creatures now lives beneath the branches of Axis, high above clouds that (from their upside down perspective) they regard as the sky. They slave tirelessly to harvest sap for the ground-based Selenites, who have tricked them into thinking they’re gods. Until one day, a girl named Kaena grows curious about what’s really beneath the sky.

The setup’s there, but the delivery isn’t. Kaena’s lore-heavy setting (with several races, superintelligent AIs, and two species of genetically engineered worms) is more complicated than you want in a movie where the villain is a blob of sap. The story also has an incomplete, threadbare quality, as though you’re playing a videogame with half the cutscenes erased from the disk, and it’s often hard to understand what’s happening, or how event B connects to event A.

My guess is that important scenes were written and storyboarded, and then cut due to financial constraints. I don’t know if that’s true, yet it often felt that Kaena’s writers expected me to know facts without having troubled themselves to explain them to me.

The villain’s entire motive is that she wants to avoid “fusion”, which apparently is how the Selenites reproduce. (The vizier gently tells the queen that she must think of her species’ future. The queen scornfully retorts “You are the last male! You crave fusion with me!” She’s got us males figured out, I guess.) I don’t understand what fusion entails, or why she doesn’t want to do it, so her behavior is incomprehensible. If the Selenites depend on sap from Axis’s trunk to survive, why are they trying to destroy the ship’s computer, which is obviously the source of the tree? And the tree didn’t exist until the ship arrived, so where were they getting sap from before?

The film has a lot of “coupon shots”: my term for a money shots that is ruined by the fact that you don’t understand or care about the big reveal. In the third act, the character Opaz reveals a secret about Axis’s true nature. It’s played up as a big moment. Kaena reacts in awe. I reacted with “so what?” I couldn’t see how it affected anything.

The film seems to piously insist that it has a brilliant concept, and that this should excuse its every shortcoming. A tree in space! A race that lives upside down! They stare up at heaven…and it’s the Earth! Isn’t that profund? Heaven is on Earth!

But movies do not exist in their outlines. I cannot watch concepts. Kaena’s plot isn’t compelling in the slightest. It’s “Noble savages with a magic tree are enslaved by a technologically superior race who are posing as gods, then a rebellious teenage girl with mystic visions goes on a hero’s journey to save them”. In other words, dead husk-like fragments of FernGully, Pocahontas, Princess Mononoke, The Prince of Egypt, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, and A Bug’s Life, coated in obscurantist Franco-glaze. You may as well watch James Cameron’s Avatar, which adapts about 75% of this movie’s plot without even realizing it, and at least makes the tree-worshipping cat people sparkly blue instead of poop-brown.

On that note…how does the the film look?

Kaena herself is superbly bouncy and appealing. She’s constantly in motion: leaping and falling and tumbling and getting ragdolled around by physics. She’s ruthlessly designed to strike one chord in teenage girls, and a different, louder one in teenage boys.

Other parts of the movie look awful. As in, “Welcome to 1994, we are now watching Re:Boot outtakes and the animators are on drugs” awful. I do not support abortion, but if I saw someone slinging this child’s coathanger-riddled corpse into a Planned Parenthood dumpster, I would not tell a soul. Some things are for the greater good.

The rest of Kaena’s tribe look nondescript, in a featureless “NPC in a cheap videogame” way. The eye stares straight past them.

2000-2004 was “the best of times, and the worst of times” for CGI. The technology could look incredible, but it was still novel (and expensive) enough that objectively horrible shit was regularly defecated into theaters.

Kaena embodies this cinematic weltanschauung: here you get incredible and horrible, in one movie! There’s a huge unevenness in how the film looks, as if it was made not just by different people but by different studios.

The making-of documentary behind Kaena is informative. The film was worked on piecemeal by various people, many of whom had no business making a movie at all. I was not surprised to learn that Kaena was originally meant to be a videogame. It began almost a decade earlier at Eric Chahi’s Amazing Studios (Out of this World has a faint but recognizable influence on Kaena‘s style). 1995 was an era of multimedia-heavy games that blurred the line between cinema and videogaming, and after Toy Story‘s success (and some encouraging feedback from Lucas and Spielberg), Delaporte and Daher left Amazing and began work on a “cinematic” game called Gaina.

Gaina was soon re-imagined as TV movie called Axis, and then rebuilt again as an animated feature. Delaporte and Daher were game developers, and they made a movie that doesn’t feel like one. They animated it with commercial 3D software of the sort used by videogame developers, such as Discrete’s Character Studio. Certain details—like the hands of characters—aren’t as detailed as they would be in a Pixar film. After all, you don’t have detailed hands in a game.

The project bumped along for years, held back by outdated tools, an inexperienced team, and the eventual bankruptcy of Delaporte’s studio. Kaena was bought by Xilam Animation (of Oggy and the Cockroaches fame), and hauled over the finish line, after rehiring most of the original team.

I’ll say this: some of the animators and character designers knew what they were doing. Kaena herself is great, and so are the Selenites, who have a creative HR Giger-inspired design. Their environment is cleverly conceived: a vile, chiaroscuro’d hellhole that seems made of congealed maple syrup.

Kaena definitely could have used more money, but writing is cheap, and that’s the part where it falls apart.

The villains are puzzling in their motives. Opaz is has been doing nothing for six hundred years. The worms are Timon and Pumba style comic relief characters that can fuck off. Kaena, the cynosure at the film’s center, lacks any sort of characterization at all. She’s just a plucky young teenager who is saintly and good and always ready to stand up to authority.

The human village is ruled by a grating one-note character, clearly meant as a stand-in for organized religion. His every line of dialog is some version of “The gods are testing us!” and “The gods are demanding another harvest of sap!” He turns into a droning irritating presence, without any depth or nuance. At times the movie becomes an atheist screed, three years before that was popular. But the film’s “think for yourself” bona-fides are questionable, since Kaena’s basically a mystic herself, motivated by dreams.

2003 was probably a bit late to make a movie like Kaena. It wants to be a vaguely edgy movie aimed at teens. Treasure Planet and Titan AE had already tried that, and flopped. I think the world just saw another unmarketable foreign movie, and passed.

Many such cases. In 2003, CGI was still regarded as a groundbreaking new art form instead of a movie-ruining plague, and we had a whole trend of lavish CGI “films” that were actually more like hundred-million-dollar Maya showcases (think Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Polar Express). The Hollywood press would reliably hype them with breathless technobabble about 360 degree mocap and realistic light specularity and characters with 60,000 individually animated strands of hair, along with speculation that human actors would soon be obsolete.

It was a bubble. Most of these films failed, losing their studio tens of millions of dollars and sometimes bankrupting them in the process. In reality, only Pixar and Dreamworks could reliably score a chunky 3-5x return on a CGI film, and nearly everyone else was left holding a bag (usually one with poorly-animated cloth physics). Even Disney got burned a bunch of times before figuring out a formula. With a few exceptions (Ice Age made a bunch of money, somehow), there wasn’t a CGI boom, there was a Pixarworks boom.

(We see a similar trend today with superhero franchises. People regard them as this omnipresent thing that can’t fail, but actually, the only studio making it work is Marvel. DC’s Extended Universe failed, and Universal’s Dark Universe sputtered out after one movie. The plates are kept spinning by Kevin Feige’s diabolical touch. When he dies or leaves the company, who knows what will happen?)

Kaena got caught right as the industry bubble burst. (A new one, of course, started with 3D, and Avatar). But even if had come out in 2001, it has severe problems. It’s dark and confused and slow. It’s loaded with rampant fanservice that would probably repulse parents and female viewers. The action scenes come and go. The animation is literally the horse drawing meme for ninety minutes, swapping competence for incompetence at random moments. The fluid physics and realistic hair are paired with characters that look like they’re from a shitty TV show or web series. There’s exposition instead of action. The movie’s modal scene is “dollar-store Ent philosophizes about the nature of being to a girl wearing clothes so fetishistically tight you could diagnose a uterine cancer in her pelvis”. If you want that sort of thing, check out Aeon Flux.

Kaena is a rough movie to love. It’s more of an archeological dig than a film: I’m disinterested in what the movie is, but fascinated by what it was originally trying to do. Almost all bad movies have a murdered good movie hiding in the frame, and that’s definitely true in this one’s case.

The Book of Lieh Tzŭ has a parable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved The Mountains”. A nonagenarian begins hauling away the mighty T’ai-hsing and Wang-wu mountains, one bucket of rocks at a time. A bystander laughs at this futile task, but the Foolish Old Man Chides him. It’s not futile. His children will continue digging when he’s gone, and so will their children. God hears the Foolish Man’s words, and is moved by his faith. He sends two angels to carry the mountains away on their backs.

It’s symbolic and isn’t meant as a psychological portrait, but I wonder what the Foolish Old Man’s children thought of the idea. Shackled to the dream of an old man; knowing that even after their father has died, they’ll still be be there, slaving at the mountainface, watching it subside with torturous slowness, before they die in turn and their children continued their fate.

And what would they do when they finished? Hundreds of years from now, will their descendents lift the last flake of rhyolite, granite, or chert from a flat plain…and go utterly mad with realization? Understand at once, with the force of a crashing wave, that this was for nothing? “The man we did this for is dead. He died long ago. He knew he’d never live to see his task fulfilled. It was never about the mountains. It was about making us suffer.”

Whiplash is an intense and terrifying film a young jazz drummer and his abusive bandleader. The kid tries to rationalize their relationship as something more than it is. A stepping stone on the road to greatness. A struggle to overcome. In the end, though, there’s no point except pain.

Technically, Whiplash is phenomenal, with fantastic filming, acting, and editing. Shots are almost blood-freezing in their brilliance—JK Simmons raises a hand to deliver a count-in, and the camera orbits it in a slow arc, allowing that raised hand to become the center of the universe. The presence of “Caravan” on the score inspired me to dig out my old Duke Ellington charts and re-learn part of it on bass.

But in the end, Whiplash’s technical merits recede from memory, leaving a raw, stark, and sad story about a kid trapped by the prison bars of a drumset, unable to leave.

Andrew Neiman is a young drummer at the fictional Schaffer Academy. He’s hand-picked to join the band of Terence Fletcher: a band leader who has the rep of demanding perfection from his students. Neiman sees this as a way to fast-track his career, and earn the respect of his parents. But Fletcher turns out to be a cruel, sadistic monster. He intersperses tirades and bullying with insincere little pep talks (“Listen, the key is to just relax. You’re here for a reason!”). He pushes kids to the breaking point, and then doles out just enough fatherly kindness to stop them from quitting.

Neiman is a naive, tragic figure. He’s wandered into the jaws of a monstrous, oblique game, against a man who is very good at playing it. Throughout the film, he resists the realization that Fletcher’s an enemy, not a mentor. Even at the end (when he’s won a victory of sorts), we sense he might get sucked back in by Fletcher’s glib charm. I found this believable. Only sinners and fools go to hell, so Neiman has to believe he’s secretly in heaven.

I’ve heard Whiplash described as a study of futility, like Werner Herzog’s “Conquest of the Useless“. But in this case, it’s worse than there simply being no point. Fletcher has a clear goal: to make Neiman and others cry and feel helpless and maybe commit suicide. Some people enjoy taking all the pains of the world, and other people enjoy giving them.

Fletcher’s excuses for his behavior—he’s pushing kids to achieve greatness, like how Jo Jones made Charlie Parker great!—is so thin you could use it to paper the head of Neiman’s snare drum. He has no actual interest in music or art. On at least one (and maybe two?) occasions, we see him knowingly sabotage a performance in front of a live audience to embarrass a musician. He likes hurting kids. That seems to be his thing.

Oddly, that’s how the movie works, too. Writer-director Damien Chazelle wrote the film based on a negative experience he had in a high school jazz band. But Whiplash isn’t really about collegiate jazz, or even music. Adam Neely, in a review of the film, observes that it’s actually a sports movie. Every plot point and character arc (Fletcher as the gruff coach, Neiman as the talented rookie, the competition at Lincoln Center as “the big game”) would make more sense for, say, NCAA Football. It features stylistic tropes that don’t really make sense. Like having extra musicians sitting around, turning the pages, hoping they’ll get a turn to play. This is because the movie needs an analog for “being on the bench”.

But there’s also a weird king of logic to it. Once Neiman is in Fletcher’s kingdom, the world starts to change. The rules become blurry. Is he playing too fast or too slow? Is he counting 215 beats per minute? He doesn’t know. Too late, he realizes it doesn’t matter at all what he’s doing wrong: Fletcher is hazing him. The rules are weird, arbitrary, and completely divorced from any sort of ground truth.

But reality has a way of coming back to you. We see Fletcher near the end of the film, and he’s reduced to a diminished, pathetic shadow of himself. We see him tinkling some lame cod-jazz on a piano at a shitty West End bar, and he finally stands revealed as what he is: a talentless hack, pushing students to achieve something he could never do himself.

He talks to Neiman (this time, as equals, not as master and student), and defends his teaching methods as a necessary evil. Students need tough love, because otherwise we get more “Starbucks jazz” albums. Which is bitterly ironic: the music we just heard him play was the epitome of “Starbucks jazz”. Fletcher, in a way, is running from his own shadow. Neiman is haunted by the idea that he might be a failure waiting to happen. For Fletcher, it’s worse. There’s no “waiting to happen” for him, he knows he’s a failure. This isn’t to say we ever feel sympathy for Fletcher. But his character does gain a certain depth.

JK Simmons plays Fletcher really hard. Too hard? It’s hard to believe that a teacher at a prestigious college would fling metal chairs at students’ faces, call them faggots, call a Jewish student a “hymie”, etc, etc.

Is the Schaffer Academy is publically funded? Asking a female student if she got her chair because she’s cute sounds like a great way to get the school buttfucked by a hundred-thousand-dollar Title XI decision. Nobody could afford to hire Terence Fletcher in real life, no matter how talented he is. He would bankrupt any school he worked for.

(My own band leader teaches high school. I asked him what the current climate is, regarding teachers touching students. His response was “Are you kidding me? We’re not even allowed to pat our students’ bodies on the back to say ‘well done'”.)

But the story is tightly constructed, and has a tendency to coil back on itself in interesting ways. The legendary “rushing or dragging” scene, where Neiman has to decide whether he was too slow or too fast (with Fletcher slapping him in the face), and finally admits he was rushing. This lines up with metronomic precision with a later scene, where Neiman rushes, and pays dearly for it.

Yet the world of the film has a slight gauzy unreality to it, as if it’s stuck halfway in the birth canal of Chazelle’s imagination. Characters don’t always behave how real people would behave. But it points to something true. Of the many lies told to children, one of the worst is “It’s for your own good”. No, often it’s for their own good. Many parents pressure their children to become a lawyer—a miserable career path, with some of the lowest rates of reported happiness of any profession. Why? Well, having a child as a lawyer makes them look like successes as parents. It has nothing to do with the child’s happiness at all, only their own. Neiman is caught in this parental trap. He grasps a dream, finds it has sharp edges, and keeps gripping until his hands come to pieces.

TekWar is the first in a series of cyberpunk novels “written” by William Shatner. If you read sci fi books around 1990, you’ll vaguely remember TekWar. You’ll vaguely remember it so damn hard.

According to popular legend, Shatner wrote the book during a strike on the set of Star Trek V. According to unpopular legend, it was the work of professional ghostwriter Ron Goulart. According to a bullshit lie I just made up, it was actually written by popular entertainer Herbert “Tiny Tim” Khaury while his ukelele was in the shop for repairs. Since truth lies in the middle, we can confidently say TekWar was written by Shatner, Goulart, and Tiny Tim working together and no I will not take further questions.

The book is about future-cop Jake Cardigan (far less cool than his brother, Jim Pullover). Framed for dealing a “Tek”, an illicit mind-altering drug, he must clear his name by infiltrating and cracking Tek cartels at the behest of a shadowy PI agency.

Today “cyberpunk” means a fluffy visual aesthetic, but in the 90s it meant a literary movement: Ballardian/Ellisonian “new wave” sci-fi with an emphasis on the sordid side of life: drug use, crime, and urban blight. Cyberpunk was raised around the principle that it’s not beauty that defines an age, it’s ugliness. The true face of the Middle Ages isn’t the Chartres Cathedral but the bubonic sores festering on a peasant’s neck. The 21st century will be remembered for World War II and the Holocaust, not the Green Revolution or the moon landing. As Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer realized, ruin and death have a fetishistic compulsion that draws us in and forces us to stare. What will the future of decay look like? The verdigris yet to flower, the crack yet to appear? How can we depict that?

In practice, the average writer isn’t very imaginative, and most 90s cyberpunk stories feature a futuristic setting awkwardly bolted to a bog-standard 1950s crime/western plot (Gibson’s “console cowboy” trope is an unsubtle nod to this). They were quick to write and cheap to adapt to film (places like Hong Kong’s Walled City and New York’s East 14th Street looked fairly cyberpunkish without a dollar spent on set dressing), and this led to a glut of substandard work that crashed the market.

Next to the genre’s more interesting works, such as Vurt and Snow Crash, TekWar stands out as particularly disposable. ”I wrote them as the sort of books you could read on airplanes and throw away afterwards,” Shatner once said. With that kind of sales job, I bet you’re itching to read TekWar already. But I am not here to talk about the book, or the TV show, or the other TV show, or the movie, or the comic book, or the marital aid.

I am here to discuss the PC game.

TekWar was a first-person shooter that came out in 1995 and left no trace on popular culture. That’s because it is a bad game. But in the long run, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was good.

Games have the lifespan of mayflies: they are released, played by however many people play them, and then fall into the same abyss; goodnight. Where they fall to, we cannot say. There is no thud as they hit the bottom. I remember countless PC games that once stood above the market like titans: dominating, inescapable…and now they’re gone. They’re not even obsolete, it’s like they don’t exist. Nobody talks about them, few even remember them, and if you think you do, it’s actually your childhood your remembering, not the game. Don’t believe me? Try replaying your favorite childhood game. It will feel strange and awkward and totally unlike your memories: you’d swear the game has been sucked out of the timeline and switched with an inferior off-brand copy. Your childhood is gone. The door into adulthood swings one way.

Music isn’t like that. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is from 1968 and still sounds like it was recorded this morning. The #1 song on the UK pop charts in January 1991 had Gregorian chanting. Occasionally a random song from decades ago will go viral, racking up tens of millions of listens for no other reason than it’s good and people like it.

Music lives forever: the same is not true for videogames. The most they can hope for is that an embarrassing Youtuber called “PixelNostalgia” or “8BitMemories” will waddle through it in DOSBox to the adulation of two hundred viewers. I remember this game! It was so great! I played it when I was six! Again, it’s not about the game, it’s about their childhood. Old games have past tense constructions (was, did, had) hanging around them like flies around roadkill. Their moment is short and they never get a second one. No revival is scheduled for The Fortress of Dr Radiaki.

1995 was an awkward year for first-person shooters. The “pseudo-3D” technology that had railgunned 1993’s Doom into the stratosphere was beginning to age, but the 3D revolution of 1996’s Quake hadn’t arrived yet. The industry settled into a holding pattern: we got iterations on the Doom formula (Heretic/Hexen/Star Wars: Dark Forces), as well as noble experiments (Magic Carpet 2/Descent) that never really felt like finished games. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath.

Then came Ken Silverman’s Build engine.

Silverman was a child prodigy from Rhode Island with a savantlike grasp of graphics programming and assembly code. Around 1992, he saw his brother playing a new game called Wolfenstein 3D, thought “I could make that” and…uh, he did. He reverse-engineered John Carmack’s cutting-edge “3D” engine from scratch, without a peek at the source code. He was sixteen years old.

Doom caused a spike of interest in shooting games. Licensed engines became a hot commodity, and so did the programmers who could work with them. In 1993-4, Scott Miller of Apogee wanted to develop a 3D shooter, but id Software wouldn’t sell him the Doom engine, so he hired Silverman to write a copy of it.

What followed was a long, messy process (Silverman had just enrolled at Brown University, and was soon failing entry-level courses because he spent all his time programming!) that culminated in Build, an quirk-filled oddball engine that powered some of the most memorable games of the 90s.

Build wasn’t a visual feast. Essentially a 2.5D engine with a lot of fancy tricks, it looked good by 1994 standards, passable by 1995 standards, and was severely manhandled by Quake. It was clunky and awkward. Everything cool it could do—such as rooms on top of rooms and mouselook—was achieved through an ugly hack. Silverman was a self-taught programmer, with all that implies, and his code was notoriously abstruse and buggy. This caused frustration for the programmers who had to work in it. I watched someone “speedrun” Duke Nukem 3D: it was actually kind of funny. He barely played the game, he simply exploited one glitch after another, clipping his way through whole levels.

So where did the Build engine shine? Dynamism. It did stuff. Unlike Doom‘s idTech 1 engine, which relied on pre-rendered BSP trees, Build generated level architecture on the fly, meaning walls and floors could move, rotate, and shift. Build took those little moments of environmental interaction in Doom (such as crushing a Spider Mastermind beneath a descending ceiling) and amplified them by a factor of ten. 1996’s Duke Nukem 3D let the player launch nuclear missiles and blow entire landscapes to pieces. 1997’s Blood had a level set on a moving train. 1997’s Shadow Warrior had driveable vehicles years before Halo. Few engines have been so exhuberantly designer-focused as Build.

The earliest Build game to exist (for a relaxed definition of “exist”) was 1994’s Rock’n Shaolin: Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D. It was the illegal afterbirth of a failed deal between Apogee/3D Realms and a Taiwanese/HK studio called Accend. For years, it was believed that the game was never finished (although Accend did leak an unauthorized demo on the internet), until someone found and photographed a game box at a flea market. So apparently Accend actually finished the game? And then released it, in complete defiance of the law? But didn’t advertise or promote it at all? I don’t know. There’s a lot of weird rumors surrounding that game. It’s cursed, and we’ll talk no more of it.

The first legal Build engine game was 1995’s Witchaven, a graphically ugly and technologically primitive Heretic-clone that I will probably never play again. I have made peace with that fact.

Witchaven is the most drab and depressing-looking game I’ve ever seen. The enemies look like claymation trolls melted with a hair-dryer. The controls suck. Combat consists of lining yourself up with enemies and swinging a melee weapon at them—which is frustrating, because there’s a delay of about a second before damage registers, and the first-person perspective means you can’t see where your feet are. Your melee weapons break after a few swings. At times Witchaven seems hell-bent on denying the player any sort of fun. The designers exploit virtually none of the Build engine’s possibilities. If the story of Build had ended with Witchaven, the engine would be forgotten today.

But then Duke Nukem 3D came out: a wonderful romp packed with style, personality, and humor. Quake was a leap forward for 3D technology,but Duke 3D was a comparable leap for design. It’s packed with silly cosmetic touches—you can flush toilets, and roll balls around on a billiards table—that individually seem pointless, but when you have a thousand of them the game just sparkles to life. When you played Duke, you felt the winds of change blow. The “boomer shooter” era of space marines shooting aliens in gray metal corridors was drawing to a close. Blood and Shadow Warriors (two more Build Engine games) further sealed the deal: shooter games could and should depict a living, breathing world.

But between Witchaven and Duke Nukem 3D, we got TekWar.

Again, we have Capstone Software to thank. I don’t know if this was made by the same team that worked on Witchaven. Given the differences in art and style, I guess would guess at “different people”. A sufficiently motivated writer would check the credits on MobyGames. I am not that writer.

TekWar features an early-gen version of Build, scarcely more capable than the version under the hood of Legend of the Seven Paladins. There are no slopes, rooms-above-rooms, or voxels. It supports reflective surfaces, but when you see yourself in a mirror you’ll wish it didn’t. Your character has no animation, and slides around as if on roller-skates.

TekWar loosely adapts the book’s story. The detective (deTektive?) elements are gone. Now Jake Cardigan is a wet-worker hired by Walter Bascom (voiced by William Shatner) to murder Tek dealers on the street without a trial. Who am I working for? Rodrigo Dutuerte?

You walk around city streets with your gun awkwardly jutting into the field of view like you’re a flasher with your dick clenched in your hand, looking for Tekgoons. It’s embarrassing. This could have been a setup for another brainless Doom clone, but TekWar is actually strangely creative. It boasts an intriguing “open world” layout: instead of playing levels by tapping through a menu, you step on a train inside the game, which takes you to part of the city controlled by one of the seven “TekLords”. This train station acts as a central hub, keeping you inside the experience and adding to the sense of immersion. This is standard today, but the idea of taking a train in a videogame seemed cool in 1995.

TekWar has sparks of the still-uninvented “tactical shooter” genre. The game is populated by NPCs who bumble around and get in the way. Shoot at them, and police start attacking in waves. This (in theory) forces you to be smart: rather than killing everything that breathes, you must eliminate Tek dealers while sparing civilians unharmed. Doom is “you against the world”. TekWar is “you against team 1, while trying to pacify team 2 by not hurting team 3”. This idea, if it had been done well, would have added a tactical, cerebral edge to Tekwar unlike any FPS game yet to be released. It would have been a revolution.

It’s not done well. The AI is Daikatana-level terrible, and this makes it impossible to plan or predict what will happen. Cops ignore Tek dealers who are firing guns at you, but the moment you unholster a gun to fight back, the cops start blasting away at you too. It sucks.

Everyone in this game is absurdly sensitive to sound. You can unholster a gun in an empty room and hear cops reacting to it in the street outside. Often it’s quicker to just massacre everyone you see, cops and civvies and bad guys alike, and deal with William Shatner’s bitching afterward. Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

Even if you’re a boy scout who’s dedicated to minimizing casualties, it’s easy to shoot civilians by mistake, because they look like enemies, particularly at a distance. The enemies themselves are identikit clones: I accidentally killed a TekLord (!) and didn’t even realize it until Shatner started congratulating me. I assumed he was just a regular enemy who was soaking up a lot of my shots for some reason, possibly because the game’s hit registration is terrible.

Tekwar has severe Teknical difficulties. Bugs I’ve seen or heard of include:

• You sometimes lose all your weapons when starting a new level.
• If you get pinched between two sliding doors, it kicks you back to DOS with an “INVALID SECTOR FOR PLAYER” message.
• Like Doom, enemies can be “gibbed” by explosions. However, gibbed enemies don’t drop vital keys, and levels become unwinnable if this happens.
• Binding movement keys to your mouse allows for super fast movement for some reason.

Some glitches are honestly adorable. In the Carlyle Rossi section of a game, there’s a ceiling-mounted turret that…isn’t a turret. It moves around the ceiling, chasing you like a lost dog. (An explanation for this I found on a forum: the turrets are considered regular enemies in the game code, just with their movement speed set to “zero”. But this parameter had to be set by hand, and the developers evidently forgot in the case of this one turret. So it moves.)

The game has FMV videos, where your boss Walter Bascom (played by William Shatner) gives missing briefings. He’ll say stuff like “Quick! I’m uptown, and I just saw Marty Dollar! Get down here and help me bring him in!”, giving the impression that the game’s is co-op and you’ll be fighting side by side with Captain Kirk. And do you? Don’t be stupid. Shatner never once appears in the game.

I should mention that 1995 was also the peak of the “interactive movie” fad, when people thought the future of gaming lay in clicking buttons and watching 320×240 Smacker files of actors reacting to what you just did. If you eliminate a TekLord without harming civilians, Shatner praises you. If you fail in either of these tasks, he yells at you (although I’ve found that he sometimes compliments you on a bloodless victory when actually you did kill a civilian. Maybe it was a minority.)

I enjoy Shatner as an actor, but I don’t need to: nobody loves him as much as he loves himself. His every line is delivered with consummate smugness. “I’m not gonna waste your time…or, more importantly, my time.” And then he pauses for an uncomfortable amount of time so you can chuckle. And it’s 1995, so the videos all look like this.

If you’re allergic to excessive pixels, don’t worry, these videos won’t even trigger a sneeze. The actual game is at leats more colorful than Witchaven, but in a garish, kitsch way, with a color palette ruthlessly optimized for ugliness. The in-game sprites are rotoscoped from real-life actors (probably from the TV show), which sounds great in theory, but creates a persistant sense of unreality. They clearly do not belong in the world of the game.

Do you see what I mean? The actress is being lit from her right (camera left), but there’s nothing in the game that could be casting that light. She’s standing next to a building, and should be in shadow! This sends a white-hot signal to your brain that something’s not right. Every character model has the same problem: they are illuminated and highlighted in all the wrong places, and it breaks the illusion of reality.

Other Build engine games dodged the problem by rendering sprites in very soft light (Duke 3D, Blood), or by being so cartoony that it didn’t matter (the rest of them, basically). Tekwar, with its Promethean striving for realism, actually looks the fakest out of any of them. It doesn’t help that the sprites often have really shitty roto, with bits of the backdrop visible on their models.

Everywhere you look, the reality of the game world is broken by sloppy and bizarre touches. The textures don’t match up. There’s water, but you can’t swim: you just instantly fall to the bottom and then start walking again (amidst reeds that don’t seem to connect with the floor). Climbing ladders is absurdly slow. This is the only game I’ve played where it takes longer to climb a ladder than it would have taken me in real life.

Then there’s the infamous “matrix” levels, which are totally confusing, are ripped off from System Shock, and just look like complete ass. Nothing makes visual sense. If anything, it looks like one of those “filler” games from Action 52, where it’s just a jumble of random sprites they had lying around. And that’s basically the climactic ending point of the game.

So, in TekWar we find some ambitious ideas, along with execution so botched that not even the combined powers of Capstone, Will Shatner, Ron Goulart, and Ken Silverman could save it. I wish I liked it more, but Tekwar badly needs teknical support.