Radio personality Ron Bennington described stand-up comedy as a game of “tell a joke, or become the joke”. Your audience has invested time into you, and they want it repaid. If you bomb and your jokes fall flat, be afraid. Your audience came here to laugh, and they’re going to do it, one way or another.

Id software co-founder John Romero was an extremely hot property in 1996. Heavily promoted as gaming’s bad boy, he’d just left id software and had launched a new company, Ion Storm, under the mantra “design is law”. Ion Storm promoted their debut game Daikatana with an ad campaign suggesting that FPS games had become lame and boring, and now long-haired John Romero was going to crash the party on a skateboard and kick everyone’s ass. Radical, dude!

Daikatana was supposed to be the next big thing. Instead, it became a joke. It missed its 1997 ship date, and then perhaps half a dozen ship dates after that. It finally came out in 2000 in a plague field of negative publicity, having gone through two engine upgrades, a full dev team, and thirty million dollars in funding.

What went wrong? It’s a long and fascinating story (told here by Gamespot’s Geoff Keighley) which, along with Duke Nukem Forever, has become an industry cautionary tale on hubris and perfectionism. Daikatana essentially ended Romero’s career as a Triple-A game dev, and he’s spent twenty years bouncing from company to company, leaving a shallow strew of indie and mobile shovelware.

Assuming you’re immune to the charms of Gunman Taco Truck and Pettington Park, Daikatana will likely remain Romero’s last hurrah as a game dev. Was it any good?

That depends on what you want. If you’re eager to play four badly designed half-a-games at once, with a graphical engine years out of date, it’s quite good.

It’s a first person shooter featuring “RPG” “elements” (LEVEL UP flashes on the screen occasionally, and this apparently does something.) Unlike Doom the game attempts to tell a story and establish a rich universe filled with lore, although it isn’t successful on either count.

We start off with a cutscene: an old man who is dying of polygon deficiency explains the plot to you. It goes on for quite a while. The developers must have realised they were boring the player, because they have ninjas jump out of the shadows, beat the shit out of the old man, and run away…after which he continues explaining the plot to you. A mood is created. I don’t think it’s the mood the developers intended.

The story is confusing, and the game as a whole lacks thematic direction. What’s the vibe here? Berserk? Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Doom? It’s neither funny nor dramatic. It reminds me of a ten year old boy play-acting Spiderman fighting Sonic the Hedgehog while he smashes action figures together.  There’s time travel, ancient Greece, a black sidekick called Superfly (note the spelling) and an Asian female sidekick who’s into martial arts, a giant sword…

But that wouldn’t have mattered if the game was fun. Fun has an excellent track record of elevating games above their own conceptual stupidity. Not so here.

The game technically has “depth”, but so does the Marianas Trench. Eleven thousand meters of water and squid-shit isn’t interesting, and nor are Daikatana‘s huge stack of poorly-integrated, half-tested features.

Why shove an RPG-lite stats system into the game when it has no visible impact on gameplay? Why is there an XP system? What does it do, and why do I care? Why design unique enemies for every level when they all feel like variants of either “annoying fast flying enemy” or “annoying slow-moving bullet-sponge”?

None of the weapons obey logic. There’s a double-barrelled shotgun that fires six shots at once (???), a rocket launcher that shoots two twisty rockets that hit everything except the enemy you aimed them at, etc. This is MC Escher with a gun catalog. The titular weapon, the Daikatana, proves to be a gigantic sword that blocks a large portion of your screen when you have it equipped. It murders everything it touches, including your peripheral vision!

But the game’s absolute nadir is the sidekicks.

They have the worst AI I have ever seen. They run in front of your gun. They get stuck on corners. They get crushed by elevators. They ignore weapons on the ground and charge heavily-armed enemies using their fists. When they die you lose, and they exist at all times in a state of permanent about-to-die. They are comprehensively broken.

Daikatana is off-the-box unplayable because of the sidekicks. Un-fucking-playable. I don’t exaggerate. Daikanata literally cannot be played because of the sidekicks and you will frustrate yourself trying. Don’t bother.

Here’s what you should do instead: download the community-made 1.3 patch, which deletes the fucking sidekicks from the game, thus rehabbing it to “barely playable”. You’re welcome.

The graphics are visually interesting at times (how often do you see the colour purple in FPS titles?), but are mostly dull and ugly. There’s no vibrancy. Why did they upgrade from the Quake engine when the colour scheme recreates most of Quake’s excesses?

What else was happening in 2000? What did the market look like? System Shock 2, Perfect Dark, Deus Ex, Half Life, Unreal Tournament, NOLF, and two Quake games. Next to these titles, Daikatana looks like a game from 1997, with inferior playability. It isn’t as bad as people say: it’s worse.

One of the final books in Gemmell’s Drenai setting, White Wolf introduces a new hero called Skilgannon the Damned.

It’s all here: the fast pace, the brutal fight scenes (Gemmell knows sixty adjectives for an axe splitting a skull), the terse and efficient characterization, the unabashed heroism, and the tension between ideals of good and evil and the complexities of reality. I truly believe that nobody ever did it better.

But “it’s all here” doesn’t feel like an unalloyed compliment, not after twenty five books of mostly the same stuff. Gemmell was an excellent but limited author, and here he paints within the lines, offering up mostly familiar pleasures. The result is a book that, while fun, doesn’t particularly need to exist.

All the usual baddies make an appearance – the Nadir, werebeast “Joinings”, assassins, shamans – as do the typical Gemmell action setpieces (here we get three fights in a tavern as opposed to the usual one or two). Once again, a character renounces their violent ways and tries to become a monk, with predictably disastrous results. And the final encounter, while exciting, couldn’t be more of a videogame boss battle if “One Winged Angel” was playing in the background.

The protagonist Skilgannon poses a particular problem: he’s just a jumble of traits from past Gemmell heroes and never emerges as a compelling and unique character. He has Waylander’s dark past, Druss’s demon-possessed weapon (the actual Druss appears in this novel, muddling things still further), Jon Shannow’s sense of having outlived his time, Tenaka’s sense of being ill-used by someone he trusted, etc. He’s supposed to be an antihero, but he only commits evil acts because of a pair of mind-controlling swords, a bit of thematic oddness that Gemmell never addresses.

Gemmell doesn’t do anything new here, but he does turn up the emotional intensity in a few places. The scenes depicting Skilgannon’s youth were fascinating, linking past Gemmell figures such as Gorben and Michanek and adding a host of new ones. Druss the Legend steals the show every time he appears, to the point where I wished the entire book was about him. And the title’s full meaning is actually pretty interesting, particularly in light of the sequel, The Swords of Night and Day.

I enjoyed White Wolf, both when I read it here and when I read its various bits and pieces in earlier books like Waylander et al. It was probably for the best that Gemmell spent his final years writing quasi-historical fiction (re-telling the Iliad). It forced him outside of his comfort zone. Gemmell incapable of writing anything but a Gemmell novel, but many of his best stories happened when he at least tried.

Did you buy this book expecting to learn about the Roman Empire? You’re in for a treat – there’s stuff in here that not even historians know.

For example, that Caligula’s sister died at age twenty three due to a “surfeit of buggery” with her brother and “seven outrageously well-endowed studs” (p34), and how when Caligula travelled he “amused himself by taking potshots at the dull-witted peasants in the roadside fields, wielding a sort of projectile-shooting bazooka” (p38), or how, in the arenas, skilled gladiators could decapitate a man and then direct the pumping jets of blood to spell “Caligula” on the sand, with the falling head forming the dot on the letter i. (p74).

But it wasn’t all fun and games. The most prized animal in the arenas was the “Libyan lion…eleven feet in length, with enormous paws armed with razorsharp (sic) claws of sabre-size dimensions, even their engorged testicles were as large as a man’s head”. Scary. The only way the Romans could subdue the Libyan lion and its engorged testicles was for a “particularly handsome slave to present his shapely, exposed anus to the lion’s mighty sexual apparatus; then, once the act of copulation (which invariably proved terminal for the unfortunate slave, due to unsustainable blood loss) reached its critical point and the lion was momentarily distracted, a gang of a hundred or more whooping slaves would wrestle the lion to the ground and throw a net over it”. (p83)

Divine Carnage is hilarious; one of the funniest books I’ve read in recent memory. I’m fighting (and losing) a battle just to fill this review with my favorite parts. Nearly every page of this book has entertainment value: which is good, because it’s a bit light on history. And literacy.

What’s this book supposed to be? A hoax? A work of surrealist metafiction? A parody of the “edgy history” trend? One of Creation Books’ typical scams?

The back cover has the words “ORGY OF DEATH GLADIATOR KILL”, with all capitals and no punctuation. The copyediting was done by someone stabbing a keyboard with a gladius; there are spelling and grammar errors on nearly every page. The phrase “plebian scum” is used so often it becomes a tic.

Also, the book was written by time travellers: James Havoc’s foreword is copyrighted 1999, but it mentions the “recent” Russell Crowe movie Gladiator, which came out in 2000.

Much of Divine Carnage was clearly composed while drunk – you can see the author’s mind wander down an alley and start free-associating while staring at an empty glass. For example, we’re told about the Imperial “thumbs up for life, thumbs down for death” custom, with an aside that the emperor’s thumb was actually penetrating a slave’s rectum. (But then you wouldn’t be able to see in which direction it’s pointing…)

Never mind that, though. Who are the authors of this masterpiece?

Jeremy Reed is a “Jersey-born poet, novelist, biographer and literary critic”. Stephen Barber is a longtime Creation Books hack-for-hire who has written a dozen titles along the lines of “transformative future sex death semiotics in the films of Uwe Boll”. Neither is a historian, but they attack the project with gusto. Jeremy Reed heroically cites four books as “…an invaluable sources of reference (sic)”, though his final sentence is candid: “There is no definitive life of Heliogabalus, and I have attempted to resassemble (sic) aspects of his character most likely to resonate in the current times.” Stephen Barber cites no books at all, just the “newly-excavated” Butrinte Caligula, which must be newly excavated indeed, considering that Google offers no corroboration that it exists.

Divine Carnage is the first in the Blood History series that marked Creation Books’s twilight years as an actual publisher. The second book was Flesh Inferno by Simon Whitechapel, and the third was The Bloody Countess, which is a reprint of a 1960s title by surrealist poet Valentine Penrose (whether Creation Books obtained the necessary rights from Penrose’s estate is an open question). The fourth book, sadly, exists only in our imaginations.

It’s likely that Divine Carnage was meant as a continuation of Tinto Brass’s Caligula, which shares its extemporized take on history and lack of good taste (James Havoc mentions this film in the foreword). Surely there’s a kid somewhere who relied on Divine Carnage as research materials for his O-levels. Hopefully that kid did alright.

I’d be remiss not to quote my favorite line from the book, on p96. “Commodus was certainly the first post-modern Roman emperor”. When I read that, it made my entire day. Creation Books ripped off a lot of people, but they did not rip off me. Not here.