July 2015

July 3, 2015

Gameview: Fallout Shelter

“Gameview” is a Dark Acre feature made up of Jack’s opinion on a videogame he played to death.

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Learning to Love the Bomb

There are too many holes in my [Fallout]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_%28series%29) experience. I got the original for Christmas ‘97, and played the hell out of it. That was a far simpler task back then, when most people only had two or three games in their backlog and were able to concentrate their playtime on individual titles. I loved the game: the setting, the turn-based combat, the role-playing, and the writing were a perfect storm of post-apocalyptic goodness.

Fallout 2 I also acquired soon after its launch, and it became one of the first games that I bought for the sake of buying. It’s worth noting that playing Fallout Shelter has motivated me to go back and push through this one, and I’m making decent progress.

Fallout Tactics was the next in the series for me, and I love everything about that game. While I’ve gotten further through Tactics than 2, it also remains unbeaten.

Fallout 3 I borrowed from a friend, and ended up completing the core story in a handful of play sessions. I know that this doesn’t constitute the entire game: the real meat is in the wasteland and the expansion packs. It bothers me that I haven’t seen all the game has to offer, but with Bethesda games how many people have?

Fallout: New Vegas I own, but haven’t played past the character creator.

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3-second review: “Tiny Shelter, something to do while waiting for more engaging things to happen.”

In the face of this litany of lackadaisical gaming it’s with some measure of pride that I can say I’ve “beaten” Fallout Shelter, Bethesda’s little free-to-play Tiny Tower-esque vault manager. As far as these kinds of games go it’s very difficult to fail, and at no time does it force the player to spend money to advance. It’s a neat little thing if you like the Vault-Tec aesthetic, or if you enjoyed NimbleBit’s “Tiny” games. The fun factor had a very fast and hard falloff for me, but I felt that the game was “over” exactly when it should’ve been. The only real downside for me was that it reminded me how much of the Fallout lore is missing from my lexicon.

Technical

Camera

Presented in a 2.5D side-view, the player can zoom and pan.

What works: The flat-view accentuates the clean artwork, and is very readable.

Room for improvement: There’s a forced-zoom function that happens during incidents that could’ve been made optional, as it tends to interrupt play. The furthest zoom could’ve been even wider to accommodate larger vaults.

Character

The game revolves around the work of *dwellers*, stylized after the iconic Vault Boy. The player starts with a handful of them, and acquires more by mating them, calling them from the wasteland via a radio room, or unlocking them from *lunchboxes*. The lunchboxes are the primary hook in the free-to-play model, and can either be ground out by completing various gameplay-related tasks or purchased en mass with real money.

What works: The use of the Vault Boy aesthetic is cute, and injects both instant charm and a strong callback to the franchise. The ability to name and breed the dwellers makes for some interesting experiments in eugenics, if that’s your thing. While limited, the outfitting functions allow for a fair amount of visual variety.

Room for improvement: Pregnant dwellers, even if armed and armored, will run in terror during incidents. I would think that after a generation of Vault-breeding it’d be possible to reprogram some of the old world’s social norms, yet this is not the case. Also the hard cap of 200 on the maximum number of dwellers is too low given the maximum number of jobs allowed, though as my game started crashing whenever I tried to index my 200-strong vault I’m guessing that it was a hardware-related decision.

Control

As it’s a mobile game, the navigation is handled by taps, swipes, and pinches. The user interface displays the number of dwellers, which can be expanded to list them for direct job assignment; resource amounts, tappable to display numeric ratios beneath otherwise plain horizontal bars; currency amount, tappable to open the in-app purchases; a menu button, tappable to unroll further functions like vault storage management, objectives, and options.

What works: On the surface, the controls are functional and logical. Double-tapping to zoom to a room, drag-and-dropping Dwellers to assign them or send them out to scavenge the wasteland, and tapping to collect resources or level up Dwellers all works fine on the surface.

Room for improvement: Once the vault grows beyond a certain size, the controls start to break down. This is due to lack of negative space in the playfield: when wall-to-wall with vault rooms it’s hard to make accurate swipes and taps. Dragging a dweller into an off-screen room becomes an exercise in frustration, as dropping them too early will wreak havoc with your carefully-planned efficiency, while dropping them too late will mean scrolling around to repeat the process, often with the same results. Better context sensitivity would have gone a long way to reduce the pain of managing a crowded vault, such as locking the selection mode or offering ways to do “resource collection only”, “dweller assignment only” commands.

Last Words

Fallout Shelter is a tight little offering from Bethesda that plays and feels more like fan-service than a serious attempt at a free-to-play videogame. If it had more direct tie-in to the upcoming Fallout 4, such as crossover rewards for good performance, then it might have had that extra dimension that would’ve kept me playing. As it is, it’s “winnable” after a week’s play, and any content depth is well-plumbed by then.

It’s free, so if you’ve got an iOS device there’s nothing stopping you from trying it, and Fallout fans are likely to find at least a few grins within.

From the Backloggery:

It’s a free-to-play using the Vault-tec aesthetic from Fallout, and one that’s very casual, non-demanding, and something to do while waiting for other, more engaging things to load.\ 4 out of 5 radroach infestations

No Patreons were milked for the creation of this “critique”.

2015-07-06 7:41 AM

Life is only short when you’re close to death.

You’re always close to death.

July 9, 2015

HOT TAKES: JUNE — JULY ‘15

“Hot Takes” is a monthly Dark Acre feature made up of Jack’s opinions on random Internet debris.

VIDEOGAMES

RUSTY NEW HORIZONS

As I’d unplugged from the rapid-fire madness of the social networks prior to this year’s E3, I’d managed to go without hearing so much as a lone squeal of excitement over anything that may have been introduced on that grandest of videogame marketing stages. The above gem made its way into my feed a full week after the show, and my first impression was that it was an evolution of the concepts presented in Ninja Theory’s ENSLAVED: Odyssey to the West. After watching the demo I’ve a feeling it’s going to have the “collection career” style of play made popular in Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed and _WATCHDOGS, with a dash of Monster Hunter. It’s the whole robo-dinosaur aesthetic that’s got me the most interested, and if it remains exclusive to PS4 then it could be the one to sell me a second-hand system. (I’d end up buying a new PlayStation 5 in the winter of ‘22 -Ed.)

GAMEDEV

TALES OF FAIL

Sunset is the story of a videogame publishing effort that failed, and did so in such dramatic fashion that the developers packed it in. It’s a cautionary tale, one that needs to be read by anyone thinking of going out in search of indie videogame gold. The hills have been strip-mined in recent years, dear friends, and you’re well-advised to prospect for other types of treasure. A note too about the game industry economy: understanding supply and demand goes beyond an individual product. A warehouse full of widgets (or an infinite amount of digital copies) isn’t worth much if there are a thousand other such competing warehouses, and there are dozens of people opening up new ones every single day. (This has swelled to 50 per day in 2025, with no signs of slowing. –Ed.)

The Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making competition was one of the things that really kickstarted my career as an independent developer, back when kickstarting meant “kicking repeatedly until starting” and not “whipping up hopes and expectations and siphoning money from them”. It came as something of a surprise then when I learned that one of the chief architects of the event, Mike Kasprzak, was leaving gamedev. Though I wholeheartedly object to his assessment of solo development, I understand his decision and would add his anecdotes to any commencement speech for outgoing game development program grads.

My hot take on these comes down to a mantra I’ve been chanting to myself ever since I got into the biz: making videogames is hard. There’s a second verse to that particular song that you rarely hear, and it’s selling videogames is hard. Success in games is a two-stage process, and no matter how much love, energy, and money is thrown into it, there are no guarantees. Unlike, say, a trade degree in infrastructure-related development, where a person could study to become a plumber or an electrician, have great career prospects, and still make potential hit videogames on the side.

I feel that with any artistic endeavor, if it’s truly in our bones then we never really give up. We just do other things until the correct alignment of inspiration, motivation, and dedication come back ‘round again. Old artists never die, they just wait until there’s enough nostalgia to crowdfund their return. Is that a saying? It should be. It’d also be interesting to see how the sales of Sunset have been, post-retirement announcement. Perhaps dramas like these could be worthwhile tail-lengtheners for flagging sales?

(Everything I’ve seen and heard in the last decade has reinforced this stance. –Ed.)

ARKHAM GOODNIGHT

Rocksteady, the developers behind a great series of videogame adaptations of Batman, farmed out the PC port of their latest effort to disastrous results. The elitism and intemperate nature of the PC gamer is well-known to me, as I’ve been one of them since ‘84, and believe me when I tell you that the attitude is a product of years of being browbeaten by software and hardware issues. We used to have to go to physical stores to buy shrink-wrapped, over-sized boxes containing bundles of floppy discs, then bring those package home and pray that they installed without error. More often than not they didn’t, and I can remember spending days trying to get games to run, fiddling with configuration files and memory management. Back then there were no troubleshooting online forums to check, because online hadn’t been invented yet. If you couldn’t get the game you’d spent 40 to 60 dollars on to work, you were stuck with a stack of coasters. And that had been the case for a very, very long time.

In June, online digital distributing powerhouse Steam sparked something of a revolution by instating a refund policy. While the long-term ramifications of this remain to be seen, and the short-term ones are starting all kinds of fires, it looks like one positive benefit has been the swift response by publishers to express something hitherto unheard of: corporate responsibility. For too long, too many big-name (and even a lot of small-name) developers have gotten away with tricking us into buying substandard product. I expect this “Arkham Knight incident” to be the first of many cases that start pushing toward a higher standard of release, more visible displays of corporate responsibility from the big hitters, and this can only be a positive thing for us weary gamers.

Patrick Klepek over at Kotaku has taken the time to offer more insight into this situation and others like it, and the article he’s crafted is worth checking out.

INTERNET CULTURE

ALL THE DISLIKES IN THE WORLD

I’m posting this one because it’s a concise summary of a subject that’s been building to a boil for some time. I’m from the school of thought that a person’s behavior online reflects who they are in real life. I know that many disagree with this idea, though most of those who do seem to have horrible online persona. It’s also shocking that there’s no legal recourse for victims of online abuse. Whether or not a person believes that this type of harassment is real, it would be great to be able to prosecute it, prove it, and set precedent to protect people in the future.

TELEVISION

SENSE8

What do you get when you throw Netflix-level production money at the Wachowski Starship and J. Michael Straczynski? Some of the most lavish, well-written television around. The trailer and creator names trick you into thinking it’s going be a science fiction-ish romp, when in fact its a clever story about the shared experience of being human, the sexual hangups we all have, and the struggle of cultural identity in a globalized world. It’s also something of a pot-boiler, one that builds to a thundering crescendo by the season finale. If you have Netflix there’s no reason not to give the first 3 episodes a chance, just bear in mind that this is far more of a human drama than it is straight (pun very much intended) science fiction.

TRUE DETECTIVE II

The first season of True Detective is a triumph of cinematography, writing, and character development, providing you’re into metaphysical murder mysteries. The second is tangential, building out the world the characters of the first live in with a new cast and location. The first episode didn’t grip me in the way that the original did, but it retained enough of the texture and mystery to compel further watching. The second one took me by the throat and fired up the old anticipation engine. The third cranked that all up to 11. Recommended watching.

NETFLIX

Due to the shifting nature and regional restrictions of the Netflix catalog these recommendations may not be available on the service, but are worth seeking out if the descriptions grab you.

THE CROUPIER

A random pick one hot June evening turned into an engaging romp through the world of a writer turned to dealing cards in order to make ends meet. I didn’t even know the premise when I started watching it, I just wanted to watch Clive Owen act. Did not disappoint.

HISTORY OF THE EAGLES

Saw this pop up in the recommended queue and started it for kicks. Kinda freaked out when I saw the running time of 3 hours, and then it was 3 hours later and I was inspired as all heck. Something of a must-see for creatives of all stripes.

BETTIE PAGE REVEALS ALL

Another documentary that tells a concise and often shocking tale of a cultural icon who didn’t know she was one. Narrated by the titular pin-up queen herself, this is a fascinating look at American culture and sexual history.

Comment threads on Star Citizen articles summarize the present state of the videogame industry.

2015-07-11 10:30 PM

So many folks out there who want to be celebrated, ain’t but precious few doin’ shit worth talkin’ about.

2015-07-17 22:40

1983? I must’ve been eight, maybe nine or ten. Grade three, or four, elementary school library, when I came across this big ol’ book of spaceships. I’m not gonna risk insulting any living or dead artists by trying to name them as ones whose work adorned those musty, public school- beaten pages (because sci-fi is a stigma, dear, and one that you must own completely and wholeheartedly or not at all, and disassociation opens up more doors than not), but I will say that whoever’s work it was blew my mind, in only ways that such things can. The literal blowing of a young person’s mind is a special thing indeed, for it’s an event that plants seeds that instantly germinate and flourish into bizarre growths that even that loamy bedrock has trouble describing. Oh, the heights to which those marvelous glimpses into impossible futures took me! If you only knew! And therein lies the tragedy of all of that, how no matter how hard I try, through word or pixel or scratch of the pencil, I will never be able to translate the visions from the orchard that sprung up from those days, and the tragic want I have to do so is what feeds this ongoing depression of the creative mind. But still I try, still I maintain.

2015-07-18 16:29

“Yeah?“

“Sure, yeah. I think there are just as many confused, awkward, and lonely people out there now as there ever was, just that more of them have louder voices than they did before.”

“Isn’t it ironic?”

“What’s ironic?”

“That these supposedly introverted and shy people are reaching such a wide audience?”

“That’s not irony at all, because I never said they were shy or introverted. Besides, introversion is a myth, but I’m too tired to go into it. No, it’s not ironic because all these people are doing is communicating on a wider scale. They might speak a language that you, personally, don’t understand, and that’s fine. It makes your reaction to their message all the more logical. It’s just that you’re noticing now the greater amplitude of their broadcasting because it’s starting to infringe on the mainstream, on the popular culture. That’s all.”

2015-07-20 10:35 PM

“You know how I know there’s no God, and if there is He hates me?”

“How?”

“Because sometimes when I go to take a piss it comes out sideways, completely missing the bowl. Absolutely matters not one bit how straight I think I’m aiming. It’s a big mess. What kind of God would allow that to happen unless for His own cruel amusement?“

2015-07-22 11:17 AM

The warm wet air comes in and it saturates everything. I think that there’s still droplets of the Japanese summer lodged in my sinuses, and they’re sitting there to remind me of the long hot days, under truly oppressive grey skies, listening to the cicada chirp and little else.

It sounds a bit awful, doesn’t it? For me, back then, it was the atmosphere of adventure. It wrapped my myopic world in a hot, damp blanket that defined the unknown, a real fog that I had to navigate to find my way across the harsh and unforgiving alien landscape that was Japan.

I would go back to those early days in an instant, just to lie on the green tatami mats that floored that first tiny apartment we lived in in Yono-shi. To remember those days of having zero opportunities, no prospects for the future, and wear the cowl of abject poverty and the mantle of gaijin, auslander, foreigner. I believe it was the last and only time in my life that I ever felt true mastery over my domain, and that reduction to being a nothing person was so absolute it was pure liberation.

July 23, 2015

MONTH 58 REPORT

HOT, BUT JUST WRITE

It’s been a wild summer. The interior of my home province, British Columbia, was burning. Parts of the island that I live on were also afire, and the combination of the two filled the air with smoke and ashes for weeks. The sunrises and sunsets were spectacular; hell, the midday sun was Lovecraftian in its blazing, hazy glory.

The city had made the decision to upgrade the infrastructure surrounding the studio. This involved a lot of trucks, jackhammers, and people shouting for weeks on end, and it made work all but impossible. Coupled with the blazing heat and dank air, the environment was not conducive to creative work of any kind, so none got done.

The roadwork finished, the fires burned out, and the temperatures fell to a reasonable enough level that things could start happening again, and so I decided to prepare my previously-published work for re-publication.

While I’ve continued to write on a regular basis, even publicly posting a year’s worth of daily practice to the Internet, I haven’t finished any long-form writing since first releasing Ambia back in the summer of ‘13. The time and skill development since then has made those earlier books almost embarrassing in their amateur execution. Not only that, but there were a ton of inconsistencies and continuity errors in all three books that I’ve only now been able to spot and correct with the help of Nevigo’s articy: draft.

There’s a huge danger of over-revision, though. I think that writing is a lot like sculpture, only instead of starting with a block of material the writer has to produce that initial blank from nothing. That’s the first draft, the formation of the rough stone that will later become a masterpiece or disaster under the hammer and chisel of revision and rewriting. It’s understanding what needs to be removed from that chunk of dross that makes editing both exciting and terrifying. I think it’s important to recognize what works and what doesn’t, and doing the best possible job to improve or remove those rough spots. I don’t think that I really did that when I first rushed to publish, but I’m confident and very happy with how the current editions are shaping up.

The big push now is to finalize the books and re-open the Dark Acre storefront, and with a bunch of hard work that should happen very soon. I’ve managed to re-contract Jiří Horáček, the artist responsible for the beautiful covers of the Solarus Cycle, and he’s graciously agreed to do a new cover for the short story Parlow’s Choice. I’ll be offering the books exclusively from this site, in single DRM-free packages containing .pdf, .epub, and .mobi versions. Any customers on record from the old storefront will receive these updated offerings free of charge. I’m very excited to bring these updated editions to you.

That’s it for this month, and expect some interim posts before the next report as the books go on sale. I hope that if you’re a fan of science fiction, or if you know someone who is, that you’ll help support me by picking up some copies and spreading them around.

DAJ

The method of the making matters not; the perception of the results is everything.

2015-07-27 7:00 AM

There was this vast expanse of open field near where we used to live. It had gone fallow, and when I was old enough to wonder about such things I got curious about who owned it. It wasn’t a public park; there were no paths or benches or anything. If you were to wade out into the waist high—for a ten-year-old—grass you’d come out with ticks and spiders and snakes biting at your heels. There was a raised concrete path that ran to one side of this empty plain, and a straight stretch of river on the other side of that. I rode that path every weekday and some weekends for years, as it was the most convenient way to get into town. At some point, someone had gone out into the middle of that field and erected a concrete monolith. It was a tapering obelisk about a storey tall, featureless and made of that kind of concrete that’s got obvious pebbles in it. I asked my father what it meant, and he told me it was an ownership marker, that someone had bought the tract of land.

I wondered what they’d build there.

My city had a big problem with poverty. There were homeless people everywhere, and over time we got used to ignoring them. It wasn’t that we dehumanized them, it’s just that there were only so many times you could refuse to help before you plunged into depression. Tt was a self-defence mechanism to put those poor people out of mind. At least, that’s what I tell myself now to feel better about how I treated them. What could I do, though? I was only slightly better off myself, with a roof over my head and a job that paid pennies. My point about these underprivileged folk was that there was the huge field next to the river that someone had bought that was now awaiting development, and I wondered if that maybe whoever owned it would build some housing for the homeless.

That monolith stood in the field, and the field remained empty, for all of my young life. I left home when I was twenty-three, a bit old by some standards, but I’d had a run in with drugs and it took that long to get my life together enough to stand on my own. In all of that time nothing happened in the field near my home, unless you call the weathering of the stone marker “something happening“. It got capped in a white layer of guano, and green moss crept up from the bottom until it looked like a narrow spire of a snow-capped, tree-ringed, stone mountain. When I visited again in my late 30’s they’d built a tall row of condominiums there by the river. The cheapest units started at 250K.

2015-07-27 7:28 AM

In order to live, you must first learn how to die.

2015-07-27 7:37 AM

“And we saw on the horizon a bloody sunrise, redder than any in living memory, and we knew that the East was afire, and we trembled to behold that ashen aftermath.”

2015-07-30 7:51 PM

Today I had a date with a young woman (24) who told me that she’d decided to have her wedding ceremony in Mexico, only she hadn’t yet found a suitable groom.

They say that 33% of the women in the city where I live are single. I don’t know who they are, probably whoever collected the data, but now when I’m out walking and I see a woman on her own I wonder: one in three? I asked one of my neighbors what she thought of that particular statistic.

“With the quality of men today, I’m not surprised. All they want to do is fuck and move on.”

I would assume that, all things being equal, there are just as many closeted female homosexual or asexual people out there as there are male. If binary sexual congress is the least important thing in a relationship, wouldn’t a civil partnership with someone you love make sense? It would sure beat living alone.

It’s a shame that society and our upbringings have ruined love for so many of us.

2015-07-31 3:10 PM

She spend the better part of the afternoon typing up a several-thousand word “think piece” that contained all of her collected opinions on why she acted a certain way. Satisfied that it was airtight and expressed her views with such perfection that it could be carved into stone and immortalized as a deathless belief, she posted it to her social networks and awaited validation.

Meanwhile, her computer gave her brain cancer.

2015.07.06 – 2015.07.31

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