POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS #21: ULTIMA: EXODUS (NES VERSION) (1989)

 

This is another one

where you wander all over the land

getting killed 

not being able to afford resurrection 

you probably don't have the instruction manual or the official hint book 

you get to a point where you start fighting smart 

grinding it out close to the save point

if you're 8-bit authentic

or working those save states

if you're contemporary 

you start socking away those golds

buy horses for your crew,

so now you can get around quicker 

and you did manage to get a seaworthy vessel

you're excited to escape the continent 

but the sailing's just too realistic

you feel like you're constantly fighting the wind

you seek the land, all over again 

but then you were surrounded by pirates

before you could dock 

and it went poorly for your people 

killed to the last hero 

back to the character creation menu

I suppose I could've stuck with the save

but I wanted a fresh crew

a fresh reality

you can do that right-quick in these sorts of role-playing games,

y'know,

delete the old family

roll up a new one

if only something something real life something something 

. . .so I download a PDF of the hint book, and I discover that the first sixteen pages are a beautiful sorta watercolor looking comic book summary of the 'story so far' in the Ultima Franchise, featuring vivid depictions of a messiah wandering between dimensions via mysterious woods and gatherings of stalwart heroes and onslaughts of slobbering beasts and swirling undead miasma hordes and tyrannical villains Mondain and Minax wielding terrifying sorcery and I just wanted it to go on and on-

-but it doesn't. 

The rest is a perfectly functional, if incomplete, guide to the equipment the weapons the classes the differences between the Magic Power system and the Will Power system-like just have one magic system, okay? This is an NES cartridge. Don't overtax shit, all right?

Let me quote

what ended up being

the most consequential line

for me 

from the Hint Book: 

"Four great adventurers challenging Exodus by order of Lord British. What is Exodus? Is it human? Is it a monster? In order to prevail, the adventurers must solve many mysteries and increase their own natural abilities." 

Oh. 

That's what I'm about.

Okay.

I thought that EXODUS was an event,

but in this game it's an entity,

a . . . final boss, even?

Well, now.

The hint book is just a stripped down walk-through with no story content beyond the comic book 'Previously on Ultima' opener. I gather from its pages that I should talk to priests, talk to prisoners, learn to bribe, learn to pray, and visit holy sites suffused with mystical power in order to learn how to pray and/or bribe . . . or do I learn how to bribe by bullshitting my way past the jailhouse guards? I might've got some of that confused. 

Oh, yeah! You can also bet on games of Rock-Paper-Scissors! That's what passes for gambling in the mystical realm of Sosaria. (Now I want Paul Schrader to write and direct a gritty film about an isolated loner who develops a perfect system for winning just enough at Rock-Paper-Scissors so as to contain a mysterious trauma from the past, but not so much winning as to get hustled out the door by the pit bosses. Call it . . . The Finger Counter.)

This is one of those games where important items of mystical potency have been brought into being that can vanquish Ultimate Evil . . . except they've been scattered all throughout the land, and, on top of that, people's awareness of them seems spotty, like different people have been told different things about what's actually going on . . . even though the method of vanquishing Ultimate Evil is relatively straightforward and procedural to the point where it would've had to have been a protocol established by a group of engineers-

Look, Exodus is an evil computer. That's the twist. Okay. Even though this is a sword and sorcery reality, it's a computer running the show. In order to shut it down, you gotta collect punch cards to insert into the four terminals that comprise Exodus, and these punch cards crash the system-so to speak-and all is well in the land. 

I guess this could be a 'breaking out of the program' moment like in The Matrix, or a 'fictional character busts loose of the fiction' like in those Grant Morrison scripted Animal Man comics. Ultima:Exodus got there a bit earlier, in any event.

I was going to criticize the usual video game absurdity of having the punch cards scattered all throughout the land. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the punch cards all in one place? Or, um, you encounter an engineer who worked on the Exodus project at one point? They've still got a bunch of junk in their garage from when they hired on with Mondain and Minax? 

But maybe it makes more sense that the punch cards are scattered all to hell. 

Video game companies are notorious for discarding source code. They grind out a product, ship it, clear the deck for the next cycle. Maybe Mondain and Minax were similarly sloppy once they finished Exodus. Mondain and Minax were the villains of previous Ultima games, and presumably they built Exodus as a way to carry forward their legacy of evil in a rationalized, fully automated form. This suggests that they concealed the punch cards to maintain control over Exodus . . . but maybe they just got lost in the shuffle. 

Or maybe Mondain and Minax lost interest in their pricy mechanical boondoggle once it was all designed and done and, in the end, disappointing. 

Perhaps, Mondain and Minax saw their own obsolescence wthin the machinery of Exodus, and therefore scorned it, even as they let it operate, a pitiless doomsday cheat in the event of their deaths at the hands of party-pooping heroes. Sorcerers make mistakes, lose battles, are all-too-human . . . but an evil machine just keeps on grindin'n'cyclin'-

-until it, too, gets trashed by heroes.

The ending is worth reheating.

I think it is.

In the NES version, the Exodus terminals are called 'altars' . . . oh, so these psuedo-mediavalist Advanced Dungeons and Dragons types-your player characters-don't grok computers but apprehend them as sites of religious offerings, a way to interface the divine or the diabolical or what have you,

I think that’s an amusing detail.

You input the punch cards in just the right sequence,

and the altars sink into the ground,

an ankh appears, which you must collect so it can be all significant in the sequel Ultima: Quest of the Avatar,

the castle housing Exodus shakes and shudders as it collapses all around you,

pulling a total Dracula’s Castle Routine,

now's the time for a horseback escape by the skin of your teeth,

ABRUPT-ASS CREDIT ROLL.

If you played the game with no reference to external sources, you might very well be perplexed. 

If you played the game with reference to external sources, you might very well be perplexed.

If you are unfamiliar with Ultima:Quest of the Avatar-

If you don't know what an ankh is-

An ankh is that cross looking thingy with a sorta oval teardrop shape at the top. If you were a goth kid in the 1990s, you probably read the Neil Gaiman scripted The Sandman comics, and you probably remember that Death was personified as a goth girl who wore an ankh necklace. 

See . . . it's ironic . . . because an ankh is popularly understood as an ancient Egyptian symbol . . . for life . . . and Neil Gaiman has Death wearing it . . . that shit is so fucking deep I want to start screaming!!!

Look. Gaiman's got millions in the bank. Who am I to criticize his touching simplicity? Alleged grown-ups-if they are reading anything-are mostly fucking with Harry Potter and a bewildering array of creepy BDSM wealth porn fairy tales . . . 

Gaiman's not so bad, I guess . . .

Hey, I wasn't even a goth kid in the 1990s, so what do I know. 

I did read a lot of Doom 2099 and Hellblazer . . .

. . . okay, so . . .

. . . you destroy the evil computer Exodus 

. . . you get a symbol of life, the ankh

. . . and the ankh goes on to become your symbol as an avatar of virtue in the next game . . .

Shutting down the program of evil was just the beginning. 

Now you must make your way in the world, cultivating your righteousness by dealing with people and situations as they cross your path. There is no more mechanization of evil. No more centralized villain or villainy.

Just a lot of perplexing shit.

You're never quite sure if you're right or wrong.

People stop wanting to join your party.

You've given some offense.

It remains obscure.

And you never quite got to the end of it,

even with the online walk-through, 

and you think back to the conclusion of Ultima: Exodus, 

"Fuck. That was the True Ending. I broke the program, and I shoulda just kept on riding outta the cartridge, away from the incomprehensible intrigues of Sosaria, and into the Perplexing Meaty Now. My confusion remains, but I am always moving forward, even if it is just Pitiless Time hustling me ever closer to the grave. I can vary up the scenery. I'm already better off beyond the clutches of Exodus . . ."

. . . and then along came COVID-19 . . .

"Fuck this shit, I'm getting back in that cartridge! Get the fuck outta my way-!"

ABRUPT-ASS CREDIT ROLL.

-November 2021-January 2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS #20: WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD/OVERLOAD (NES VERSION) (1990)

stalking dark corridors

the treasure can't be trusted

if it's not booby trapped

it's a monster in disguise

our greed turned against us

gotta go slow

embrace the methodical

speed kills 

ten floors deep

wireframe and theatrical flat suggestions

of blando corridors 

you'd think the domains of some maniacal wizard would be more flamboyant 

but this monotony could all be to a purpose:

drive the enemy out with confusion and tedium 

leave theatrical evil to Count Dracula and his aristocratic indulgences 

Werdna's austerities of form and place have their own anti-distinctive protective mojo 

leave the seductions and the spectacles to the pretentious bloodsuckers of this world 

maybe this is Werdna's Way

of evoking a monstered community

ravaged'n'hollowed out

by capital-as-per-usual

fuck the hero quest

this is some kind of an eviction, 

ain't it?

play it with a homebrew OST

of sounds of demolition 

chatter of trash-out crews

heroic dungeoneering no more

now the party's doing a slow motion tear down

of some unwanted, unauthorized Labyrinth

that the state has turned a blind eye to

for far too long

no doubt the Mad Overlord's gonna turn it all into a shopping mall combined with underground Apocalypse shelters for all his oligarchic friends 

THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF PREMIUM RETAIL SURVIVALIST LIFESTYLE IMMERSION 

brochures come to mind

you

the player character 

ain't even really playing at anything

you roll up a crew 

you're gathering workers 

you

the player

are just some form of

uh

what?

a . . . spooky supervisory consciousness 

that'll do 

minimal interface

strip out the human

rationalized processes of erasures 

the hardcore gamers are like "fuck the story" 

which is good basis

for trash-out supervisory consciousness 

Werdna

or so I hear

got rehoused

inside that blazing bland low-cost development 

Werdna's pension's just enough to cover it

better than getting disappeared by the Mad Overlord's secret police,

I guess,

but His Madness is trying to put on a happier global capitalist face

and Werdna's not making a stink

and he's got Murphy's Ghost to keep him company,

now there's a sad sack spirit,

the Murphy's (Law) Ghost

wandering the blazing blando development 

mutter-composing some endless letter

chronicling his great unrecognized Protagonist-hood 

to some fanbase 

that only exists inside Murphy's spectral skull

well,

least Murphy's still got that hustle

however much of a Godot Routine it might be

Werdna's just staring into television 

drinking beer after beer

likes them microwaveable Santa Fe rice and beans

and the Swedish meatballs are just fine,

too

heard that the Mad Overlord's in talks with Count Dracula to do something special with the newly renovated underground 

say,

player,

they're gonna need you 

to crew-the-fuck-up 

put on some security theatre for the influx of oligarchs and fugitive war criminals 

looking to occupy

some newly valuable space

pays well

or so I hear

-June-December 2021  

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: RETRO CITY RAMPAGE (2012)

Developed and published by Vblank Entertainment

Designed by Brian Provinciano
Music composed by Leonard J. Paul, Jake Kaufman, and Matthew Creamer

...

"Just like in real life, food and drinks heal bullet wounds."
-from the Retro City Rampage instruction manual

"Law is sublimated violence."
-Alvin Toffler, Power Shift

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A man with a lot of guns stalks the city. He steals cars. He takes life at will. He is burning to transform himself into a Hi-Score Street Warrior. Time travel is on the table. Stuffed suits in corporate boardrooms think they're masters of the universe, but our hero knows that violence, not globally scaled economic flim-flammery, is the true engine of power. He'll blast his way through the fabric of space and time, if necessary, rising through the criminal ranks, zooming up the underworld leader board-

Oh, but now he's had a setback. Our man had a hot streak of paradigm-shattering novelty slaughters racking up bodies civilian, police, military, ninja, cyborg, but he got cocky. He got killed. He had to start back at the heart of the city, with less cash in his pocket, and a reduced armory. Ain't that a bitch? Now he's got to do that fetch quest all over again. Time for a break. Time to hop over into the free-roaming dimension to work out some aggression, come back to that onerous fetch quest later. Or maybe he'll just hijack a bus, drive on the sidewalks, see how many kills he can chain together to unlock another achievement, maybe a new hairstyle, or a butterfly tattoo for his left pectoral, or a Yugo with mounted machine guns, or a mullet hair-do that doubles as a sapient AI street warfare consultant . . .

What new horror is this? A sub-par attempt at dystopian sci-fi perhaps hoping to pass itself off as a lost story by J.G. Ballard?

Is it the new Grand Theft Auto game? Close. It's a description of the game that has finally made good on the premise and the promise of GTA . . . Retro City Rampage. 

(Well, it's mostly a description of Retro City Rampage. I couldn't help but throw some of my cracked-out fan fiction daydreams, fantasies, and idle musings into the mix . . .)

Here's a video game with ambition. It wants to function as both a kind of imaginary artifact of a time that never quite existed, and, at the same time and in equal measure, it wants to out-GTA GTA.

Retro City Rampage is a work of alternate history speculative fiction in the guise of a Grand Theft Auto-style open world shoot-em-up action game. It takes the distinctive elements of GTA-ultraviolence; narco-business; driving way above the posted speed limit; mass murder of cops, bystanders, and criminal competitors; and, yes, stealing automobiles-and poses this science fictional scenario: what if someone had made GTA for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System?

Think about it. The elements were all there. The NES had violent shoot-em-up games like Contra, Super C, Ikari Warriors, The Punisher, and NARC. The NES had open world RPGs with battery backup game saving function like The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. And the NES had oddball games like Dick Tracy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? both of which mixed driving and exploration with shoot-em-up missions and fetch quests.

Ultraviolence perpetrated with high-end full auto assault weapons . . . open worlds with complex quests(and in the case of Ultima IV statistically tracked moral complexities) . . . exploration . . . fetch quests . . . driving around looking for stuff . . . God's eye top-down perspective action much like the very first Grand Theft Auto  and also like in Ikari Warriors, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Dick Tracy, many others . . .  NARC and The Punisher were specifically concerned with organized criminal narco-business gangs, and both were surprisingly violent games to make it past then-puritanical Nintendo of America's censorship standards . . . you can't have any sex or politics in video games, but you can have authoritarian men with guns shoot street dealers in the face with high-explosive ammunition-nothing political about that . . . the basics, more or less, of a GTA-style game were all there, but spread out among disparate titles created by various companies.

If only someone with a synergistic vision, and an anti-authoritarian philosophy, had strode over the horizon--the advent of the Era of Open World Socially Irresponsible Action Console Gaming would've come much sooner. If this had been the case, what would be the vogue now, in 2013? The mind-it does boggle.

Retro City Rampage is the game that might have been made for the NES if that person of vision had manifested within the depths of the bygone 8-bit era of console gaming. I'm not so much talking about the actual story content you experience as you play the game. The game itself is presented as though it were such a creation from such an era. The graphics-character sprites, dialogue portraits, world/level design, vehicles-are studiously 8-bit. The music is glorious 8-bit chiptune, as are the sound effects. The dialogue and text within cut-scenes are intentionally written in a clunky, grammatically erroneous style suggesting a rushed,  in-house localization into English from a Japanese language original. Difficulty level is moderate spiked with a few truly frustrating missions, but you're given infinite lives and a "battery backup" to save your game. The controls work, but they are often a source of frustration when the action gets fast and frantic. You will die many times. You will come back, again and again, like some mythic hero across many lives. But will you win? Are you a bad enough dude to defeat Dr. Buttnick and rescue the flux combobulator from the Evil Good Guys?

That's what the overall impression of this video game is when viewed as a kind of imaginary artifact from an alternate dimension of reality. And, no, the good ol' NES probably wouldn't have had the power to actually handle Retro City Rampage. Remember, I'm talking about a piece of speculative-alternate-history-fiction-embodied-as-video-gaming-artifact here. RCR fudges the actual hardware capabilities in favor of a working gaming experience, but the 8-bit atmosphere-the set design, music, overall tone if you will-are spot-on. It's an enticing illusion of an 8-bit game that never was, never could've been, but we all wish could have been.

The actual gameplay and story content are more nakedly absurd. Retro City Rampage's story is a mish-mash of spoofs of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ghostbusters, The Dark Knight, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Back to the Future, Robocop, Bionic Commando, Double Dragon, Metal Gear, Mega Man II, Smash TV, and many others. It's a Wendy's salad bar of goofs on video games, fast food, music, and movies from numerous eras woven into a frantic orgy of action that would work just as well as an Adult Swim cartoon (get those guys who made the Superjail cartoon to do it!) There are also satirical jabs at corporate malfeasance, death by fast food, pathological consumerism, the hypocrisy of moral guardians who want to blame video games for societal decay and violent crime, and good old fashioned All American worship of power and force. It all moves at a whipcrack pace, stringing together different parodies and homages and conflicting pop culture realities into a jittery, propulsive, sometimes frustrating, but often engrossing action gaming experience.

Game play is top-down, God's eye view POV action and larceny after the manner of the very first Grand Theft Auto game. You have to complete quests which are often timed and revolve around specific victory conditions. In-between quests you are more or less free to explore at your leisure. Legion achievements, many of them humorously useless, are unlockable in the course of finishing missions and achieving exotic styles of mass slaughter and destruction. It is this unapologetic emphasis on monstrous behavior which makes RCR more fun than the more serious minded GTA.

Did I mention that Retro City Rampage out-GTAs GTA? It does. Here's how: the free roaming mode. Basically, you can just run wild with unlimited money and ammunition and see how many tanks you can get chasing you once you've trounced the conventional police forces. Playing in this arena is totally at the player's discretion. It gives you a true feeling of out of control lawlessness and maniacal mayhem with zero pretensions to relevance, social commentary, or attempts at superficial insights into crime and criminals. Retro City Rampage unmasks the secret fantasy at the heart of those Grand Theft Auto games: to play an ultraviolent video game where you can use unlimited force, backed by unlimited resources, all to no good end. Even in the regular game where you have to complete missions and manage money and ammo the plot and story are totally amoral to such a cartoonish and satirical degree that I began to think back to that one time I tried to actually play through GTAIV seriously and found myself laughing at the faux-grittiness and inauthentic "hard-boiled" dialogue. I even had an acquaintance of mine try to convince me that the GTA games were "basically, like, The Wire of video games." Uh-huh. Retro City Rampage is as much a jab at  lazily written, over-hyped games striving for relevance as much as it is a chance to go totally berserk.

Even the story mode, which is, as already noted, an Adult Swim-ready mish-mash of lunacies, engaged me more than any of the story I've sampled from occasional and, frankly, half-hearted engagements with any of the GTA titles. Bottom line: GTA bored and frustrated me with high difficulty, cliched characters and plots, whereas RCR addicted me from the title screen and made me laugh out loud.

RCR also has some intriguing surprises up its sleeve. I don't want to give anything away, but I'll share this wad of thoughts I had as I played through one of the final missions: This is kind of pissing me off. It's also kind of great. All along, I thought I was free to do what I wanted. But I was just on a track. Like every other game, really. Even the most sophisticated sandbox-style games . . . you're still ensnared in the logic of the game. You're still bound to choose from the range of options the game designers have built into the game. I mean, I can't just go up to a shopkeeper in Fallout 3 and ask to buy his right eyeball. Or walk up to Liquid Snake and say, "Hey, bro, I forgive you. There's no need for us to punch each other out on top of this flying battleship or whatever the hell this thing is. Why don't we just hang it up for today, scoot on over to the nearest Starbucks, get a couple of mocha frappes, and I'll show you some rad footage of rottweilers mating in the noonday sun on my codec."  Freedom in video games is just an illusion. Well, fuck me. 

By the way, I would love to see the Retro City Rampage movie if, if it were directed by Paul Verhoeven.

Just throwing that out there into the ether. Not unlike a prayer, really.