Between a Doc and a High Place

Lest you start thinking that I only intend to use this blog for posting video game reviews and lots of nothing, I thought I'd share a fun and unexpected adventure I had today. Actually, two such adventures.

Aside #1: The necessary backstory for you to understand why today was awesome is this: it has been raining in Klamath Falls for about 8-9 straight days. That is not hyperbole. Or, at least, it's very slight hyperbole. It stopped raining briefly a few times. But, for the most part, it rained for a week and a half nonstop. This is weather that I might expect from a place like Ohio (where this happened a few times, at least, in my memory) or Portland (where it apparently happens at least once a month according to friends who live there). But in Klamath Falls, in a desert climate, and specifically in a place that claims to have 300 days of sunshine a year (a claim I believed until this week)...last night Lindsey and I were out running on a level street and there were puddles of water that went up above my ankles when I stepped in them.

So, anyway, I went to bed last night with no plans to get up and do anything outdoors today. I slept in later than I've slept in in a long time, because most of my weekends here involve willingly waking up at 7am so I can get an early start on whatever wilderness/hiking/climbing pursuit I have planned. Today, all I had planned was sitting by the window, mournfully watching the rain pummel passers-by into mush-piles.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up instead to find fingers of sunlight streaming in between the blind-slats and a mostly clear, blue sky doing its best non-SAD impression.

Having already lost a few morning hours to sleep, I slammed a remarkably heavy breakfast down my gullet, threw the dog in the back of the truck (okay, not literally threw) and tore off toward Moore Park.

Aside #2: I'm going to include an aside here that condenses a lot of my life lately into a paragraph for the sake of making this post make more sense. I think in the past a lot of why I've had a hard time getting back into blogging has been because back when I first started blogging, I blogged about everything because I didn't really have any other hobbies or friends. I still have that inclination, but I blog way less often now. Which means when I load this page up and start typing, I always have to wrestle with the urge to spend a weekend hammering out detailed posts on everything that's happened to me in the last three months and how I fucking feel about it SO THAT THE BLOG WILL KNOW. Basically, if I indulged that urge, I'd never actually write anything. In fact, that urge is the main reason why I haven't been writing anything lately. Hence, Aside #3...

Aside #3: I have a dog now. His name is Doctor, and he is a blue heeler. He is pretty awesome, and we are training him to hopefully be a running dog and a hiking dog. He is currently five months old and very small, so he is not good at these things yet. But he sure as hell likes to try being good at them.

Doctor, either lolling his tongue or vomiting a roll of Bubble Tape.

Doctor gets a walk every day, or else he turns into a raging lunatic as a matter of course. So, seeking to kill two birds with one stone, I took him out to Moore Park, which is basically Klamath Falls's version of Kamiak Butte, if Kamiak Butte had an ass you could inject tons of steroids and growth hormones into and then watch it get awesomer.

Doctor and I didn't climb Moore Mountain together, though, because a) all of the trails up it are unpaved and were still a morass of mud from the rain-week and b) as a heeler, Doctor still has an inborn tendency to nip at my heels if he senses that I don't know where we're walking, and climbing Moore Mountain without a map would lead to many such moments. I have tender ankles.

I think we still had fun, though, as there were stone bridges to be crossed...

 ...and Ponderosa pines to sniff and pee on...

We managed to hike for almost two miles in a loop without leaving the paved trails in the park, and Doctor managed to hike past three people without attacking any of them (he still has a problem with people, and it's unclear whether the problem is just overenthusiasm or actual hatred). About halfway through the walk, he started giving me the over-the-shoulder, tongue-wagging smile, which is the closest thing to an expression of clear happiness that a dog with a bobbed tail is capable of producing.

We managed to get back home by 2pm, which got me thinking that with 4 more hours of daylight and no dog, I could easily actually climb Moore Mountain. I'd climbed it before, with Lindsey, but this go-round would be made interesting by the fact that I had no map to help me navigate the labyrinth of bike-and-hike trails that criss-cross the mountain, only a few combinations of which actually lead to the summit thanks to thick foliage even during winter that makes simply bushwhacking not an option. I left the dog happy with a ball full of food and some water and drove back to the park.

I had a vague memory from the past of using the road to hike to the main "scenic drive" loop and then jumping on to a mountain-biking trail at about 10:00 of a counter-clockwise circle of said loop. From there, it was all eyeballs and intuition. My intuition is bad and one of my eyes was already swollen half-shut from a broken blood vessel that had, it seemed, doubled the size of my eyeball. Oh well.

Things started off well enough as I found what might have been the same trail we'd used last time to approach the ridge leading up to the mountain summit.

 After walking for about fifteen minutes total, I could actually see the mountain summit, which I took to be a good sign.

Then, I took a right turn instead of a left and ended up at a trail that ran straight up the ridge to the west of the summit. From previous experiences hiking this trail, I knew that it didn't actually lead anywhere except out around to the right of the summit and to a beautiful view of Upper Klamath Lake. But I didn't want a fucking view of Upper Fucking Klamath Lake, I wanted to climb Moore Mountain. So I backtracked for about five minutes, took the next trail branch I saw...and ended up at the same ridge trail again.

This went on for awhile, but eventually I systematically eliminated three trails until realizing the fourth one was the correct one. While switchbacking my way up to the ridge on this trail, I almost plowed headfirst into two large female deer. "Plowed" is not an exaggerating either. Moore Park deer are so acclimated to humans that if you're not paying attention you can damn near walk right into one before it moves out of the way. This one hunkered down about twenty feet away and waiting for me to leave.

After playing awkward switchback-hide-and-go-seek with the deer for a few minutes, I started actually gaining altitude. Now, the climb from the parking lot to the summit is only 800 feet, which is about a third the altitude gain between breakfast on a normal climb of mine. But it's the off-season and I was busting ass to finish before the sun went down, so I was already a little beat. Fortunately, the sight of snow on the trail motivated me to get moving again.

Shortly after merging onto the ridge-climbing trail proper, I got my first view of the lake.

Shortly after that, I took another wrong turn and ended up goddamn slogging uphill at a ridiculous angle on a deer path for about 200 vertical feet, in mud that threatened to pull off my boots and through thorns that threatened to pull off my skin. Because I'm a moron who can't tell the difference between a deer trail and a human trail most days. Fortunately, I eventually topped out on this obviously human path with the secondary summit's radio tower in sight.

From there it was a pretty easy romp through more thorn bushes to get to the summit. But this is why route finding is actually very important when it comes to climbing Moore Mountain. Because everything along the north face of the thing that isn't a maintained human trail is fucking thorn bushes.

Pay the blood-toll to the thorn god, mortal!

The view from the top was beautiful, especially when I considered that I'd been expecting to be looking out my window from inside all day long at grey, weeping clouds.

Stukel Mountain in the distance, to the left.

Mount Shasta to the south.

Mountain Lakes wilderness and Upper Klamath Lake over the hill.

 Overall, it was a hell of an afternoon for leg-distancing, and a great excuse to try to encourage myself to start blogging about Life Stuff again. I hope if you read this it did not kill you of boredom.

Review: Dear Esther (PC)

So, I finally got around to playing Dear Esther, a game that I've been asked about a number of times during paper presentations on Minecraft but never actually experienced myself. And it was better than I expected. Of course, saying I "played" it is sort of misleading, as it doesn't really let you "play" anything in any substantive sense of the word. It is, however, a master class in how to create a virtual place, to make a player curious enough about the fictional world in front of them that they'll gladly trade time in the physical world to explore it. That doesn't happen nearly enough with video games, and even when it does, it usually isn't done this well.

When I first started up the game and realized that all you really did was walk around and look at things, and that you had to walk around really slowly, I almost gave up. But, I imagined it much the same way that I think of all the "real-life" walks I go on: typically, whether I'm going on a walk around the neighborhood, or a twenty-mile hike, the first little bit is boring. It's hard to instantly remember why I enjoy the slow-down of just walking, of just soaking in my surroundings, of not trying to "accomplish" anything other than to just be moving through space for awhile. Eventually, I settle in, and walking for the sake of walking seems as natural as breathing. Which it sort of is.

The same thing happened with Dear Esther. After the brief rough patch at the beginning, I began to sense that I wasn't always going to walking through washed-out grasslands, and that I was probably eventually going to get to find out what was at the top of that Barad-Dur-like tower in the distance. I accepted that the "game" wanted me to approach it as a sort of meditative space instead of an accomplishment-powered challenge. And, intrigued, I went for it.

It's like walking in central Idaho, only not real.

I wasn't disappointed. If my description of the "gameplay" in the previous two paragraphs sounds intriguing to you, then Dear Esther is worth your while. If it sounds like a load of horseshit, then you should probably stay away. It's another experiment in (sort of) gaming, and the results were fascinating to me.

Regarding the poetry, voiceovers, etc. that make up the story, I thought that it was great. Sure, it's a little bit of a stretch stylistically, and might seem a little overly serious, but hell, considering the way Dear Esther ends, it's not exactly supposed to be a comedy. I saw the narrative as trying to do some really interesting things with time, perspective, and the perils of having an unreliable narrator as he descends into madness during the story. Seeing as how I was studying Poe while I was playing this game, maybe it was just a happy bit of synchronicity. But I think there are a lot of clever little nuances to this story that you could, if you wanted to, try to interpret, discuss, and find more meaning in. And that's also rare for a video game. Much like Psychonauts, the narrative treats you like an adult. If you're one of those people who find games like this "pretentious," then you should probably steer clear.

If this screenshot makes you incredibly sad, then we are grief-brothers.

But, combine the game's wonderful visual setpieces, consistent sense of place, and dense, psychologically disturbing exploration of grief and illness, and...wow. This thing was really, really good.

Review: Shelter (PC)

So, as I do with most games nowadays, I got Shelter marked down on Steam on the strength of its RPS review. While I didn't quite experience John Walker's level of enthusiasm about the game, I definitely enjoyed it and found it to be more than worth the few bucks I played.

Basically, Shelter is a game in which you play as a mother badger tasked with leading her cubs to safety through the wilderness. The aesthetic is really unique, and manages to successfully bypass that whole "typical indie game quirky art style" trend by sheer force of originality.

This is badgers in the woods. Neat, huh?

The different, fairly obviously differentiated "levels" of the game range from the forest-like space you see above, to a slightly greener forest-type space, to [SPOILERS] the middle of a forest fire, to a flash flood, and a night under a full moon [END SPOILERS]. So, I found the settings to be pretty varied and the aesthetic able to translate to different levels in interesting ways rather than being a one trick pony.

The core of the game, as I said above, is your quest to lead your babies to safety. There is immediately feedback for your failure, as if a baby dies, he/she is dead, and gone, and the suddenness with which this can happen and the odd poignancy of it really surprised me. It's a point for the argument that long exposition isn't really necessary for a player to be able to build emotional attachments to characters. By the time they were carried away by a hungry eagle or washed away in a flood, I cared more about these baby badgers than I did for some characters in Baldur's Gate.

While the game is really effective at creating a feeling of futility and attrition as you march through its deceivingly beautiful locales, it's also a bit annoying in the lack of agency it gives you to protect your young. For being given such an effective mission, there's really little you can actually do to effect its outcome. You can run fast, you can hunker down and walk slow, you can dig up food and leap onto small prey to kill it...and that's about it. The babies just follow you in a chain and there's literally no other way you can interact with them besides moving and hoping that they follow. The threats to your young are clearly built around this limited model of interaction, and the ways you are expected to avoid those threats are thus surprisingly clever in some instances, but ultimately it all boils down to either a) running, b) walking slowly or c) hiding in place.

With such a beautifully realized environment and a survival-style mission, I sort of expected the game to be a bit more open. It's not. It's basically an on-rails survival simulation, which was also a little frustrating to me. When there's a fire to avoid, there's one way around it. When an eagle is hunting you, you find yourself artificially closed in to a small meadow. It heightens the terror, sure, but it also makes everything feel a little more game-y than maybe it could have had it given the player a few more choices.

"If there's a fire, stop, drop, and roll five paces to the left, then up six paces, then right fifteen paces, and then straight through that conveniently hollowed-out log!"

All that said, the experience was short, (bitter)sweet, and absolutely worth the money. In this case, my complaints about the game are more in the category of "I wish it had been this instead!" than the category of "I didn't like what it was!" For what it is, it's quite good. And its approach to emotional storytelling, such as it is, is effective enough that it's worth buying and playing just to appreciate that the devs managed to do so much with so little. But you'll also likely wish that they'd done more.

SHELTER 2: BADGER'S REVENGE

Review: Rogue Legacy (PC)

At this point, I think I've complained ad nauseum about my feelings regarding the use of "roguelike elements" in games where they don't necessarily improve the game or make it more interesting or engaging. Like throwing "RPG elements" like stat points and leveling up into AAA shoot 'em up games in the mistaken belief that somehow it makes the gameplay deeper, lots of indie devs seem obsessed with the idea that procedural generation and/or permadeath just magically make a game more enticing. According to most of the "roguelike-like" games I've played lately, that's just not true.

However, Rogue Legacy does it right. It does it so right, that about two attempts into the game I literally slapped myself on the forehead with exasperation over how obvious Rogue Legacy's approach to the genre is and how nobody (including me) had thought of it earlier.

It goes like this: 

1. Fun, Castlevania-y platforming and fighting
2. The expectation of eventual death
3. The ability to carry your loot out of the castle upon your death
4. The ability to regenerate as another hero with slightly different skills and disadvantages (the next "generation" of your adventurer family, hence the title Rogue Legacy)
5. The ability to spend your saved loot on boosting your skills/weapons/stats before your next playthough
6. The required forfeiture of all (or nearly all, later on in the game) of your loot before you try playing again (you literally pay a toll to Charon to enter the castle

What the hell does he do with all of that money, anyway?

It's bloody brilliant. It captures the essence of what's great about procedural generation (the thrill of learning the layout of a map so that you can survive better and then the challenge of having that advantage wiped away in an instant) and about sudden, frequent death (you're always working your way through the castle a little bit on tenterhooks) while allowing you to have the satisfaction of knowing that every playthrough is going to be worth something. Unless, I guess, you get whacked within seconds of entering the castle and exit with 20 gold pieces. I had playthroughs where I absolutely ripped through two entire zones of the castle and came out ready to buy ten new upgrades for my character, but those were few and far between. Yet, most playthroughs I gathered at least enough gold to buy one upgrade after my sudden and violent death, and that was enough of a sense of moving forward to keep me motivated to keep playing for the occasionally big reward of those longer runs. And that's the beauty of the game. Though you play through the same four dungeon "levels" over and over again, they're always different enough that you're forced to pay attention, and they're always going to give you some sort of reward, provided you don't absolutely biff it. 

In one fell swoop, the game does away with basically all my complaints about the roguelike genre.

But there's more. Each of your character's iterations has some randomly-assigned quirks that seem sort of goofy at first but prove to be important as you get more and more used to the game.* For example, dwarfism seems to just make your character funny-looking and small, but eventually you might realize that [SPOILER] your size allows you to access many secret rooms you couldn't otherwise reach, but that your weapon's attack range is much smaller, forcing you to get closer to enemies to attack [END SPOILER]. Each of your character is also assigned a class randomly, and the pool of available classes expands as you buy more upgrades.

Oh, and most of the in-game text is hilarious.

Each time you die, you get to choose from one of three possible successors. Oftentimes this choice allows you to choose a hero that best suits your needs for the next playthrough, but sometimes this choice gives you three terrible options and forces you to face the castle with whomever you deem the least bad option. This can make for some really interesting playthroughs. For instance, once I got stuck with a Spelunker and assumed his weak ass was going to get splattered all some spike traps by the second room of the castle. I gave it my best shot, though, and about a half hour later I died with an absurd amount of money in my wallet (?). Later on, as you unlock more classes, equipment, and things like the Architect, you can put a lot more forethought into your runs, not just choosing a character with the best abilities for what you want to accomplish, but also outfitting them with the best equipment and abilities. 

I ran into a few small annoyances later on in the game in the sense that at times it seemed like I was expected to grind for gold a bit longer than I would have liked. The castle itself is small enough and the enemies predictable enough that you can run through most of it after playing and upgrading for a few hours. But you have to beat a boss in each of the four interconnected "levels" before you can progress to the endgame, and this you cannot do without some serious leveling up. So there's a point at which the game's greatest strength becomes a sort of weakness as well, as you spend hour after hour running through nearly identical halls, slaying identical monsters for gold and slowly building stats from, say, level 2 to level 15 (out of a possible 75, for the truly masochistic). I managed to beat a few of the bosses on a lower level than I apparently should have been able to, just due to still having old-school Contra reflexes, and it was nice in a way to occasionally overcome the grind through what felt like sheer playing skill, but then there was one boss in particular that I had to spend 2-3 hours leveling before I could defeat it, so there's going to be a bit of grinding mid-game regardless of how good you are. 

It was him. This motherfucker.

And it's a little annoying once you realize that many of the rooms and traps are identical and the enemies in the harder levels are just bigger, stronger, faster versions of the enemies in the early levels. One of the early thrills in the game was learning enemy types, their patterns, and their weaknesses, so this bummed me out a little.

This wizard is just like the others, but the sprite it bigger and it's more killy!

That said, Rogue Legacy was awesome, and if I didn't have so many games in my queue right now, I'd be going back for New Game+ right away. The platforming and fighting itself feels almost perfect (moving horizontally always feels a little slidey to me for some reason), and so even when you're grinding at length the basic gameplay always stays fun in that repetitive-mindless-but-good way. And strategizing your character's build in the later game really adds a surprisingly deep layer of planning that I didn't expect from the game at first. Good times! 

The end!

* This isn't true of all the traits; for example, the one that makes you constantly fart loudly really has no point aside from FARTS which are FUNNY.

(Cold) Walking

I had to get up extra early this morning to get to work before a breakfast with the Provost that started at 7am. Since September, I've been riding my bike to work, but this has been getting harder and harder because of the weather. Leaving the house today at 630 instead of my usual 800, coupled with the fact that it was three degrees outside made the decision to walk instead of riding justifiable.

Living in the Pacific Northwest for almost nine years now, one of the things I've come to really love is the dry, clear cold that accompanies most winter days. Unlike back in the Midwest, where winter involves a cloudy, grey sky and general soddenness 80% of the time, here the desert climate keeps the sky clear the majority of the time and gives you a strikingly crystalline view of the stars at night if you're anywhere that's not a Walmart parking lot.

So despite my initial griping about not being able to get a ride to work with Lindsey, I was actually really excited about freezing my ass off on a walk when I realized it was going to still be dark outside while I was walking. Our neighborhood couldn't be described as "busy" at the busiest of times, let alone at 625 in the morning, and though the sun hadn't yet risen up from behind the hills to the east, it was high enough that the newly snow-encrusted mountains to the west and across the lake were barely visible, while the stars were still out in a sky just a little more blue than black.

Though I'm typically loathe to get up this early on purpose, the half hour or so before sunrise is one of my favorite times of day, especially in the winter. Where, on good days at least, sunset often instills me with a sense of "job well done" at the end of the day (whether that job be my actual job, or just hiking or watching TV), sunrise makes me feel like I'm getting to see the world before anything's really started. It's sort of like the time I was on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride as a kid and the ride broke down, and we had to exit by going back behind the scenery and through the employees' area. In terms of the coming day, nothing's happened yet, but nothing can happen yet. It's a weird sort of liminal space, made more so by the cold: nobody wants to be out in the world because there's nothing to do yet, and it's cold, but the world's still there. In 30 minutes or so it'll be business as usual. But not yet.

Usually, I leave for work about 90 minutes later, and when I do, the day's already in full swing. But not today. Not yet.