Elf Sternberg

Fanfic, even authorized fanfic, can be a risky venture. I've often made that point myself as a writer of fanfic, and as a reader. Making a fanfic video game out of a beloved work from a deeply respected genre master is especially treacherous. And yet, The Invincible somehow manages to both be completely faithful to Stanislaw Lem's original novel, The Invincible, yet extend it brilliantly.

I played the video game first, so let's start with this: I knew nothing about this particular book when I played the game. Like most SF readers, my encounter with Lem consisted of being forced to read Solaris in high school, which I found terribly dreary and uninformative. Lem's writing style is very much an older, more telling style, a narrative mostly of descriptions of people doing things; dialogue is reserved for brief color and long expositions. Not a style conducive to video gaming.

The Invincible: the video game

The game focuses on the character of Yasna, a member of a small exploratory vessel from "The Commonwealth," as she wakes up in the desert of Regis III, an unknown world of very dry atmosphere and a weak, cool sun. Her last memory is of her agreeing to stay on the ship with the ship's navigator (and its commander) while the other five people on the crew go down for a look, but she finds her backpack and her notes sticking out of a dune nearby. In her notes she finds that she had been walking for several hours and has a map back to the team's campsite.

She gets in touch with the navigator, finds two of her crew in a state of catatonia, and from there has to find her way back to the ship's one working lander.

The plot and story of this game are what make it worthwhile. There are very few places where you have to decide more than "go left or right," and like most such games the outcome of any such decision is foregone. This is mostly a tale being told in a slow, engaging way by a first-person game engine. The order in which you explore a new place, and whether or not to check out some side-stories, are pretty much the only fundamental decisions you'll make.

That said, it is an engaging bit of work. Yasna comes into conflict with a team from "The Alliance," who came in a starship named Condor. The game doesn't say so in so many words, but you get the sense that the Alliance is "western" in some sense, whereas the Commonwealth is more "soviet." Eventually, the real crisis of Regis III comes to a head and Yasna and members of the Alliance must work together to survive.

The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is excellent, and Yasna is good company with which to hang out.

The Invincible: the book

The 1964 novel has no "Alliance" or "Commonwealth." We're told only that The Invincible has been dispatched by "the authorities back home" to Regis III to find out why Condor, which had been scheduled to explore Regis III eight months earlier, had not returned.

The book focuses on the character of Rohan, the ship's senior exec and second in command, and the experiences he has on the surface of Regis III. The story follows Rohan around as various expeditionary teams are sent out to try to find Condor to discover what could possibly have happened to the ship and its crew. It's dry in that way that 1960s science fiction could be dry, especially when joined with Polish sensibilities of that time and the translator's efforts.

For all that, it's a brilliant book. It was written 22 years before Drexler's Engines of Creation and yet every great idea in that book exists in The Invincible. How the dangers of Regis III emerged from naturalistic processes is so well-described it makes James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker read like fanfic. Lem single-handledly envisioned nanotechnology, and how nanotechnology, automation, and the feedback mechanisms of natural selection could interact decades before those very terms came into existence.

Faith and Deviation

The game is astonishingly faithful to the book. Recall that I read the book after playing the game. In the game, the Alliance has caterpillar construction equipment digging massive boreholes, balloon-wheeled all-terrain jeeps, ground-effect transporters, ducted-turbine "flying saucers," multi-legged crawlers and a few force-field floating war machines. The mix of vehicles felt completely nonsensical... and every one of those is in the book. The "atompunk" feel of the equipment in the game is accurate to the book in every detail. So are the limitations of the space suits, the communications equipment, the surface-to-orbit landers, the sensory gear, and even Yasna's compass is a pretty good representation of the same one Rohan used (although Rohan could wear his on his wrist, and Yasna has to keep taking hers out of her pocket).

The game starts on Regis III three days before The Invincible is scheduled to arrive, which creates tension in that the Commonwealth people, who are just a little exploratory team of eight, know they need to do a quick survey and get the hell out of there before The Invincible arrives.

There are a few deviations from the book. In the book, the crew of The Invincible find Condor and it's dead crew... and one guy who might still be alive in one of Condor's cryochambers. (It's not a spoiler to say he's not alive and can't be recovered; it's just a moment Lem added for pathos.) For game reasons, those cryochambers are empty and still working when Yasna finds the Condor. The book says that Condor and The Invincible are the same class of ship and of the same size. The game says that the Invincible is "the biggest ship in the Alliance, and twice as large as anything else they have." Condor's team didn't have time to set up more than one drilling operation to explore the strange metallic ruins under the sand, but the game, to stretch out Act II a bit, has three different drilling sites for you to visit.

And ... and that's about it. That last one could even be just that the crew of The Invincible, wrapped up in its own concerns, didn't find all the explorations the crew of Condor conducted. Otherwise, the game is a wholly faithful and reasonable extrapolation of what happened in the book, and the cold war conflict of the Commonwealth and the Alliance are deftly added, sensitive to the conditions of the cold war as it was playing out in 1964, and believable. It's a visual novel, an entirely new story, the best kind of fanfiction, told in an interactive way that gives well-thought and well-designed visuals to one of Stanislaw Lem's great works.

Technology And Its Disconnect

You get less of a sense of it in the game because the first-person visual narrative forces you to be "in the moment" with Yasna, but both the book and the game really hammer home the weirdness of atompunk sensibility (and the game somehow manages to do this without being "ironic" about it!). Lem's future is "like five years from 1964, only with bigger engines." Lem didn't expect information processing to get much better; he has robots and, like lots of SF writers, over-estimated how easy speech recognition would be and under-estimated speech production.

In the book, The Invincible has both orbital and atmospheric drones, but their lifespans are short and their cameras are both analog and terrible. On two occasions in the game, Yasna gets to operate a "camera balloon" drone (something not in the book, but completely believable given the tech) and the cameras have the classic snow and terrible bandwidth of analog. The teams use Morse code when voice radio becomes unintelligible. Their orbit-to-surface telescopes have a resolution of "miles", whereas the Mars Orbital Surveyor has a resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, and unlike the MOS, The Invincible has to de-orbit the satellite so its payload parachutes within about 40 miles of their landing site so someone can retrieve the film!

This is science fiction from the 1960s in all its glory: manly men doing manly things, with bigger engines and more powerful laser guns, but no one and nothing is going to challenge man's position as the most intelligent being. Need to map a planet? You'll need 200 men and four months to go through all the photographs.

Now that I think about it, the introduction of Yasna, a woman crewmember, into the game is actually one of the biggest anachronisms; there are zero women in Lem's book, the only mention of women at all is Rohan's observation that Captain Horpach never married. Or it could be completely in keeping with the games "cold war" sensibilities to introduce a woman on the Soviet Commonwealth's side, since one of Lenin's positions was that, unlike the West, the Soviet union didn't discard the intellectual firepower women could bring to scientific endeavors like space exploration.

Success Isn't Always Pleasure, But In This Case

Fun is where you find it. The book isn't fun, and neither, really is the game. What they are is intriguing and, ultimately, satisfying. The game succeeds wildly in what it sets out to do: retell the story of what happened to the starship Condor on Regis III from a unique (for the book) and different point of view, provide a visual vocabulary for all the wonders Lem described, and make the point of the book and its conclusion just as hard. You learn something from the book and the game, and you learn different things. The book is short, less than 200 pages, and can be read in about four hours. The game is about twice that long.

Technical details

The Invincible ran "okay" on my computer. I run Ubuntu Linux and have a GeForce 2060 with 6GB of RAM, and the framerate was sometimes not all that fantastic (I discovered that disabling the "special effects" on the operating system's window manager made it run much better!), but it runs well on modern hardware and it's gorgeous all the same. Given the nature of the game, I didn't need perfect aim. Running it on Linux and Wine (Proton) was otherwise flawless.

Deathloop is a very pretty game with an absolutely fascinating premise that, unfortunately, dies on its own writing. I had only played one Arkane Studios game before, and that was the later Prey, which held together quite well all the way to the end. The “twist” in Prey was annoying but, thankfully, came only after the end credits and could safely be ignored.

Deathloop’s premise is that sometime in the mid 1960s a group of eight uber-wealthy people formed a corporation and took over the island of Blackreef in the North Atlantic that was home to “The Anomaly,” a rift in the fabric of spacetime. They found a way to control the anomaly enough to create The Loop: the entire island resets in time and space in a way that lets people enjoy their entire world, Groundhog-Day style. Only something went wrong and everyone’s mind is reset along with the world.

Everyone except Colt Vahn, former head of security for the corporation and a man determined to destroy The Loop. He remembers everything he learned the day before.

So this is just like a video game: when you die, you remember all the mistakes you made, but the game treats you like the same person you were on the previous iteration. You learn in real-time at the same pace Colt does. It’s a fascinating premise that takes the whole “iterate on the mission until you get it right” and makes it a part of the game mechanic!

The final mission, you learn, is to kill every one of the eight wealthy people. Each is from a different discipline: two scientists, a game designer, an artist, a musician, a theologist, a writer and a CEO; together, they’re known as The Visionaries. Each Visionary has a “Slab,” a component that gives them a super-power (invisibility, short-range teleportation, the ability to link people into a single experience (usually death), and so forth), and that connects them to The Loop. The problem is that if you don’t kill all eight in one day, they all wake up the next day with their Slabs… and you get to keep a copy, presumably stolen from the previous timeline. So you not only have to figure out how to kill each of them, you have to figure out how to kill ALL of them, in 24 hours, in Deathloop’s weird timescale. There’s a puzzle, and it’s actually a very good one.

Also, the island is crawling with Eternalists, people who are sycophants of the Visionaries, and who are psychopathic in their own right. They spent months preparing to activate the Loop, having brief experiences of the Loop, learning that death in the Loop means you’d be back the next day. When they turned the Loop on permanently, they didn’t expect the memory-erasing. And the writer character, Julianna, has taken it upon herself to tell everyone “Colt wants to break The Loop. Kill him on sight!” So everyone on the island is a hopped-up lunatic out to kill you, when they aren’t partying to enjoy their “aternal” unkillable existence.

The problem is with the writing. There are four factions at play: The current Visionaries, the AEON program they founded to research the loop, a prior research program known as Horizon, and before that a group known as The Army of the Motherland. We learn almost nothing about these factions. We learn that Colt is probably a lot older than he looks, having been stuck in not just this Loop but several beforehand, and before that stuck in a “natural” Loop with the fishing village that used to be on the island shortly after World War 2. And yet all of this is just to build plot bunnies– they never do anything with this. He’s just a cipher for killing ciphers.

And that’s the problem with the game: everyone is a monster. Colt especially; the Loop gives him the excuse to learn how to murder people in dozens of creative ways, from intimate neck-breaking to blowing up an entire warehouse full of Eternalists, from kicking people off cliffs to reprogrammed sentry guns tearing up the audience at a rock concert. You have no idea what kind of man he will be when that’s not what he’s doing. And the “good” ending is basically him and one of the Visionaries making a deal: look, don’t end the Loop, let’s work to cross timelines deliberately (something that happens at “random” to forward the story), find variants that are more interesting than this one, and spend the rest of eternity treating The Loop as our hunting and killing ground.

I play video games to hang out with interesting characters, even though many of them are quantitatively mass murderers: Morgan Yu (Prey), Captain Titus (Warhammer 40K Space Marine), the Doom Marine, Gordan Freeman (Half Life), Issac Clarke (Dead Space), even Blood Rayne. Their worlds are surreal but fleshed out, giving them a moral purpose that excuses, to some extent, the gun-weilding horrors that they commit.

None of that really applies to Colt. There’s no world to save. There’s no one being hurt by The Loop, except Colt. We get some vague sense that he’s outraged to be trapped in the Loop again, trapped with them, but that’s not a reason to go all murderspree on them. The only way to get out of the Loop is to kill all the Visionaries, although we do get the sense that if the Loop breaks they’ll all wake up again, mortal once more, but even Colt isn’t sure.

So it was a great game with a fantastic premise and good mechanics, but it fell apart at the end by just being… unsatisfying.

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One thing that is amazing about the game? The soundtrack. If you can find it, it’s amazing; there’s a consistent theme throughout the soundtrack, and it can sound repetitive at times because of the two main lietmotifs, but overall it really holds together.

But even there, it represents a problem. One of the two common lietmotifs created by Tom Salta, the principle composer, is spooky. It consists of a three-note, pause, three-note minor key chord sequence underlain with an expertly played Theremin. Except there’s nothing spooky about Blackreef. The game doesn’t know the difference between “spooky” and “weird,” and it shows. It works in the context of the game but only if you don’t think too hard about it.

But it is a damn good soundtrack.

The video game The Turing Test has been out for a few years, but it was on sale during the pandemic so I bought it and played it. It’s a blatant Portal clone of seven chapters with ten room puzzles in each chapter. You play Ava, a “backup engineer” on a mission to Europa, the largest moon of Jupiter, who is awakened from cryogenic suspension by the mission AI, whose name is TOM, when the ground crew fails to report in. Your job is to leave the orbiting ship, descend to the surface, and find out what happened.

The crew, it turns out, have used robots and automated equipment to redesign the entire ground base into a series of puzzles that, as the AI informs you, “seem to be Turing Tests, in that they can only be solved by a human being.” When Ava asks TOM what he means, he explains, “In the very first room, you threw the battery through a window. I would never have thought of that. I am, after all, programmed to preserve company property.”

But there is something ominous and wrong about what you’re doing, and this feeling of creepiness grows as the mission goes on and you start to discover notes from the crew about what really happened and why they’re so eager to keep TOM out of the base. It does seem a little odd that Ava doesn’t question why TOM is so eager to get in, but there’s really no choice to the mission; either Ava continues, or she’s stuck on Europa for the rest of her life anyway.

The puzzles are pretty good. They’re very much like Portal; you have a single tool for manipulating different power sources, and can sometimes control small utility robots, to throw switches, raise levers, activate or deactivate window shutters, and so forth. I had fun with them, and learned that I’m still a lightweight when it comes to alcohol; a single glass of wine made some of the later puzzles unsolvable until the next day.

The story is short and interesting, and like all stories, has questions to be answered. There are two different questions at the heart of The Turing Test. One is a moral question, and the other is a philosophical question. “Does TOM think, or is it just programming?” is the philosophical question. I probably would have found it much more interesting if I hadn’t been deeply steeped in, and deeply familiar with, the arguments Daniel Dennett and John Searle have been having for the past twenty years or more. TOM falls into the Dennett camp, and the even older the Julian Jaymes camp, that TOM walks like a duck and talks like a duck, so is clearly a duck.

The other is an issue of Kantianism vs Utilitarianism, although the latter question is muddled and poorly argued. TOM is arguing the Utilitarian point of view, but it’s clear that he’s leaning heavily on Objectivist arguments as well since he’s programmed by The Corporation to protect their interests. Ava is arguing the Kantian position, but her argument is muddled by both a phenomenological weakness and deonotological descent: she feels duty bound but she’s not entirely clear as to why.

The ending is disappointing. The ending does settle the Turing Test question, but it doesn’t solve the moral quandary that supposedly is the conflict. This is the big problem with a lot of writing, not just in games but in general: the main character’s biggest problem is not the one the writers want to face in the final conflict of the story.

But it’s a good puzzle game, and a good SFnal setting that’s more serious and straightforward, than Portal. If you enjoyed Portal for the puzzles, then put The Turing Test on your Steam wishlist and wait for it to go on sale.

Doom (2016)

What more is there to say about Doom? It’s Doom. That’s about it; it set the standard for what a first-person shooter should be, and it’s been doing that ever since. The ID Tech 6 engine is just freaking amazing, and it all runs without any failures at all on my Linux box, which is something of a miracle.

I should say up front that I really loved Doom 3, which is apparently considered “not very Doom.” In Doom 3, there’s a lot more story; you’re walking through a well-realized world with dozens of voices found on every data slate you pick up, furthering the tale of a mad scientist who discovers a portal to Hell and makes a deal with the denizens there. It had lots of different settings and a few nice puzzles to solve, but was mostly jump-scares and boss battles.

The people at ID didn’t think that was very Doom. Doom 3 was an adventure with guns; this latest Doom is basically a first-person twin-stick.

Twin-sticks are among my favorite genre of video game. The original twin-stick game is Robotron: 2084, which first came out in 1982. You had two controls: one for direction of motion, the other for direction of fire. There’ve been a lot of twin-sticks since then: from Atari’s shameless and rushed-to-market rip-off, Black Widow, to modern retellings like Geometry Wars, Tesla vs. Lovecraft, and Nex Machina, the last of which was written with help by the guy who wrote the original Robotron. (All of those, by the way, also run great on Linux.)

And Doom is a twin stick. Every level is basically six or seven “arenas,” large spaces, often marked with a “gore nest,” where you fight off one or two massive waves of murderous hellbeasts, collect whatever loot was dropped, and move on to the next arena. There are few jump scares and fewer puzzles.

It’s much more arcade than it is story. The story is thin tissue, just enough to justify the landscapes of Mars, the cramped and dangerous interiors of the Mars base, and the painful bleakness of Hell, and is accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek collection of set pieces where you discover the UAC knew all along that it was engaged with “real magic,” but it was a kind they could technologize, as long as it didn’t get out of control.

And the graphics simply are gorgeous. Doom really does push the envelope for so many frames per second of incredible artwork, all in the service of this very silly shoot-em-up. You can see the amount of effort that went into every pixel.

But all of that is just dressing on the arcade action, the sweet dopamine addiction of random number generators vs. the reflexes you’ve got.

This weekend I was at a politically critical event down in Georgetown with Omaha, and while she had to be there for all sorts of reasons, I was just the ride. I mean, I knew some of the people there, but once I'd said my hellos I didn't have a role there.

I wandered out to get some air, and wondered if rather than booze, I could find a coffee or a Coke somewhere. I strolled up the street and passed by a coffeeshop (closed, of course), and a barcade, one of those bars full of nostalgia machines from the 80s. It was mostly pinball (which can't be easier to maintain than video games), but upstairs there were a few uprights. Turning the corner, I saw a Defender. Defender is my machine; I once played for over 30 hours in front of one on a single quarter; I've seen Mutant Wave 990,000 and Level Zero.

It was a bit like religion. I put my hands on the controls and my hands knew what to do. Every reflex built from literally hundreds of hours of playing was still there. Not as sharp as they used to be, of course, but still solidly and really there. The knowledge about how to handle mutants, bombers, and swarmers. The secret line. Baiter timing. The four-star Smart Bomb trick.

Normally, I play for an hour on one quarter. The game lasted only twelve minutes. That's four times longer than the developers of the game expected anyone to ever learn how to play, but for me, it was terrible. 165,000? I can do better than that.

And someone had. Someone had the legendary score, 999,975. I'll see you in Hell, Mr. C.

I played the Id game Rage this weekend. I'd found it in a remainder bin, and I vaguely remember having played and enjoyed it, so I figured another play-through would be fun. I also purchased the add-ons "Sewers" and "Scorchers," the latter of which is an entire major in-game campaign that unlocks after you reach the Wellspring level.

The Scorcher campaign starts in caves under Dan Haggar's compound. Which is weird because Dan never mentioned caves and there's really no association between those caves and the placement of the Haggar settlement; there's no benefit there. The number one need of people in the wasteland is water, and if the caves are sources of Dan's water, they should bloody well say so. (That said, we know there's a lot of water bubbling through the crumbling dam area just to the west, so why loser clans like the Ghost and Wasted are allowed to monopolize it is inexplicable.)

And that's where you meet Sarah Haggar. So far, in Rage, you've met a couple of women: Janus, Loosum, Becky, Olive, Sally, Elizabeth, Ginny, and Daemia. All of them were dressed appropriately for their environment. Ginny and Loosum wear cargo shorts, but so do some of the men.

Sarah Hagar is dressed in a ragged knee-length skirt and a two-toned hand-stiched leather bikini top. She wears this while actively in combat against mutants and Scorcher bandits deep in a cave of sharp rocks and dangerous tools.

This makes absolutely no sense. You've already bought at least two upgrades for your body armor, and she's dressed like a character from Dead Or Alive. It's weird how this annoyed me. Rage had been doing so well with its women characters up to this point.

Totally by coincidence, Feminist Frequency this morning puts up an article about Buying Women's Bodies Through DLCs. But in her point, she talks about how this is used as a selling point; access to visible representations of pliable women is used to upsell the product. The sexism sells. But as far as I can tell, Sarah's appearance was never used to sell the Scorchers DLC. It's just... there. Unnecessarily. Which makes it all the stranger.

tl;dr: It's a third-person 3D shooter with a female protagonist set in a vast sinking ship. It's a fantastic site-seeing adventure but as a game the controls are terrible and as a story it lacks coherence or closure.

I finally got around to finishing Hydrophobia: Prophecy, the PC port of the XBox game Hydrophobia. The plot is pretty simple: you're Kate Wilson, security engineer for the great ocean-going arcology Queen of the World. Your ship is home to the super-wealthy, who (much to the surprise of both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx) are busily trying to figure out how to power, feed, and water the surviving population of poor schmucks out on land. A group of pan-suicidal whackos take over the ship, determined to stop this act of charity and, in the course of doing so, wipe humanity off the face of the Earth. They start to blow stuff up. You happen to be in just the right place at the right time to start messing with their plans, so off you go.

The premise of the game is more interesting. Since you're on a ship that's had lots of terribly nasty things done to it, there are vast sections flooding. The game was built around a hydrology model; you're constantly being battered by floods, have to swim down and around many different underwater sections of the game, and since it's a third-person game you're occasionally dealing with water on your lens.

So: a water-based game with a female protagonist. It ought to have been perfect for me. And for the most part, it's not bad.

The controls are terrible. Just awful. I can't count the number of times I was shouting at the screen, "Just jump! It's the only logical thing you can do! No, don't let go and fall to your death! Jump!" Over and over. Swimming wasn't quite as bad as some other games I've been in; vaguely reminiscent of the Descent series.

The plot makes no sense. Pan-misanthropic genocide isn't a thing you can build an army around.

For all the premise that you're supposed to be on a ship, you may as well have been in Bioshock's Rapture. There was never any sight of the sea, you never went topside, you never saw the sun. It may have been a limitation of the game engine that outdoor settings just weren't possible, but still.

There's no ending cutscene. They give you a voice-over partner, a guy Kate calls "Scoot," who's basically your chorus helping you along. He gets captured 2/3rds of the way through the plot, though, so you're on your own for the last battles, and you never find out if he's okay, or if the ship sinks, or anything. Once you defeat the boss battle robot, its explosion kills the main villain, and... that's it. Fade to black. No idea if Kate lives, Scoot lives, the world lives.

For all that, the actual site-seeing in the game is fantastic. It's a beautiful game, there's a lot of interesting things to do, a couple of nifty puzzles, and, like I said, it's a water-based game which gets water right, which is pretty rare. And it has a likeable female protagonist who's never presented as a sex object. She's just the main character, trying to do her job. (She gasps and grunts a lot when in the water, though, which gets pretty tiresome later in the game since by then you're down in engineering and storage and there's a lot of water.)

I snagged a sale copy from Steam for five bucks. It's basically in the bargain bin; I see it's on sale today for 50 cents. It's kind-of a shame that it has all these annoying details; it could have been an amazing experience.

tl;dr: Unbelievalbly violent, unbelievably fun. IYLTSOT,TITSOTYWL.

This is undoubtedly the most violent video game I have ever played. It is also one of the most fun.

You play a Space Marine in a "universe of unending war." The Warhammer universe is incessantly depressing: every planet the empire has occupied has been allocated to a single role, none of which are meant to support human beings, just the products of human beings: food for armies, military equipment for armies, foot soldiers for armies. You're the best of the best, a soft-spoken, English-accented space marine named Titus who calmly wades into battle and slaughters Orcs by the thousands.

And it is thousands. Titus wears highly effective powered armor, carries a handgun in his left hand and a sword, axe, chainsaw, or warhammer in his right. In one vast battle which lasted almost an hour, an Orc mage summoned wave after wave of orcs of all sizes and strengths, and I weilded my warhammer to slaughter them in unending, beautifully rendered three-d battle. At times of low hit points, I could summon "the fury of the emperor" or use a heavy, armored stomp to stun a particularly hefty Orc, if I had weakened him enough, and then issue an 'execute' command, which would result in an especially gory slow-motion blow of blood and violence, and my hit points would go back up.

It's your typical Warhammer 40K scenario: Orc invasion of a Mechanicus world after a source of unbelievable power. You wade through all the usual places: ruined cities, sewers, high-tech construction centers, military establishments, and so forth, battling non-stop waves of Orcs.

There's no real plot. The engine is a last-generation 3D engine, on par with Quake III, Halo II and the latest Unreal. It's more than adequate for this excessive machinima violence.

It is also fun. Undeniably, incomprehensibly fun. It's third-person melee combat done right, and there's nothing in it that will make you a psychopath. The orcs are unrelentingly evil, there's no moral ambiguity here, and there's no confusion with the "real world." It's great stuff. It makes no excuses: if you want to wade into the enemy, and this game give you that in droves.

If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.

I finished Rage, and I have to say that, in the end, I was not terribly impressed. Rage is basically a technical demonstration of the ID Tech 5 gaming engine: a whole bunch of different games, all thrown together into a stew, but made without enough meat, or vegetables.

There are three acts: Wasteland, Wellspring, and Subwaytown. But Wellspring is "in" the Wasteland and you can drive back and forth between them easily. Once you go to Subwaytown, you can never go back to the others, and if you haven't finished all the sub-missions (not critical to the central plot, but still fun), you can't. Worse, Subwaytown feels rushed: there are only four real "missions," which felt like far fewer than those in the Wasteland part. Part of that was due to there being only one "side job" in all of Subwaytown, and while there are seven sewers in Wasteland, later there are only two.

And the final act is, well, dumb. It's like suddenly you fell into Quake III, with no explanation, no build, none of the critical revelation. Just wham!, and you're in. Also, two things you were promised never happen: You never meet Dan Hagar a second time, and I won't spoil the other one but believe me, it's a big promise never delivered.

Rage has a problem: it needs to be popular enough to justify producing downloadable episodes to round out the story, but it had to be shipped on time. It has failed at this balancing act, and I'm oddly not sorry. This is the first game ID has released since being bought by Bethesda software, and it's the first one since Return to Castle Wolfenstein that has failed to grab me in a serious way.

Labyrinth is one of those board games that became an instant classic among a certain set, those who remember playing D&D in college and perhaps still play it but who now have children of their own. It's a simple enough game: you and your peers have a set number of prizes to find in a maze that's clearly laid out on the game board in front of everyone. Each player draws a card to determine their specific prize, which they keep secret from the others.

The board is made up of tiles that can be re-arranged. On his or her turn, a player takes the one loose tile and places it somewhere along the edge, shifting an entire row or column on the board, and freeing up another tile. This action re-arranges the entire maze, closing off some parts of the maze and making others accessible. If you're good, you can make a subtle shift that gives you access to your prize, while denying others access to theirs. Once all the prizes have been collected, you have to escape the maze. Your opponents try to stop you.

The players pieces are vaguely magical: knights, sorcerers, witches. The board has a strong D&D feel to it, and the objects you're recovering are cutely retro as well: magic lamps, scrolls, pots of gold.

My family loves this game. So when Omaha got a copy of the electronic version for her iPad, I agreed to play it with her. The original name ("The aMAZEing Labyrinth") has been brought back to distinguish it from the American "Labyrinth" game, a video game version of the classic physics puzzle. Omaha's due to make her own review, of course, that's what she does. But here's my impression.

It succeeds completely in translating the rules of the game into a working video experience. It doesn't sacrifice anything at all in that regard. To that extent, it's a playable, portable version of a beloved board game.

The cards have been eliminated. It's just your pieces on the board. Each time you would need to consult a card in the real-world version, the video game informs you in a pop-up "Your next prize will be shown when you press Okay. Don't let anyone else know your prize!" You're supposed to pick up the iPad and view it privately, then place it down so others can see your progress. Along the right is a control for the loose tile, as you get to decide it's orientation before placing it, as well as tallies for each player. Yellow arrows, as in the original, show where the tile can be inserted to shift a column, and the game enforces the "no undo" rule by eliding the one insertion point that would undo the previous player's turn. When you can't find your prize, there's a button that hides the players in case someone is standing on it-- a smart and very thoughtful utility.

Labyrinth for the iPad is a translation of a board game with strong emotional appeal enhanced by the physicality of the game pieces and moving tiles into an electronic game, an "experience under glass." As such, it loses a lot in translation. The transition from 3D to 2D means that a number of the visual cues I use to make sense of the board are missing. Your character pieces "dance" and occasionally fidget to distinguish themselves from the reward goals on the board, which may be distracting. The visual separation of tiles is "seamless" in this version, which makes planning even more difficult-- it's hard to tell what will move when you insert your piece. A faux-3D shadow effect makes the board very confusing when it's upside-down, meaning that when the other player is going I had a heck of a time planning my moves, and the art doesn't help.

The placement of the card and tallies makes good use of the landscape display, but the art is understandably different from the (now 25-year-old) original. There are some artistic clashes between the original stone-and-dirt artistic theme of the maze, and the new elements with their emphasis on calligraphic illumination and faux-stained glass. The cover art is silly and irrelevant (what the heck is that ghost doing?). A video game necessitates the use of text that was completely unnecessary in the original. Removing characters from the playlist was poorly documented and difficult to discover.

Labyrinth for the iPad is an excellent road trip tool: it will keep the kids, and the adults, occupied for quite a while: each game lasts about 45 minutes. It accomplishes what it set out to accomplish. But it's still no substitute for sitting around with the real board game, pop and chips, and having fun with the family.