Reviews of Games You'll Probably Never Play If you Haven't Already: The Dig · 1:27am May 1st, 2017
Oh my God, Eakin! You're making blog posts after being away for so long! Does that mean you're going to start updating your stories again?
What a great question!
...So anyway, I recently watched the Mostly Walking playthrough of The Dig, a LucasArts adventure game from the 90s. For me it really hit the anti-sweet spot (sour spot?) of being written well enough that I want to engage with the ideas it presents, but botches the execution so badly. If you want to learn how to write a phenomenal opening to a game, play the first fifteen minutes of this and never come back to the rest of it. Also, look up Orson Scott Card, who wrote a lot of this, and check out that 'Ender's Game' book of his. Then learn absolutely nothing else about him, or you'll regret it.
Spoilers for The Dig beyond this point. Consider yourself warned.
A lot of you may be familiar with the stories I've written for the Optimalverse, the sub-category of fanfiction derived from Friendship is Optimal that deals heavily with the ethics of strong AIs and, to a lesser degree, various concepts pertaining to the ethics of transcendentalism. If the previous sentence made your eyes roll back into your head, congratulations! You're The Dig's target audience. Seriously final warning for spoilers right here, read beyond this point at your own risk: The Dig's message is that Death is Good, at least in the grand scheme of things. Cheating Death in the game's universe is severely punished (up until the very end where it suddenly isn't, but more on that later) from a narrative perspective. Not subtlety either.
If you were fatally injured, and then your travel companions discovered magic crystals that cured death itself and brought you back to life feeling better than ever, would you want them to use it on you?
BZZZZZZZT! Ohhhh, you said yes, didn't you? The correct answer was NO! Because the high the crystals provide is addictive and having a crystal used on you is the gateway to becoming the equivalent of a meth head. Therefore you should accept that death is inevitable.
What's that? You think the more interesting question might be 'What if we could transcend death WITHOUT becoming drug addicts?' Congratulation on asking more intelligent questions than this game does. But this is a faux pas that better writers than I fall into all the time. They raise the interesting question of 'Is it better to do Thing A or Thing B?' then, because that question turns out to be too nuanced for them to manage, cheat themselves and the reader with, 'well, Thing B is in this specific example accomplished via a process with Side Effect C, where Side Effect C is really bad. And logically, Since C is worse than A, we can also conclude that B is worse than A.'
So accept that you could die at any time and doing something about it with the technology available (well, the unnatural alien technology at least. The game doesn't take a stand on the subject of, say, penicillin, but I digress.) Your PCs have been transported to an alien planet that seems mostly abandoned, because as it turns out the aliens who used to live here all Ascended to A Higher Plane of Existence (Called Spacetime 6).
This is where the game takes a weird turn: This ascension is treated as a bad thing. Because while the aliens can observe the infinite spectrum of possibilities, they're trapped there and can no longer exert much influence on Spacetime 4 (our reality), or build new things, or live finite lives. So as players our goal becomes to pop over to Spacetime 6, turn around, and bring everybody back to Spacetime 4. And it really is that underwhelming, the end of the game is literally your PC stepping through a portal, remarking at 'wow, this infinite expanse of possibilities is pretty cool, but I'm just going to chill here,' whereupon the lost alien species senses you and all of them re-materialize in Spacetime 4. It's actually somehow less impressive than I've described here. We never get the perspective of 'actually, being conscious of the infinite range of all possible outcomes is quite nifty,' everyone is just immediately happy to return to the Natural Order. Being mortal but able to influence reality is, again, the Natural Order of things, and those who feel otherwise are punished for their hubris.
Oh, except the grateful aliens pop into alternate universes and bring back the NPCs who died over the course of you adventure. Because Cheating Death is Wrong, but we need a happy ending for our player too.
My greatest frustration with this game, and the reason I can't recommend it, is that it presents questions it isn't interested in grappling with and tries to use that as a proxy for actually being a bold, intellectual undertaking. If your story is going to present a similar dilemma, my advice to you is to be sure you can lay out examples of when and why both sides might actually be valid. Don't just manipulate things such that 'The natural order is A, B, C, and outside forces will punish those who try to circumvent that.' It's way better to be ambiguous about these sorts of thing than heavy handed. And make the deaths of your party members count! If you're willing to undo a character's death, you've retroactively neutered all the tension your story ever possessed. Unless this is seriously earned, it's probably a bad idea.
Anyway, The Dig isn't actually a bad game, but it isn't as smart as it thinks it is. At least not after the first quarter hour or so. Not a game you really need to go out and experience for yourself.
I never played the game, but I have a copy of the Alan Dean Foster book adaptation kicking around here somewhere. Haven't read it in years, I should pull it out again one of these days.
4515190
I should have mentioned that! The book may very well be better than the game was, though I'm not confident enough to seek it out myself.
4515194 My memory of it says yes. But then Foster is one of those consistently competent writers. He's never been astonishingly stellar, but he's always at least readable.
Glad to see you're still alive, brother.
Eakin! You're alive! You're ALIIIIIIIIIIIVE!
I was enthralled by the very early bits of The Dig but I quit early on, before even getting to all that stuff. The sin that broke me was an early puzzle with an alien control panel for a crane gantry that turned out to be just like simple up-down-left-right controls but they were all in these flowy organic shapes to deliberately obscure their function. I was all like NO ONE DESIGNS CONTROL PANELS THIS WAY and I basically rage quit.
I re-googled the image and it still fills me with negative feelings.
steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/266086874778243142/2CA586D4FD64BC09518A1C3BF89B58AE205EE803/
EDIT: And yes, it's good to see you again!
I had a friend who was big into LucasArts adventures and the two of us worked through the Indian Jones games, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and The Dig.
I only vaguely remember my impression of The Dig; I played it a few decades ago after all. I do remember thinking the ending was a deus ex machina ass pull, though I'm pretty sure I didn't notice the pro-death ideas.
(I also remember my friend being amazed when I figured out the simple programming puzzle near the beginning of the game. It was all magic to him.)
Very thorough review of the story. What did you think of the other aspects of the game? Music, dialog, graphics, game play mechanics, etc.
I don't know why I never played The Dig. I must have bought a half-dozen other LucasArts games around that time. Sam and Max Hit the Road was my fave.
And let me add my "good to see you 'round here, pardner" to the chorus!
Tease.
You didn't even answer the great question!
And ahh. The good ole 90s. Hearing Lucasarts instantly makes me think 'Day of the Tentacle' and all the glory of that game. There's a lot of games from that era I am nostalgic for (And which finally are near-impossible to play on 64 bit architecture without jumping through the hoops of emulating Windows XP in a virtual machine to then emulate DOS, which is kind of silly)
So, Eakin the handsome, does your impromptu blog post mean you might grace us humble ponyfolk with your presence once more on a semi-regular basis?
I remember The Dig. That style of game, the pixelated, rotoscoped cartoon that the 90's were so famous for, still sticks out in my mind.
I don't have many memories of the game itself, so it must not have intrigued me much. I remember beating it, and one of the people I 'rescued' from death had aged tremendously or something, and I remember thinking how much it sucked to be him.
That's about it. Also hey good to see you around again!
Man. I'm literally playing this game right now -- friend of mine who's into adventure games (a genre I never got into) gifted me pretty much all the classics, this one included. And as he pointed at The Dig as his favorite, I said what the hell, let's start with this one.
It's... good? I think? I have no standards for adventure games 'cause this is literally the first one I'm ever playing, but so far the story is okay to me. Sort of a campy old-school sci-fi sorta plot, nothing particularly grating so far. (Haven't read the entire blog, as you said there were spoilers, though I skimmed through the comments). Honestly, the one thing annoying me so far are some puzzles. As 4515378 said, fuck that panel puzzle. It's counterintuitive to the point of total cheapness.
As per the writing, eh. Snappy dialogue, Orson Scott Card before he got weird. Now and then two characters will start a pun-off and it's fun for a couple minutes, yo.
That whole addicted to being revived from death thing. I heard about people who kept trying to get near death experiences before. So its not far-fetched at all. Some guy tried suffocating himself til he passes out multiple times and stuff like that. Spiritual people can sure be crazy, because they think souls matter more than brains or biology.
I bought that in a Steam bundle (with Loom and two Indiana Jones games) a while back, but haven't got around to playing it.
That fits with my vague memories of playing bits of it. Also welcome back! Any chance of BC? I promise to to squeal and fangirl at you :P
The game basically follows the book. The difference is the book explains thing better and sometimes gives you the view from the aliens side.
This is the price of a game closely following a book or movie.
Still a fun little game, as long as you ignore how hard/bad one or two of the puzzles were.
Also, in your inventory is a fun mini-game to clear your head when stuck
Maybe because I played this game start to finish with 2 bathroom breaks (one ended with a kidney stone removal so my time wasn't a total lost) and I don't remember the last time I slept... not sure my point... of yeah. How the fuck was this even related to transcendentalism?
Better question is: What the fuck game with Deus Ex ending? Could have made that area a puzzle (were they short on time?) or had Low talk them down from SpaceTime 6! No, no. "Heh look a human - we're bored and let's go home!" Just let's hand wave the climax. Lost my ass.
The Aliens! You think with a lot of time on your hands a person would grow into an adult instead some of baby with no self control. Phoenix down turns you into a druggy? Bullshit. What was wrong with these asshole aliens?
Also, why did the writers have a hate boner for Brink? Jeus fucking chrits his actions so transparent or you can see them a mile away or that stupid aging. Not cool Maggie. Not cool. Maggie you're an idiot. Low though, can be my wingdude any day. The other two were meh.
All the puzzles were pretty good. Nice to have some hard stuff without going Space Quest or Monkey Island levels of dumb. Though, not really a compliment when you think of it. If it wasn't for the puzzles, I would've lost intertest in this game and just watched a let's play. And this pretty... even though it take places on the most boring looking planet in SpaceTime 4... pretty game was refreshing to the eyes. Sound was good too. The voice acting was more the acceptable. UI held up.
I'm tired and going to take a nap in SpaceTime 3.
I expected a sentence of this sort.
4516582
*chuckle* Speaking of the more... conservative of the views for which OSC has put his money where his mouth is, I once saw an entertaining take on that when someone summarized Ender's Game as "Classic 80s Sci-Fi by a classic 80s homophobe".
4515566
As far as classic LucasArts adventures go, I'd recommend Day of the Tentacle, The Secret of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 1), or The Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3) for a better introduction to the genre. They're much more characteristic of LucasArts at its best.
(I suggest The Curse of Monkey Island as an alternative to the first one for an introduction to the genre because you don't strictly need to play them in order and I found number three to make a much stronger first impression, even ignoring its higher-resolution graphics, voice acting, and condensing the big matrix of mostly useless verbs down to hand, eye, and mouth icons to reduce needless friction in the gameplay experience and make "a witty response for as many non-actions as possible" a more attainable target.)
Also, for Monkey Island 1 and 2, if you want them voice-acted, you can get that by buying the remastered versions and using the fan-made Ultimate Talkie Edition Builder scripts to produce un-remastered versions with the remastered voices. (For the main character, Dominic Armato reprises his role from Monkey Island 3... and apparently he's such a huge Monkey Island fanboy that he already knew all the lines.)
4515550
You're over-thinking things. All the best ways to run DOS games either run on <insert arbitrary modern OS here> or don't run on Windows XP.
Generic Solution: Install DOSBox (possibly with a frontend like DBGL, possibly one of the "mega-patch" versions by people like ykhwong to add features which haven't seen a mainline release yet, like Glide emulation). It's open-source and runs natively on all modern OSes. (How do you think GOG.com manages to turn a profit selling copies of old DOS games with a 30-day money-back on their technical support?)
"Rose-Colored Glasses" Solution: To work around things like weird, un-configurable keybinds and various other warts, check if the game is supported by a modern engine rewrite. For example:
* ScummVM (supported games)
* ResidualVM (supported games)
* Gargoyle (text adventures such as Zork)
* Exult (Ultima 7)
* OpenXcom (original '90s X-COM games, has good mods)
* OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe, original TTD files now optional)
* Corsix-TH (Theme Hospital)
* ZDoom (anything idTech1-based)
* ...and countless others. (Feel free to ask if there's something specific you want. I try to keep up with these things.)
The main tricky area is 16-bit Windows games, which require one of the following solutions:
1. Have or find a copy of Windows 3.1 or 3.11 and then install it in DOSBox (instructions: [1] [2])
2. Have or find a copy of Windows 95 or 98 and install it in VirtualBox.
3. Run Wine on Linux or OSX (I suggest PlayOnLinux/PlayOnMac as a DBGL-like launcher, even if you're not using the auto-install scripts for more modern games.)
For Windows 3.1 games like Bricklayer (gotta love the music), you typically want Wine 1.2 because of a "break the hack to begin implementing it properly" change that landed in 1.3.
4516992 I did this Dosbox with 3.1 a few weeks ago to try to run Mordor because yay nostalgia, but the resolution on it was so terribly low I gave up rapidly because it drove me nuts. If I could get it where I could resize the Window adequately, sure - but the advantage of XP emulation is that'd sidestep a lot of it.
Now it's possible I just need to hack around in Dosbox more to understand it better; Mordor is a game that's basically played on a bunch of windows you can drag about and resize at will, and each window is stuff like the map, your character sheet, the quick-status of your party, inventory, the like.
On a sufficiently large screen you can show most of it; on a small one everything is tiled on top of itself and it becomes a pain in the ass to navigate.
I mean... well... isn't that 95% of games, movies, and anime?
4517253
Sounds like you need to grab either the S3 or Tseng ET40001 video drivers for Windows 3.1 linked from the instructions I referenced. That should give you options as high as 1024x768 @ 64K colors.
(Running Linux and Wine inside VirtualBox instead of WinXP would probably also solve the problem, but I haven't tried Mordor, so I can't be certain.)
4517369 It could just be old memory but I think I'd feel that would still be way too cramped. It's not a high priority right now, admittedly
Huh. Well, I'm used to a spread of three 1280x1024 monitors, so I'm not used to thinking of "1024x768 was huge for Windows 3.1-era machines" as a restriction on how much space a single application will get (especially when DOSBox can upscale that output to fill higher-DPI monitors), but, if you really do need it bigger, then that could justify nesting compatibility techniques.
(I run a customized mix of Lubuntu and Kubuntu Linux as my main OS, so "64-bit Windows doesn't run 16-bit apps or Wine" isn't an issue for me.)
If you really want to do it in a spiffy way, here's what I'd recommend:
1. Install Lubuntu Linux in VirtualBox (because both are free and Lubuntu is easy to install and lightweight), then install PlayOnLinux into it. (It provides a launcher GUI and Wine version downloader/manager that functions similarly to DBGL for DOSBox and, for 16-bit Windows apps, you want a simple way to pick "newest Wine" vs. "Wine 1.2.x" on a game-by-game basis.)
2. Create a desktop shortcut which directly launches the virtual machine in Seamless Mode. (Try starting Seamless Mode from the VM window's menus first. Some versions of Lubuntu don't auto-install the VirtualBox guest extensions during setup and those are needed for seamless mode.)
3. Whip up a custom login session type which launches Openbox (window manager) in the background and PlayOnLinux in the foreground and nothing else, so you don't have a stack of two titlebars when you go seamless and closing PlayOnLinux will end the VM's login session. (I can do this for you if you're interested. It's basically just a two-line shell script an an INI file to add it to the login selector.)
4. Use "Save the machine state" to shut down your VM so it'll "boot" right back to whatever you were doing. (It's basically VirtualBox's version of a laptop's hibernate functionality and a great way to patch Android-emulator-esque "Oh, this is my stop!" savestating onto old PC games.)
The one caveat is that, if you have a multi-monitor desktop, you have to configure VirtualBox to emulate a multi-monitor system and set up the monitor layout in Lubuntu or your seamless-mode windows will be constrained to one monitor.
The simplest way to do it on my three-head system is to set VirtualBox to emulate three monitors, have it remember the window positions, and then set this to run on login in the custom session because Lubuntu defaults to sending the same output to all monitors:
xrandr --output VBOX1 --left-of VBOX2
xrandr --output VBOX0 --left-of VBOX1
If you can find an Openbox theme that matches your host OS's titlebars, it'll feel very native indeed.
(And, since Openbox themes are based on a mixture of "use color X for thing Y" config keys and small images, you could always make your own by screenshotting a native window and then using the eyedropper and cut tools to break it up into a theme... or you could trivially swap in another window manager like IceWM which'll have its own set of themes and is even more amenable to making themes by chopping up screenshots. Openbox is just the Lubuntu default.)
4515566
I'm responding to you first, so skip anything below the response to this comment.
Mechanically, it's a fairly interesting example just because most of the puzzles are very self-contained, but also reasonably intuitive. Many adventure titles of that period considered something along the lines of 'Use [Pencil Sharpener] with [Crossbow]' to be a creative solution to a puzzle, and if you didn't get that, well, that was your fault.
4515708
BC?
4515379
Maybe pro-death is too imprecise. Characters die, and the game is inconsistent about what bringing them back means in a way that suggests it wants to have it both ways. So killing a revived NPC might trigger a message along the lines of 'You didn't kill him, you killed the thing that came back when we tried to revive him,' sort of dialogue.
Then when that character comes back later, it's 'I'm back! Boy, those crystals sure made me act crazy, right?'
It's not that I couldn't have possibly found the ending we got satisfying, it's that I needed a counterpoint to what they presented. There were very obvious and audience-accessible paths that could have been explored.
4517276
I think in most cases they don't care, and I don't begrudge them that. But framing your grappling with the question in... uh... question as a selling point and then not giving it a fair shake over the course of the game is worse. 'Mario rescues the Princess' doesn't really make much out of exploring the class relationship between them, and that's fine. But being a game that asks up front 'what does Mario rescuing the Princess really mean?' and presenting the plot of Super Mario Bros 1 as an answer is far more disheartening.
4522915 Bronycon! The writers room and dinner have both exploded in size and could still use your lovely countenance.
4515379 I still can't solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle if you put it in front of me. I solve hobby problems in Haskell with pattern-functors and paramorphisms.
Things are funny like that.
4522934
I moved away, and it's not a feasible trip anymore. Sorry!
Oh my god, you're alive.