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  • M.U.L.E. (Berry, 1983)

    M.U.L.E. (Berry, 1983)

    Developed/Published by: Dani Bunten Berry / EA
    Released: 11/1983
    Completed:     24/06/2021
    Completion:     Beat Tournament mode against 3 AI with a colony score of 110,000+
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    MULE is an interesting one. I was trying to think what the cinema equivalent is, as a sort of easy metaphor: a classic that was lauded (if never particularly imitated) by a generation of filmmakers that goes almost completely unwatched these days. It’s not one of the obvious ones (you know, Super Mario Bros. as Birth of a Nation, or something); it’s too sophisticated to be something super early (Space Invaders as Journey to the Moon) and so I just can’t place it. The Red Shoes, perhaps?

    The thing is though–and I suppose it’s the reason I’m trying to draw the metaphor–is that if you want to watch The Red Shoes and see what the likes of Scorcese have raved about, you can do so easily–it’s streamable on about nine different services, free with subscription or even ad-supported; you can buy it on a Criterion blu-ray and get a boat load of special features to give you context. Nothing is holding you back.

    Here’s how you can play MULE: you can pay $8 to Good Old Games to play the trash PC port that is totally unrepresentative (it’s maybe also available on Origin, but I haven’t looked.)

    Ok, so you don’t want to do that (and it’s not Good Old Games’ fault: they near-exclusively sell PC games). So here’s how you play MULE “as intended”: You have to download an Atari 800 emulator or understand how to make something like Retroarch make that happen. Then you have to find a ROM (watch out! You might download a pirate one that crashes if you catch the wumpus!). Then you have to find the BIOS files that will let the emulator run the Atari 800. Oh and don’t forget that the Atari 800 emulator requires a bit of fiddling to make that work. And because you want to see the game as intended, you’ve either now got to make this run on that CRT you’ve got lying around for this sort of thing or run it through a shader, preferably with a nice border so it looks like you’re running it on an old TV.

    Oh, and for context, you’re going to want to look up the (beautiful) box and manual online.

    The alternative, is, of course, to buy an Atari 800, monitor, a copy of the game (good luck finding it for less than $200) and four joysticks.

    This is, clearly, absurd. Now don’t get me wrong; there are lost films and inaccessible films. But MULE is out there, and in the history of games it’s at least as important as The Red Shoes is to cinema. But you have to be extremely dedicated to play it–and worse, if you don’t need to be (for example, you pass an Atari 800 in a “VIDEOGAMES!!!” exhibition at a museum) it will be completely impossible to grasp.

    So anyway, that sucks, because if you’re a student of games and their history you should play MULE, and not just because it’s honestly still pretty fun. Because it’s passed into this position that people only talk of it from the second or third hand–often to pay tribute to the pioneering Dani Bunten Berry–and I actually feel a bit sad about that. We pay tribute to those who came before us by playing their work, not just talking about it.

    [“OK, now start the criticising”–Ed.]

    How dare you… ahhh you got me. I think MULE is super cool but here’s the thing that happens after you put in all that work: you go “mannnn this is olddddd” because MULE is old, and “80s personal computer” harsh. It’s at its heart almost a board game, but it’s slathered in early “we haven’t quite worked all this out” design decisions that sorta made sense at the time but also extremely don’t now.

    It’s played like this: you and up to three other players (though it’s always played with four) are settling a planet; each round you have to select a plot of land (from plains, mountains or river) and then select a mule, equip it to either mine ore, collect energy or farm food, which it can do on any plot (well, you can’t mine on river tiles) but gain the most benefit from doing so on the equivalent tile. After everyone has done so, a random event happens (a solar storm makes more energy production, for example) each commodity is consumed by your community and the surplus is traded: either to or from other players or to or from the town store. And then the next round happens (oh, and sometimes you can buy plots of land at auction, not just take them when given.)

    It’s actually pretty graspable, but the quirk is the law of supply and demand. With particular lands (and land placement) you can create massive surpluses of certain goods, and you can also choose to ignore some goods even though your community needs them. “I’ll make so much money selling this ore” you think, “that I’ll be able to buy as much food as I need.”

    Trading happens in a format that must have inspired the negotiations in Theme Park (“Ah yes, I know exactly the mini-game”–every reader, who is as decrepit as me) where you walk your characters down or up the screen to meet at a value, with the quirk that if the store doesn’t have any of a good to sell you the sellers can walk back infinitely (well, within the set time limit) to bleed you dry. (And the computers will do this…) BUT–if they do this, they’re in danger of the colony getting a bad score at the end of the game! So it’s all about the balance of winning (individually) without losing (as a collective). Man sounds like those clowns in congress should play some MULE, am I right???

    So far so good, right? The problem is it’s the early 80s, so all of this is done with a one-button stick where you have to control your character and make them walk into the mule pen and then walk out with the mule and then walk into the outfitter and then walk to your plot and then the timer runs out because you didn’t make enough food, or because moving your character is janky as hell. And selecting your plot of land? Oh that’s a reaction test as a cursor moves along the screen (faster on the higher difficulties) meaning the PC is gonna screw you out of half your lands (and mis-timing is going to screw you out of the other half.) And because there’s not that much space on the screen, actually fully understanding supply and demand in context… isn’t going to totally happen. You need to remember how much of a good you need to buy to not be in shortage. How the shop price affects things and changes is… obscure.

    Which is not even to raise the nadir of MULE: random “punishment” events. Yep, this was designed well before balancing was really a thing, and they had the best intentions at heart, but “lift up the low boats” wasn’t a thing– “smash the high ones with a tsunami” was. It’s a bummer because it doesn’t really work. It’s super clever to make the winning players play first (so it’s easier for the worse off to strategise) but some players can get into such a commanding position that losing some money here or there isn’t that bad. And instead, things tend to happen like you scrimping and saving, finally getting your engine up and running, lots of ore coming in… and a pirate ship shows up, takes all your ore on a turn when the players ahead of you all switched to energy and food, and now you’re stuck with nothing to sell and no way to afford the energy or food you need to keep your plots going. It is the dogshit worst.

    That said, while MULE has the capability to cause (and must have caused) Monopoly-esque meltdowns, the game is still dang fun if you can get into the mindset. The AI is hilariously vindictive–I love that it will screw you on land auctions if you try and force the price up to screw them (it’s all about timing when to walk backwards…) and that they’ll be extremely selective as to when to buy from you, even if it hurts them (I’d swear it knows it doesn’t need food towards the end of the game…) and if you save-scum away only the bullshit punishments or mis-clicks (be generous; it’s 2021) the core here is so dang solid–and it only really makes sense as a video game, because I’ll be fucked if I’m calculating the new cost of mules based on the previous trading period using a table in a board game manual or something.

    Is it a classic I’ll return to again and again? No, not really. Is it something that any student of video games should play once, twice, three times at least? Of course, and if there’s anything you take from this it’s criminal that they probably won’t.

    Will I ever play it again? I am desperate to play this on tournament mode with three other experienced (but not too experienced) players IRL. No joke desperate. I think there some of my issues (the misclicks; the punishments) stop becoming as massive an issue when you’re playing with more than two people…

    Final Thought: Shout out to TreyM for their classic CRT overlays! This kind of thing really doesn’t feel right without them–and they’ll continue to help me experience things “in context” as much as I can when I get to the likes of Rescue on Fractalus…

  • Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

    Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

    Developed/Published by: Bioware / Electronic Arts
    Released: 25th January, 2010
    Completed: 26th March, 2015
    Completion: Everyone survived the suicide mission.
    Trophies / Achievements: 860/1355

    A few weeks ago I had a dream—one of those sort of generic dreams where you find yourself doing a test, but you can’t read the pages—but something about it involved me starting Mass Effect 2. I can’t remember in what context or why. So, not one to go to war with destiny, I booted it up.

    Here’s an important fact: I didn’t like Mass Effect. My main memory of Mass Effect is that it was boring. Boring shooting. Boring dialogue. Boring bumping around on boring planets, before boring missions in boring, samey (sometimes exactly the same, I remember) spaces.

    However, I’d made it through the whole game so I imported my hero into Mass Effect 2 (after changing his face significantly, because he was a rum looking chap and that’s no mistake) and got down to work of saving the galaxy again or whatever.

    Now here’s where the article gets a bit… I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing I think can easily be discounted as sort of fannish complaints (despite the fact I wouldn’t consider myself a fan) relating to one of the biggest factors of the Mass Effect series and (in general) Bioware’s output—the romance system.

    You see, something I definitely respect about the Mass Effect games is that adherence to the idea that your choices stick and have consequence. In terms of game franchises that go to some effort to tailor the experience via the player’s actions from one game to the next I can more or less name this and… The Walking Dead? I’m not even sure if that’s true for The Walking Dead offhand.

    So here’s me, playing the game. I’ve shot up to my cabin on the Normandy, I’m wandering about… and I’m like… “that’s weird. Why is there a picture of Liara on my desk?”

    Liara is one of the cast in the first game; I didn’t romance her. Actually, I had sort of unintentionally conspired with the game with a really retrograde past for my hero—I’d romanced Ashley Williams (the one other possible romance target) only to, at one critical point of the game, let her die because—I can’t remember actually, but it was critical to the galaxy or whatever.

    So there’s my hero with his sad and clichépast—the woman he loved, dead because he chose the galaxy over her… except the game has decided that actually I’ve kept a torch for Liara instead.

    And it didn’t make me particularly happy that on meeting Liara during the game, she made out with me. I didn’t consent to this. I feel… genuinely uncomfortable.

    You might consider that a massive overreaction. After all,  I actually recollect the Mass Effect team—at some point, possibly while doing press for 3—discussing that Commander Shepard isn’t the player, but a character the player is guiding (this was in contrast to a more traditional RPG like Dragon Age.) It’s something that’s kind of reflected in the weirdly fuzzy dialogue, where, for some reason, it gives you lines of dialogue to choose from, and your character then might say something almost entirely different (I’ve never understood why they didn’t keep the selections down to verbs: “comfort” vs “admonish” etc.) Yet it’s a tension I ignore—Commander Shepard is me, whether they like it or not. So when something as important as my past is altered, when decisions are made for me that I have no input on, my trust has been violated.

    And this got me thinking about consent in these games. Because romance is treated as a system, and I know what they’re aiming for—that action movie scripting; the hero, the admiring female (or male! Shepard can be played as a lady) who falls into your arms before the suicide mission. The problem is—and many people have commented on it, I’m not pretending I’m somehow extra insightful—that your potential paramours basically just stand about and wait for you to force their interest. Talk to them, say the right things enough, and get some action. Push in compliments, get out sex.

    The women in this game stopped being characters, or people (and they have to be people, they have to be characters) and became playthings. Here’s me sitting, leading all three up to just the point where I have to “commit” to one—not really sure that I will commit, because I’m still annoyed about Liara—and in fact, I’m probably more interested in “Yeoman Kelly Chambers” who offensively doesn’t even get to be a real romance option because she’s not a main character.

    It actually gets to this point where two romanceable characters—Jack and Miranda—have a fight. Now, for a little background, Jack is the survivor of abuse. She’s a character that I’m not sure of the quality of, to be honest—the classic “survivor of abuse that’s really mean and difficult but also promiscuous and risk-taking, because she’s so damaged”—but when given the option of defending Jack—abused by the corporation, Cerberus, Miranda represents—or siding with Miranda who (for no good reason) chose to make a point about how “it wasn’t really Cerberus” I sided with Jack, rather than take the special magic “everyone is made happy” Paragon option.

    As a result, I could now never romance Miranda. That’s it, the algorithm decided I didn’t play the game right. I’d pushed in enough compliments but I made a nuanced choice. No sex for me!

    This kind of interaction has none of the pleasure of… you know, actually interacting with another human. The idea that I could at least make Miranda “loyal” (important to the wider, non-romance game system) again if I made all the most goody-two-shoes choices to eventually unlock a dialogue choice… it’s ridiculous, boiling Miranda down to a vending machine I have to reset my pin code to use. And consider that I clearly engaged with the story and characters to the point that this bothered me. Why put systems in place where I have to “game” my interaction with characters I saw as people to the point where I see them as robots?

    And if you engage with the “game”, the romance narratives feel dangerously naive. Have sex with Miranda and you’re treated with the saddest, 80s soft porn sequence, but your sex sequence with Jack is the culmination of the story where your interest in her “validates” her and she cries as you penetrate her with your magic penis that makes people move on from decades of abuse. That’s awful.

    Mass Effect 2’s romance system feels like… well, it feels like a joke about a programmer’s idea of how love works. The kind of thing someone with absolutely no experience would make if they tried to boil it down to the most basic systems. And as a result, consent gets lost in the shuffle. You can make that beautiful woman like you if you just say the right things, whether she’s interested or not. You decide. They don’t. And one dialogue choice “switching off” romance doesn’t make it any better; it’s still my action that made them perform one way other the other, and the system breeds entitlement of the player to the character they want; you just reload rather than role-play.

    (And look. It just doesn’t work the way it does in an action film anyway, unless we’re talking about something as stupid as a Bond film, because not every woman you see in an action film immediately has a lob on for the protagonist, and then waits for him to fire into her passively. Yes—I’m actively claiming your average action film has women with more agency when it comes to romance than Mass Effect 2. Things are different if you play as a female character, and I’ll even admit your average action film doesn’t have as many women in it as Mass Effect 2, but the issues of system and consent exist even if you’re a female Shepard firing into Garrus or whatever.)

    I didn’t romance anyone in the end. Before the suicide mission, Mathew Shepard stared longingly at his picture of Liara.

    “For fuck’s sake,” I said.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ve already started Mass Effect 3. While I have very specific complaints, Mass Effect 2 is a pleasant diversion; bad narrative pacing, but nice enough shooting and a grand enough finale to make me want to keep going quite happily. Goodness, it’s almost like you can still enjoy media while acknowledging it has problematic aspects, eh?

    Final Thought: I’m cheating here but lets talk about Yeoman Kelly Chambers. At the end of the game, if you’ve romanced no-one, she’ll do a sexy dance for you in your cabin! Anyway, you can meet her fairly early in Mass Effect 3 and she’ll note that she was so disturbed by being kidnapped by “The Collectors” earlier in Mass Effect 2 that she’s suffered serious trauma about being on the Normandy and can never set foot on it again.

    That’s right! Sexy dance from a traumatised woman. Probably should have thought that through a bit.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.