Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

  May cause nausea, pheremonal overload and severe cognitive dissonance.

  This game is a memetic hazard and should be labeled as such. For countermeasures see [broken link].

  From a contemporaneous review: "I have played five games and this is the worst."

  From a positive review: "Vent your egg sacs before playing this game." Not into my sink!

  Blog post, July 9

  GAME REVIEWS OF THE INFINITE VOID 2.0 PRESENTS

  Recapture that Remarkable Taste (c. 17 million years ago)

  A game by the Yaiskek Corporation

  Reviewed by Ariel Blum

  Publisher: Various.

  Platforms: Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight, Your Return, Becomes A Better Value Over Time, et al.

  ESRB rating: M for frequent sexual references

  This is not the Sayable Spice review, but it is a review I'm mentally capable of writing, so be happy with the hand life deals ya, as my father used to say. (Presumably he still says this, but I haven't heard it in a while, because I stopped complaining to him when I got a blog.)

  Jenny and I experienced Sayable Spice in an abstract space of pure game possibility. The game doesn't take place in the typical environments of Farang games: the beach, the underwater cave, the forest, the hot spring where the water's too hot to stay for long. The famous night-sky nebula is nowhere to be seen; there's not even a day-night cycle. With no English translation and no visual clues as to what's going on, there's only so much you can say about a game. More to the point, there's only so far you can play it.

  In Sayable Spice you start out as an amoeba-like circle, glistening with vagueness. As a circle, life is good, but you can't do shit. You can explore the two-dimensional world and bump into other shapes, each with a complicated "lock" on one side that you might fit into if you weren't shaped like a damn circle.

  Fortunately, you can pick up icons that change your shape. Touch a square icon and your circle becomes a semicircle attached to half a square. Touch a triangle and the semicircle turns into a quarter-circle connected to the half-square by two sides of a triangle. There are many icons and your shape gets complicated real fast. But once you've got a few icons, you can shuffle them around, altering your shape to form a kind of appendage that's the right shape to fit into a lock and pick up a tool.

  And that's where our understanding of the game stalled. Nice game mechanic, no way of seeing through it to the game itself. Sayable Spice was made by Edink-speaking Farang, ninety million years ago. No one speaks Edink anymore and no English translator is available.

  ABlum: why not? we have huge corpus of text

  i could make my own translator if i had google's computer

  you have computronium + strong ai

  what is the problem?

  * * *

  Curic: Strong AI is the problem.

  Farang languages are multispacial

  and feature internal dialogue.

  Edink-English translation software would have nearly

  full sentience.

  You're asking me to create a new form of intelligent

  life and give it to you.

  Are you going to take care of it?

  Curic's good! She's already figured out how to play on my fear of committment.

  Jenny and I considered options like making up our own game using the Sayable Spice mechanics and calling it "Sayable Spice," or just choosing another game to port. But then on Tuesday the CDBOEGOACC was translated into English, and I noticed something I'd overlooked: we aren't the first people to do this. Seventeen million years ago, on another planet, the Aliens made a remake of Sayable Spice. And thanks to Curic's crate deliveries, I can play the remake in English.

  ABlum: it looks like a lot of the alien consoles and games are based on constellation tech/games

  mostly farang tech actually

  * * *

  Curic: We probably gave it to them during

  the contact mission.

  * * *

  ABlum: there was a contact mission?

  * * *

  Curic: Sure, how do you think they joined

  the Constellation?

  You know the Aliens. The eight-foot monkey lizards. Charlene Siph, the Constellation ambassador, is an Alien—she narrated the welcome video and she's on TV all the time. Seventeen million years ago, the Aliens' home planet hosted a number of early-industrial civilizations who made radio and then physical contact with the (smaller) Constellation. Within a generation, the Aliens were building personal computers.

  OH MY GOODNESS IT'S NEW HARDWARE TIME AGAIN

  Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight (c. 17 million years ago)

  Species: Alien

  Civilization: Ip Shkoy

  Developer: Ktei Corporation (plus many clone-makers)

  Publishing Lifetime: 7 Earth years

  You'll find the Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight in crate #2, underneath a ton of useless and/or time-sink hardware. It's very similar to the Brain Embryo, so if you've already set up a Brain Embryo (I don't recommend this) you'll have no problem setting this bad boy up. To hook it up to your television, you just need to remove the first seventy-three million years worth of adapter cables, and switch out the spectrum converter at the end. Everything should look familiar, from the abacus-like controls (greatly enlarged for Alien hands) to the all-in-one pirate-cart cylinder screwed into the data socket.

  Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight is not an exact clone of the Brain Embryo, but it was designed by people who'd taken a lot of Brain Embryos apart. It lacks the Farang system's RF emitters, since Aliens don't have the Farang water-sense any more than humans do. But its processor handles the same six-dimensional polygons, even though without the RF emitters you really only need three.

  Play Recapture That Remarkable Taste and it will become clear that Sayable Spice lacks the standard Farang forests and beaches because the game takes place inside your brain. That vague circle you play as isn't a person: it's a memory tomia, a concept from Farang psychology. Your job is to assemble little bits of memories from the subconscious and try to get the attention of the conscious mind.

  In this game you play the sense of taste; the sense of remembered taste. The little shaped icons are chemical compounds, and after picking up a few, you can shuffle them into a shape that fits into a "flavor" (the tools). The concept of a flavor, whatever. The challenge is in managing your inventory of remembered chemical compounds—this isn't Proty's Big Escape where the power-ups are arranged so you get one right before you need it. If you have to drop a flavor, you lose all the compounds that formed the "key" you used to grab it, and you go right back to being a circle.

  Yeah, at this point Jenny and I ran into another wall. Pick up three or four related flavors, and this memory tomia catches the attention of the conscious mind. Then you supposedly get a playable flashback or daydream related to the flavors. So if in the remake we create flavors like "roasted peanuts," "sauerkraut," and "beer," you'd put them together to get a day at the ballpark—some memory or fantasy that fills in the life story of whoever's brain you're in.

  But who's gonna know about peanuts/sauerkraut/beer, seventeen million years from now? Even an English translation is useless when the most important words in the game are transliterations with no cultural context. Man, fuck you, Ip Shkoy Aliens, with your evike and your prash pods.

  How do I know that this flavor-combination thing is part of the original Sayable Spice and not something the Yaiskek Corporation made up for the remake? Because that would imply that the Yaiskek Corporation gave a damn about creativity. This is a company that got its start recording dance-hall radio broadcasts from the Alien civilizations on other continents and rebroadcasting the tapes in Ip Shkoy cities without permission.

  Just like with humanity's first computers, most of the early games for the Hi-Def False Daylight were digital versions of analog Alien games, or (not so much like humanity's first computers) clones of Constellation titles adapted for Alien senses. Yaiskek
decided that this was their kind of business, and jumped into the market with a bunch of cheap clone games. When they ran out of Farang games to clone, Yaiskek cloned their competitors' games, and after learning their competitors' tricks, they switched to selling cheap 'n' trashy mask cylinders—more on these later.

  And now you see the real problem with Recapture that Remarkable Taste: It's a game made by people who had nothing invested in the franchise. Like, imagine those awful movie adaptions of decent game series like Unauthorized, made for the sake of a quick buck and/or tax shelter. Except imagine that instead of making a movie, you made another video game. That's Recapture that Remarkable Taste. The writing's cheesy, the graphics make it hard to distinguish between basic geometric shapes, and it was originally released on a memory cylinder with two other ported Farang games—your sure sign of quality.

  But even Yaiskek couldn't fuck up Sayable Spice that badly, which means Jenny and I should be able to do a pretty good job. There's something grown-up about this game—the way it assumes you can keep track of complex shapes, the fact that it takes place in the mind of someone old enough to have flashbacks. Makes me glad I started my own game studio. If I'd pitched this remake to the Brazillian company, they'd turn it into a game about making birthday cakes for all your moe friends.

  Blog post, July 9, late night

  A special message to "Starman Jones." In the interests of interstellar cooperation, fuck you. I call you out, sir.

  Since the English translation of the CDBOEGOACC came out, I've seen about five new blogs devoted to going through the database looking for interesting/funny/stupid things. These blogs are awesome. And then there's your blog, where you lead people on with made-up bullshit. You're claiming you've actually played these games. You're bluffing to get attention. You're the kid in seventh grade claiming he's got the codes to make Dana Light take her clothes off.

  You write about "the majestic games of the Wazungu, which take days to play." Did you actually get a replica system (which, as I understand it, would be the size of a refrigerator), learn about pre-Constellation Wazungu culture, and spend days playing their games to find out if they're majestic? Or did you just wait until there was a translation of the CDBOEGOACC and then start a blog full of fake reviews and purple-ass travelogue prose?

  Seeing people jump on this translation, even in stupid ways, made me remember how privileged I am that I get to play these games for real. I'm going to try to be better about bringing them to you on a regular basis. And things will get better. I doubt there's a computer in the CDBOEGOACC more powerful than today's phones. Eventually we'll write emulators. We have the rest of our lives to get to know the Constellation. There is no need for bullshit.

  * * *

  Chapter 10: K.I.S.S.I.N.G

  Blog post, July 10

  Hey, stop sending me email about the stupid plastic board. I know it's in the CDBOEGOACC—that's where I found out which games were "compatible" with it. It's called "Where Sun Can See" and it's described as a way of sharing game data and messages.

  Sharing with whom? Well, Double Attack, for instance, is a game you play over a period of time, alternating with your crossself. So it turns out the Farang do have two-player games, but both players share a body and switch off.

  ABlum: do you ever have to leave messages to your other self?

  * * *

  Curic: No, we use the brain for that.

  Young people sometimes have trouble taking their

  crossself's opinions and preferences into account.

  Written messages will help with that.

  It's for kids, yeah? It's all part of the magic of growing up two different people in the same body.

  Blog post, July 12

  The best thing about the Simulates Hi-Def False Daylight system is the memory mask cylinders. See, Brain Embryo software comes on a little screw-in cylinders, each holding a single polished read-only work of computer art. When the Aliens remade the Brain Embryo as the Hi-Def False Daylight, they added a socket to the top of each memory cylinder, into which you can screw another memory cylinder. You can daisy-chain cylinders without limit, each one patching the ROM of the cylinder above it, until the read time becomes atrocious and the computer's memory becomes a rancid soup of hacks and patches to that original program you've got teetering at the top of the tower.

  A lot of small companies put out mask cylinders for popular games—level hacks, text hacks, graphics hacks. It was a good way to make some cash without worrying about boring things like originality or operating capital.

  Recapture that Remarkable Taste was not a best-selling game, but it did well enough to have four mask cylinders. I don't own these cylinders—no space in the crates— but the all-in-one pirate cart can emulate them just like it emulates the games.

  "RtRT: Closer Look": In Sayable Spice the player character is a circle. In Recapture that Remarkable Taste it's a little polygonic picture of an Alien. This patch changes the picture so that the Alien is, how to put this delicately, totally not wearing any clothes. Prurient interest and what I must assume are secondary sexual characteristics abound. (This cylinder was made by the Yaiskek corporation. They put out a nude hack for their own game!)

  "Intelligent Multisystem 4": A big honking cylinder, dwarfing the RtRT cylinder itself in mass and circumference, containing its own dedicated processor and speaker. This one sits beneath all three games on the RtRT cylinder, and reads out the Pey Shkoy dialogue in a low-res robotic voice. Not sure why—it won't really help blind people play the games. Bonus points for coming up with a name so generic it could be a piece of human hardware.

  "Recapture That Remarkable Time". A total conversion which changes the plot of the game so that it's making fun of old farts who wish the Constellation would go away, and who blame the ETs for everything that's wrong with Ip Shkoy society. RtRT came out fifty years after contact, so there must have been plenty of old farts around. Funny but kind of cruel: the old fart player-character comes off as harmlessly confused, as if the Constellation had preempted Matlock. Much easier for a human to understand than RtRT.

  "G'go Investigation: When You Gotta Die": Total de-version published by the G'go Corporation, makers of serial soap operas in role-playing-game form. They removed all the game mechanics: instead of chemicals and flavors, the player character can interact with a bunch of annoying NPCs from other G'go games. Each NPC delivers a one-liner and then dies in a spectacular animation, eg. being eaten by a sharklike creature, except the shark doesn't even bother to eat the NPC, just pulls opens its stomach and stuffs the NPC right into the gastric juices. For collectors only.

  I must say I feel some sympathy for these small-time con artists. There's a whole year of my life which could be summed up as "Ariel puts out a mask cylinder for a popular game." Even after quitting Reflex and the Brazilian company I'm still cranking out these mask cylinders, as those of you on my friends list will soon find out.

  Blog post, July 13

  [This post is friends locked.]

  Listen up. This one's for all my college friends who moved out of Austin and who have been giving me shit about Bai ever since, as though I were his designated caretaker. I have solved the Dana Light problem. Just not in the way you wanted.

  Before the Sexy Cookout on the 28th, my attitude was laissez-faire. With the economy the way it is, I figured everyone should pick one luxury and run with it. For instance, I have my crippling mortgage. Jenny has her art (by this I mean her art supplies, not the $25 sketches she gets at UTAkuCon). And Bai had Dana Light.

  But at the Sexy Cookout, there was a little party-fart involving Bai and Dana. As the party's on-call sysadmin, I manfully defused the Bai/Dana situation by slandering Jenny. Even if you'd been there, you wouldn't have noticed it. I grabbed Bai the beer I'd promised him and went off to fight other fires. But Bai drank that beer, and then he drank another one, and eventually got up the courage to corner me again and ask for an embarassing favor.

  "So I heard you got la
id off, bro," he said.

  "Actually, I quit," I said. "It's like I laid the company off."

  "Yeah, well," said Bai. "Do you want to make some money?"

  "I don't want to design wind turbines, if that's what you're asking," I said. "Did you not see where I announced that I was forming a game studio?"

  "This isn't for work," said Bai. "'Spersonal. I want you to jailbreak Dana for me." His phone came out again; Dana was eating popcorn and watching one of Bai's taped shows. Which was always weird to me; I imagine the "real" Dana Light having more intense hobbies, like kickboxing, or LARPing wargames.

  "What's... wrong with Dana?" I said.

  "Nothing!" said Bai. "I love Dana. But she's high maintenance. Every week she wants some sunglasses or a car or some other downloadable content. She's bleeding me dry, bro."

  And here's the problem with your backseat driving of the Ariel-Bai relationship, guys. You weren't at the Sexy Cookout because you left town years ago. You still have this college-era picture of me and Bai in your heads, so you're imagining Bai from 2007 with some Dana-like piece of software from 2007, and me "putting up" with some vaguely-defined "shit".

  Well, something happened in 2007: it was the fucking iPhone. People with money started pouring it into mobile, and once the up-front price of an app fell to a dollar, they started doing psychological research into apps designed to drive DLC upsell and in-app buys. I know y'all was snickering at my work for the Brazilian company with the ponies and the birthday cakes, but I saw this stuff firsthand. Sure as the Brazilians have the ten-year-old girls' number, there's someone next door in Bolivia who's got yours.