Constellation Games

by Leonard Richardson

Svetlana Sveta has taken over writing the Crispy Duck Games corporate blog. It seems my habit of burying the marketing copy inside layers of self-loathing does not leave a good impression. When I was a kid, I always had to be the one to load the dishwasher, because my brother Raph always broke the dishes. Now I have cashed in that karmic check and I have more time to record the truth of my life on this blog.

  Jenny's also pushing me to find another place to live. Her couch cushions are starting to smell bad. I'm working on it!

  Blog post, September 17

  GAME REVIEWS OF NEPOTISM 2.0 PRESENTS

  Temple Sphere (2012)

  A game by Reflex Games

  Reviewed by Ariel Blum

  Publisher: Reflex Games

  Platforms: Xbox Forever, Playstation 4

  ESRB rating: M for the usual killy shooty crap

  I stuck Bai's Temple Sphere disk into his Xbox. "It's time to learn!" said Tetsuo Milk.

  "We can give this two, three hours," I said. "Then I need to do some work. You should understand how to play by then."

  "You'll go back to Jenny's apartment?"

  "Jenny has a date with a pretty-boy who cuts himself," I said. "So I'm sleeping here tonight."

  Tetsuo turned the game box over and over, and sniffed the plastic. "This game became public three years ago?" he said.

  "Yeah, two and a half," I said. "Loooong before contact." I sat back on Bai's couch, the couch I'd be sleeping on. I picked up a controller from the coffee table and played through the "navigate the Xbox game-loading menus" minigame.

  "All right!" said Tetsuo. "I'm exciting. I want to see the fictional extraterrestrials." The second controller hid in Tetsuo's vast forehands. He tapped buttons.

  "I'm starting a new campaign in story mode," I said.

  "I want the buttons to do something," said Tetsuo.

  "You don't need that," I said. "Campaign mode is single-player. We'll trade off the one controller."

  "This game was many-player on the party night."

  "That was deathmatch. Multi-player stories are too shallow or too hard to write."

  "It should be easier!" said Tetsuo. "More people telling a story makes it easier."

  "I don't tell you how the Ip Shkoy signaled social dominance," I said. "Don't tell me how to design games."

  "You're showing me hostility."

  "I'm starting the game," I said.

  Yes, Easy Mode, No, No, Skip Boot Camp. Cut scene: spaceship: exterior shot. Caption:

  UNSF DEEP-SPACE CRUISER "MALAWI"

  JUNE 11, 2122

  "They got the date kind of right," I said. "For first contact."

  "What does that date mean?" said Tetsuo. "What's their inertial reference frame?"

  "It means it's the future, okay?"

  "Why aren't you pushing buttons?"

  "This is a cutscene."

  "What's a—"

  "It's a movie where the story happens."

  "Why is a movie in a game?" asked Tetsuo.

  The cutscene cuts to the interior of Malawi, where Lieutenant Luntz has us blue-beret maggots lined up in formation. "This is a civilian operation!" he yells. "All non-essential personnel are confined to quarters! If you are in this room, you are not essential!" Yadda yadda yadda. Luntz reminds me of Colonel Mason, the head of Tammy's Mars mission.

  I killed the cutscene and started the first playable scene of Temple Sphere: standing in a barracks with five other soldiers, who were playing poker on a foot locker using plastic cards and magnetic chips.

  "Where did the douchebag go?" said Tetsuo. "I wanted to see him flaunt his relative social dominance."

  "That cutscene didn't have any ETs," I said. "I want to get through as much as possible today."

  "The douchebag will die, yeah? It is your 'foreshadowing'."

  "He doesn't last five minutes," I said.

  One of the poker players called out a scripted AI event—"Hey, Martinez, join the game." Instead of playing forty-five seconds of poker (Reflex loves their games-within-games), I kicked open my own foot locker and pulled out a spacesuit. Instantly sheathed, I cycled through the HUD configurations.

  "I have another question," said Tetsuo.

  "It's about the spacesuit," I said, "and I'm putting on the spacesuit because the ETs we're meeting on this 'civilian operation' turn out to be the Tools of Justice, and in thirty seconds they come out from behind a moon and blow up the Malawi."

  "You must foreknow this?"

  "No, but if you decide to play poker with your buddies instead of getting ready, you fall to the planet and it's two hours before you see a Tool outside his battle armor. I don't want this to be a multi-day thing. I got work to do."

  I opened a hatch in the bulkhead and ran out of the room. A warning flashed in my HUD about confined-to-quarters. "Hey!" said one of the AI poker-players, but nobody got up to follow me.

  "Staying in quarters puts you on the Combat path, which is for frat boys. But if you disobey orders, you can make it to one of the Tools' targeter scouts and take the Infiltration path through the game, which is a) a better game and b) has more backstory."

  "The douchebag coerced you. You promised to stay in your room."

  "And if you're a frat boy, you don't think to leave. It's what we in the computer business call an affordance."

  I ducked behind a larged potted plant to hide from a patrol, then sprinted into the vestibule of an airlock. Again someone shouted "Hey!" and this time there were footsteps.

  "Now they're angry," said Tetsuo. "You broke your promise."

  From a rack I selected a pair of thrusters, which instantly installed on my spacesuit. "It doesn't matter because—yup, there it is." An explosion tossed my player character into a bulkhead.

  "Okay, out we go." I jumped out the airlock with the precision of an early-beta tester, and tumbled through space, catching upside-down glimpses of Malawi as the Tool of Justice assault vessels carved it up with laser beams.

  Fiery antimatter explosions cracked the ship along the lines of its construction. Tiny suited figures jumped or were thrown free of the explosions and fell towards the planet below. A bunch of NPCs for the frat boys to meet later down the Combat path.

  "That's a huge-large spaceship," said Tetsuo.

  I paused the game. "Well, it's the future."

  "Spaceships will never be so huge!" said Tetsuo. "You should build a tiny spaceship to tow a tiny port to where you want to go, and then everyone can walk through the port."

  "There's already a video game about ports," I said. "Anyway, we didn't know they could really exist." I handed Tetsuo the controller.

  "The hard part is done," I said. "Getting onto the Infiltration path in the first place. Now it's your turn. You need to intercept a targeter scout, throw the pilot out, and fly back to the hangar ship. The thruster controls are on the heads-up display."

  Tetsuo pinched the controller between two fingers and tapped a couple buttons. Nothing happened. "Ariel?" he said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Which button did you use to stop time?"

  "The big one in the middle."

  On his third try, Tetsuo got the hang of the thruster controls and escaped the destruction of Malawi. He set the controls to send him putt-putting along towards the enormous Tool flagship. Within twenty seconds, he was disturbed by a high-pitched beeping noise.

  "Is that your phone?" said Tetsuo. He pushed the big button in the middle and the noise stopped.

  "It's your suit proximeter," I said. "There's a targeter scout coming at you. Now's your chance."

  "I see nothing."

  "It's coming in from below you," I said. "It shows up on your 3D radar."

  "Whose amazing idea was it to have a war in space?"

  "You can lock on to the ship by activating your boot magnets."

  "Tell me a button."

  "R2A."

  "Tell me the position of the button."

  "Under your... your index finger, I guess?"

  "You name your
fingers?"

  I flopped at the controller. "There!"

  I activated Tetsuo's magnets and he fell with a clank onto a Tool of Justice single-occupancy support vessel. His in-suit radio receiver picked up the vessel's pilot cursing in Pure Speech.

  "Okay," I said, "just walk up to the top..." clank, clank, clank, "and there's your fictional pre-contact extraterrestrial."

  Tetsuo paused the game again and crawled close to the screen. Corporal Martinez stood at the rear of the tiny vessel, looking down and forward into the cockpit. The targeter pilot, a guardian-caste Tool, was twisting around in his safety straps, trying to get a glimpse of the intruder on his hull.

  "What an unclimax," said Tetsuo. "It looks like an Earth bird."

  "Well, you look like a Komodo dragon."

  "It looks really like a bird," said Tetsuo. He cocked his head. "Except for its huge beak."

  "The beak is real, too," I said. "Toucan beak. This guy is the guardian caste. He'll smell you with that thing from a hundred yards."

  Tetsuo took out the Temple Sphere strategy guide he'd bought at the used bookstore, and flipped to the section with big renders of the Tools of Justice.

  "Hrm, a eusocial life-culture," said Tetsuo. "Like the Gaijin."

  "Like the bees," I said. "We didn't know there really were eusocial extraterrestrials. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a way to make you feel okay with..."

  "With killing them," said Tetsuo.

  "It's a war, Tets. It's an FPS. There's gonna be some killing."

  "Oh, a war," said Tetsuo. "Occasionally I'm glad my children are incubating on a space station which humans can't visit."

  "This is no worse than Ev luie Aka's Ultimate DIY Lift-Off," I said. "And that came out fifty years after contact."

  "Ariel, this is your mother," said my phone from Bai's coffee table.

  "Now that's my phone," I said. "Hold on."

  "Ariel, this is your mother."

  "Why did I think this ringtone was a good idea?" I said. I tapped the phone.

  "Ariel, this is your mother," said my mother. And there went Temple Sphere for the rest of the day, so there's your review of a game you've already played.

  Real life, September 17

  "Ariel, this is your mother."

  "Yeah, hi, Ma, what's up?" Rather than courteously turning away, Tetsuo stared intently at me-on-the-phone.

  "Well," said my mother, "I wanted to call and plan our trip down to Austin this weekend."

  It never stops! "Ma, it's not a good time. My house burned down. I can't put you up right now."

  "Well, we're looking at hotels, but I thought, what if you and Tetsuo came up here? It would be simpler, and since you're between jobs right now—"

  "I have a job, Ma. I started a company. That gives you a job. Why is Tetsuo involved in this?"

  "I greet your mother!" said Tetsuo.

  "Tetsuo just greeted you," I told my mother, "as though you had had some kind of previous interaction with him."

  "Hello to Tetsuo," said my mother. "He invited us down. He's worried about his class on Constellation history. He wants to talk to people with teaching experience."

  I covered the receiver—the whole phone, really. "Tets, can't you talk with someone at UT?" I hissed. "Why does it have to be my folks?"

  "I am talking with many people," said Tetsuo.

  "I don't—graah."

  "May I speak to her through your phone?" said Tetsuo.

  "Knock yourself out." Tetsuo transfered the Xbox controller to his hindhands, took my phone, and pressed it against the front of his face.

  "Hello, tyen," he said, letting his Purchtrin accent deepen a little. "Yes! Are you healthy? Your mate? Yes, if everything was on a web page there'd be no point— They said— yes, I ask if you have an office at Texas A&M University? Because the wise elders of the college pledged me half of an office, and— I don't know with who. Someone small, I hope, like a human or a Farang.

  "Yes, I will ask them for a complete office. Hear my conclusion, tyen. If I come to see you, you and your mate can show me your offices. Without this information, I do not know how to decorate my own. It is settled! Later there will be details."

  Tetsuo hung up the phone and handed it back to me. I jammed it into my pants pocket. Tetsuo resumed flipping through the Temple Sphere strategy guide.

  "It is settled," said Tetsuo. "I'll go up. You don't have to go."

  Man, what a n00b. "Oh, I have to go," I said. "You don't know how this works."

  "How works it?" Tetsuo asked. "Is this a folkway?"

  "You volunteered to visit my mom and dad. By the laws of parental guilt, you are now the son they could have had. Now I have to do better than you."

  "Does this mean I have been accepted into your tribe?"

  "Only for purposes of guilt trips."

  "I apologize for causing you trouble," said Tetsuo.

  "Save it, smooth talker," I said. "Save it for my parents."

  Tetsuo had flipped through to the end of the strategy guide while we were talking. Now he turned the final page and closed it, blinding me with the glare from the glossy cover. He thought over this for a while, as though he had a DVR in his head.

  "Shall we keep playing?" I said.

  "Suspicion confirmed!" said Tetsuo. "This game ends with a genocide! The player character kills all of these enormous bird-people!"

  "What? No! It's just the warrior caste."

  Tetsuo thumped the strategy guide like a Bible. "That excuse is terrible!" he said. "If you killed all the Gaijin kemmers, the rest would be unable to reproduce. What were you smoking? Perhaps it was crack!"

  "Tets, they cancelled Temple Sphere 2. It would be bad taste. I don't know what else you want. Have you ever cancelled a game? It's not cheap."

  "You were an employee of Reflex Games," said Tetsuo.

  "Yeah, I quit," I said. "Five years ago, okay? I didn't work on Temple Sphere. I did the prequel."

  "What was the prequel?"

  "Recoil," I said. "Just humans killing each other. No ETs."

  "I can see why you would rather create games about ponies," said Tetsuo.

  "Your conclusion is totally wrong," I said. "I quit because Reflex was full of douchebags."

  "You also said the Brazilian company was full of douchebags," said Tetsuo. "You are employed by a suspicious number of douchebags!"

  "It's an industry epidemic."

  "Also a disease of academe," said Tetsuo. "When I first spoke to your mother about lecturing, she said bad things about many colleagues. Is your entire planet populated by douchebags?"

  "Yes!" I said. "Now you see my predicament!"

  * * *

  Chapter 26: Everyone With Cartoon Violence

  Blog post, September 19, afternoon

  It's a crowded situation here at chez Blum College Station, as my parents are renting out to a boarder (an A&M student) in my brother Raph's old room. Obviously the way to handle my and Tetsuo's visit on top of that is to have me sleep in the living room, and give my old bed to the seven-foot-six space alien, not counting the tail.

  Tetsuo and I pulled his steamer trunk into my bedroom, panting. "I've been living on a couch all month," I said. "So if you wouldn't mind doing your actual sleeping in the living room...I mean, there's no way you'll fit in this bed."

  "I will sleep on an inflatable pillow-mattress of my own design," said Tetsuo.

  "Okay, great, but by parental decree, your stuff goes in here. I always just use the closet."

  "You once lived in this room?" Tetsuo had worn his "status hat" (a cowboy hat) on the train ride up to College Station, and he had never taken it off. Now the ceiling fan brushed it off and he caught it.

  "Yeah, in high school. Hey, you should scan this room, like Curic did my old house."

  "We can't scan every place you've lived, just in case there's an additional fire."

  "No, I mean, this room is exactly the way it was when I left for college. It's a historical recreation. It has
n't changed since 2004. I didn't know Jenny, or Bai, or anyone."

  Tetsuo looked around and pointed at a plug-in air freshener near the window. "This appliance says copyright 2013," he said.

  "Well, it hasn't changed very much. But when my folks find another boarder, all this stuff gets boxed up and put in the attic. This is your last chance."

  "I'd rather interview the former inhabitant," said Tetsuo. He opened my desk drawer and gently lifted out a red plastic protractor.

  I opened the closet that used to contain my dress shirts. It was now full of boxes marked RAPHAEL BDRM. I jumped over Tetsuo's trunk and started dragging it towards the other closet. Tetsuo said nothing.

  "Former inhabitant?" I said. "That would be me."

  "Hrm-hrm. Perhaps you want to tell me about the Greek emotion called nostalgia." Tetsuo held the protractor by one end and waved it up and down. The cheap plastic wobbled.

  I thought about going back in time and telling my younger self that in ten years a space alien would be in my room waving my protractor around. Except I didn't remember the protractor at all.

  "There's no nostalgia here," I said. "Nostalgia's in the rec room with the TV and the game systems. This is where I got sent when I wasn't allowed to play anymore."

  "Nostalgia is only for good memories?" I don't think Tetsuo was being sarcastic.

  I strained against paint that had turned into glue and yanked open the other closet door. "Oh, geez," I said. Half-hidden behind an old computer monitor was my secret pinup of PS2-era Dana Light, her polygonal tits looming out of a camouflage halter top as she blew smoke out of her pistol.

  "I am going to die," I said. "I can't believe that's been hanging in here the whole time!" I reached to pull the poster down.

  "Don't touch anything!" said Tetsuo. "This room is historical!"

  "You guys already scanned my notebooks," I said. "Leave me some dignity!"

  Real life, September 19, late night

  "So obviously Raph has to be Raphael," I said.

  "Why is it obvious?" said Tetsuo. He laid on an ottoman and lifted his head above the dinner table to look us in the eyes.

  "Well, the name's the same," I said.