Tech

As promised, an apolitical post this time around

What is it about vampires that so captures our imagination? Lately I’ve unearthed a couple of old vampire PC games that used to keep me up into the wee hours. I buried myself in the puzzle getting them to fly on my Steam Deck, and have been drinking in once again their ambiance and action. One is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, released in 2004; the other is Dark, released in 2013.

(Before I go on, let me say that playing these games with joysticks is sooo much better than with mouse and keyboard, especially when traversing those spiral stairs in Maximilian Straus’s house in Bloodlines.)

The Steam Deck puzzles for running each of these games have been absorbing  tasks, a welcome distraction from the headlines.

Neither game is supported in the Deck’s Arch Linux build, but for Bloodlines the adaptation process is fairly well documented here and there online. Which is not surprising, given the game retains an amazingly large and active fan base even now, 25 years after its release. In fact, part of my impetus for playing again has been the recent release of a few pretty amazing fan mods.

The most important of the Bloodlines mods is the “Unofficial Patch,” without which pretty much none of the rest would work. This patch fixes some bugs from the original game, also restoring character options, maps, and side quests that were trimmed for the game’s original release, but whose files remained in hidden folders of the program. Those restorations alone have extended the game’s life throughout the decades. It even restores a completely new set of endings for the story, for players willing to join the Sabbat.  Built on that patch, most Bloodlines mods follow the original storyline but add a few extra features such as extra clan choices or new side quests.

Of the Bloodlines mods, War Games is the first I’ve encountered that completely ditches the original story line and maps, replacing them with a World War II mission. When I first played War Games several years ago, the code was still somewhat buggy but playable. Since then it has been smoothed out quite a lot. Granted, without a professional budget, the mod’s voice acting remains minimal, sometimes jarring—the result a mix of dialog that’s sometimes human voice, sometimes AI, and sometimes merely text dialog. Frankly I prefer the text, with my mental ear filling in, especially for Sebastian LaCroix, who plays a minor role here but a central role in the original game.

Preludes I and II are a pair of more recent mods that have blown me away with their quality is Preludes I and II. A Preludes III is in the offing, to continue the trilogy. Preludes together are a story line placed immediately before the events of the original game—and that includes a couple of significant spoilers, so you should definitely play the original beforehand. As a part-time labor of love, the trilogy’s development progresses in fits and starts, and II still has a couple of side quests that remain unfinished. But even now, that pair of mods is so, so satisfying, with some real surprises. I’ve talked with the developer a bit by email, and plans for Prelude III have me very excited.

Turning to the second game … getting Dark to run on the Steam Deck is a much more difficult task. The game is much less popular, to say the least, so there’s nearly no discussion online of Linux adaptation, and virtually zero of potential Steam Deck use. In fact, had I not also tried the game on a Linux desktop installation, I’d’ve had no clue as to why it was launching nothing but a black screen on the Deck.

But on the desktop, I discovered that starting up the game first opens a Kalypso Media pop-up that connects to their website, and you have to click “Launch” on that pop-up screen to load the game. I ventured a guess that the Deck was choking on that pop-up, and I searched online for a way to disable that. Eventually I discovered a tactic of adding a “127.0.0.1 launcher01.kalypsomedia.com” line of text to the end of the Deck’s “/etc/hosts” file, redirecting the pop-up to the Deck itself as host, instead of the online site. Yeah, it sounds pretty arcane to me, too, and locating that hidden “hosts” file wasn’t easy. So you can imagine my satisfaction when it worked.

Honestly, part of why I enjoy dicking around with these tech puzzles is the gratification of subverting a system, making it do things outside its intended parameters. (See my “Playing the Oddball Options” post for some examples of subverting some TCGs.)

I mentioned above that Dark is “a much less popular game, to say the least.” Frankly, it gets hated on quite a lot, and I understand why: The dialog and voice acting are hackneyed noir; the story line is utterly linear, the movement options are sometimes frustratingly limited, and you’re pretty much forced to develop the character’s skills into a few specific choices, because the combat skills are lame. It’s clearly not an open-world first-person shooter.

But it ticks off three check boxes for me. Firstly, I like “walking games,” a category in which the experience of the journey is the whole point. Journey and Dear Esther are the epitome of the form for me. So Dark’s linear plot is satisfying. Secondly, I love puzzle solving, and I find traversing each locale in Dark thoroughly engaging. That the product includes a handful of separate “Challenge” maps outside of the main game adds to that satisfaction. And finally, the vampire’s shadow powers in this game feel so frickin’ cool! As a result, I can ignore the fact that I ought to be able to climb a particular hedge and can’t, or jump to a particular fire escape and can’t, for the sake of a game that let’s me jump halfway across the screen as an embodiment of shadow.

YMMV

Okay, before closing out this post, let me touch on something I absolutely hate about Bloodlines and find a bit irritating in Dark: the excessive objectification of females.

Yes, the vampire is a seductive, predatory creature in fiction. It is effectively a sort of incubus or succubus, and its prey is often drawn in by that sexuality. I’ve no complaint about the same being true in a game. As long as it’s true for all genders.

But you can’t swing a dead cat in Bloodlines without hitting a female hooker, and nearly every back alley has some woman performing fellatio on some guy in business clothes. Add in that one of the cheat codes is specifically for breast size, and the design team seems a stereotypical bunch of horny teenage boys with power fantasies. In fact, the release of Bloodlines 2 for decades while the publishers purged that game of the original developer.

Dark is less problematic overall, though I find the stereotypical “rescue the princess” ending an annoying unnecessity.  But the especial crime is a lascivious statue of two women intertwined, gratuitously placed for a near unavoidable encounter in the game’s very beginning. Dark highlights anything you can interact with, and this is the first, but clicking it results in the protagonist’s infantile reaction, “Pretty! Pretty!”

So, Bloodlines makes me cringe upon stumbling across a gratuitous blow job or topless back alley character anywhere in the game. Dark makes me grit my teeth at that one spot, and frown that the female club owner at the story’s beginning becomes the protagonist’s “plus one” at the end.

Those things having been said, I do recommend Bloodlines for its many, many options for repeated play, Dark for the feel of the game and its inventive story line and downloadable content. And I especially recommend playing each with joystick controls, which the Steam Deck makes quite nice.