I should preface this by saying that I haven't liked a vampire movie, book, or game since Subspecies 2, Carpe Jugulum, and Castlevania 2, respectively. I have, however, compensated for this by disliking almost every vampire movie, book and game with a passion that far surpasses what could justifiably be called 'sane.'
Over the course of the twentieth century vampires went through a transformation from blood drinking animate corpses, to a staple of not-very-good horror movies, to a staple of not-very-good horror movies no one watched, to porn for weird girls, before finally congealing into their current incarnation: training manuals for teenagers that want to appear on Jerry Springer someday.
White Wolf Publishing's Vampire: The Masquerade pen and paper RPG, from what I can tell, attempts to create an ordered, underground society out the many different breeds of vampires, while simultaneously capturing the minds and wallets of the elusive 13-17, skinny male/overweight female, upper-middle class, black t-shirt demographic.
In the "Land of Darkness," (White Wolf's silly fucking name for their silly fucking game world,) vampires are split into numerous different clans, such as the Toreador (Brad Pitt in Interview with a Vampire,) the Brujah (Stephen Dorff in Blade,) the Ventrue (Bill Nighy in Underworld,) the Nosferatu (the Nosferatu in Nosferatu,) and so on. It is also very hardcore, and tough, and sexy, and not fucking silly. Because if there's one thing role-playing game aficionados wish they could be more than anything in real life, it's hardcore, or tough, or sexy, or not fucking silly. These various Clans are policed by the Camarilla, enforcers of the vampire code of conduct known as The Masquerade, adding political and social struggles to the normal eating people and not attracting an angry mob struggles. Whether this approach works with role players, a group of people known for arguing for hours over whether +1 damage rings are factored before or after a +10% enchantment and saying things like "a buxom wench with a gleam in her eye" with a straight face, will remain a mystery, as I can't seem to muster enough give-a-shit to do another Google search.
All of which brings me to my point: I just played almost an hour of Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines, a RPG-FPS hybrid for the PC developed by Troika. If you don't know anything about CRPGs, then you should know this generally means "Oh! The guys that always release 85% of an awesome game." And that 85% usually more than makes up for the 15% of bugs, shitty combat, confusing controls and/or poor interface they always forget to leave out.
After searching for the latest fan patch I found a mod that added clan-specific quests, as well as several other optional improvements and re-balances. It even promised a 'nightmare' difficulty, which, given that I'm playing an undead with supernatural powers, should have put all of the humans in breeding dungeons, leaving me free to hunt and torment them individually in my personal Labyrinth of Rotted Meat, full of giant insects and thaumaturgically engineered abominations against God and science. What it meant to say was 'masochistic' difficulty. So I disabled those options when I installed it.
The character creation screen gave me the option of either choosing my own stats or asking me a series of psychological questions to best determine my character. Upon discovering that the questions were exactly as accurate as MySpace personality tests I decided to tough it out with the character sheet. After choosing my sex (woman with impossibly big boobs,) class (brujah, the only class not seemingly targeted at the kind of people that smoke Clove cigarettes, misquote Monty Python movies in Denny's at 3AM, and know way too much about Edgar Allen Poe's personal life,) I assigned my skill points to several similarly-named and seemingly redundant skill trees. The game then prompted me to pick an optional 'history,' which is a trade-off perk. I decided to take one that offered increased Blood Buff with a -2 to frenzy. Since I didn't know what either of those things were it seemed a harmless enough choice. I mean, buffs you can control and frenzy you can't, so you want less frenzy, right? I mean, it's not the kind of thing that would render my character functionally unplayable five minutes after the tutorial level, right?
The opening cinematic played out well enough. The game looked good. And ran well, which is shocking since I don't have a high-end system. Quite the opposite. I didn't watch most of the movie, as I was trying to readjust my monitor to get the entire screen on the screen and none of the buttons seemed to function as 'pause.' I gained control in a generic shithole of an alley and began the game with a conversation with what I can only assume was a homeless sex offender before he became a homeless vampire sex offender. I punched him several times on accident, since the Mark of Cain magically allows vampires' left mouse key to only do that, as opposed to the left mouse key of humans, which can be used contextually to interact with a large variety of things in a large variety of ways.
Around this time I began to notice a great many things. I noticed the many, many helpful dialogue windows that explained what each key on the keyboard did. I also noticed that the only way to close them was with the mouse. I also noticed that I would need to have both hands on the keyboard to play the game, since every single key on the keyboard did something different. I noticed that there was no way in hell I was going to remember half of these. I noticed that my vampire had very poor traction. I noticed that I'm not allowed to feed on civilians around witnesses, even though I have to leave my meal alive, which would seem to qualify as "a witness." I noticed that I still do not have three hands. I noticed that I really, really believe that the Playstation 2 controller has the right number of buttons for a human, which is not 40. I noticed that there didn't seem to be a save function, or a proper inventory screen, or glossary, or mini-map, or any numbers for my HP/MP (blood power or whatever they call it,) which is fine, provided it's full. But is full 50? 10? Should I conserve spells or just buff myself to demi-godhood and feed on the remains of my fallen adversaries? Did they really think mapping "talk" to "E" and "lunging-bite-attack" to "F" was the absolute best design choice in a game that involves me frequently taking my hands off of the keyboard to close fucking dialogue popups? Did they not notice that "E" and "F" are right next to "W," which is forward, and "D," which is move right?
The homeless vampire sex offender (HVSO,) despite repeatedly telling me that we had no time for introductions, especially since we were surrounded by a gang war between a gorilla wizard and wolfmen with Uzi's, proceeded to slowly and confusingly direct me through the tutorial level, using unhelpful clues like "sneak through the alley across from us," despite that alley being a dead end containing nothing but a hobo woozy from blood loss. The next half hour of resentment-building exercises contained such gems as "jump with the space key onto the boxes, fall off, take your hand off the mouse to use the other direction arrows so you can aim your jump, go back to the mouse to close the goddamn popup, hit the "E" key to pick up the lockpick, go back to the mouse because the fucking popup wasn't done explaining what lockpicks do (they pick locks, apparently,) fall off the catwalk after accidentally hitting the lunge button, jump back up, pick up the lockpick," and "spend ten minutes hacking the only computer in the world still running DOS to open the safe to get the key, take the keycard to HVSO, punch HVSO on accident, punch HVSO again on purpose for being a dickhead, jump, remember 'space bar' isn't the talk button either, finally open the door, wonder why we didn't just kick the door in," and "shoot the bottles off of the crate, no, don't try to feed off of those rats over there, I said shoot the bottles, I don't care if you're a melee class and yes, I know mapping melee and ranged weapons to F1 and F2 will be a huge pain in the ass if you ever want to switch in the middle of a battle, shoot the bottles, yes I know the gun misses nine times out of ten from a range of 12 feet, keep shooting or there will be more popups."
By the end of the harrowing-ass tutorial level I was down to 3 out of 9000 MP (I guess,) and about 438/984 HP (maybe,) but I was still alive and ready to move on. As I approached HVSO I finally learned what 'frenzy' means (beyond the opaque, bullshit explanation of 'wrestling with the beast within' description HVSO gave me,) after the screen turned red I watched my character kill the shit out of HVSO about thirty times in a row (instantly resurrecting with full health while making snide comments is a lesser known vampire power.) At first it was surprising, but it soon got irritating, and soon after that it got boring, but not normal boring, that extra crappy, ripoff boring you get when a friend invites you over to hang out and talks on the phone to someone else the whole time. Finally she stopped, returned his useless-ass gun, had a nice little chat, failed whatever random saving throw she kept not passing, and then kicked the living shit out of him again as the screen faded to black. "Well," I think, "Thank God that happened at the end of the level. I'll soon begin the game proper with a full blood gauge and will not cast any spells unless my unlife is in jeopardy."
Appearing in my new apartment, (in the Roaches Squallor building, on Heroin Needle Lane,) I immediately noticed that my magic gauge was still empty. Hooray. This stupid fucking vampire made it all the way from the warehouse to however far away the apartment is, at night, in a city populated only with rats, winos, gang-bangers, and lost businessmen without bothering to fucking eat someone. I found three blood packs in the refrigerator, and after consuming those I had about 17/351 Blood Power Points. "Surely that's enough to not go fucking crazy as soon as I leave the apartment," I assure myself. There were also a couple of pizzas on the counter, but there didn't seem to be any way to pick them up to use as hobo bait to lure the homeless inside so I could feed unmolested. I then explored my new apartment, turning the radio on, then back off, because someone thought fucking reggae would be appropriate, turned the TV on, which showed a news anchor monologuing about people and things that would probably be good to know if I had had any experience with Vampire: The Masquerade before playing this game and wasn't too busy trying to remember the controls to make a note of who survived a catastrophic whatever, and would probably fill out my journal nicely if the game bothered to have one.
Moving on to my desk I found a letter from my vampire mentor telling me he had sent me an email. Old people, amirite? Another letter inviting me to a side quest, a brand new laptop with the latest version of DOS and $100. Thanks guys. I'll get right on those missions just as soon as I pawn the TV and radio to buy every mammal in every pet store in a ten mile radius, some makeup so I don't look so obviously corpse-like, and also another filthy white t-shirt, so I'll have something nice to wear.
While making my way out of the apartment building I was tempted to break into my neighbors houses but didn't. One, I don't want to be the asshole neighbor on my first day here. Two, although I have level two in lockpick and sneak, I have no idea if they're home or if they have level 57 in "Hey, my front door just opened." Three, none of those fucking popups ever explained how to save my game, so if I fuck up it'll probably go on the auto-save, assuming it's doing that. I was tempted to press escape to see if that brought the menu up, but it would be just as likely to quit to desktop and I'll be damned if I'm playing that tutorial level again. Three, I don't know what kind of consequences it will have. HVSO made it seem like not drawing attention to myself was the main objective of this game, and that had already proven to be beyond my capabilities, since I had repeatedly beaten him to death almost immediately afterwards.
Outside I was immediately approached by a homeless man asking for change. I was given the option to either eat him, pay him or ignore him, and not lure him inside with the promise of leftover pizza microwaved by a single woman with huge boobs. Since there was a mask over my health bar (the mask means no vampire shit or vampires will kill you. I think. There was a lot of information in the tutorial,) I didn't want to risk pissing off my vampire overseers and chose to ignore him. Across the street I was accosted by a very loud and on-drugs fellow who immediately identified me as a vampire, and despite my protestations began to scream his story of being an errand boy for a vampire to convince me that he was cool, man, he was with it, I'm not a cop, man, you can trust me. Around the time I had decided I would have to get him out of sight to murder him before he could rat me out, the stress of his pothead wheedling broke whatever part of my brain would allow me to say "I will give you $50 if you come back to my place and let me drink some of your blood," and instead proceeded to beat him to death with my bare hands like a tiny, undead Hulk. In true keeping with the much talked about predatory nature of the vampire, Dingbat of Clan Suicidos chose not to eat him as I watched, helpless and full of impotent rage. Well, helpless and full of impotent mild indifference, anyway. I regained control just as three police officers appeared.
Possibly as a comment on the nature of Californian police officers or just another dumbass design choice, the police immediately decided that the proper response to an attractive, unarmed young woman attacking a large man screaming about working for vampires was to shoot me to death while I tried to remember what key they mapped "lay on the ground with your hands behind your head" to.
