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Rob Zacny

Episode 342: Satellite Reign

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Three Moves Ahead 342:

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Satellite Reign

Satellite Reign is more cyberpunk than anything has a right to be. It deftly combines quality gameplay with all of the hallmark features of the often overplayed or misinterpreted genre. Giant Bomb's Austin Walker joins Rob to talk about Satellite Reign and why they enjoy it so much. Also, Rob finally fulfills the prophecy of someone on the show using the word "panopticon".

Satellite Reign, Invisible, Inc., XCOM

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I'm excited to listen! I'm an old Syndicate fan (mostly played the Atari Jaguar version; that 10-key pad actually made it play pretty efficiently as a console game), and I backed the kickstarter for Satellite Reign, but it just keeps wallowing in my backlog. 

 

Also, I have kind of a podcrush on Austin Walker.

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This episode timed nicely with the game being 66% off for the Lunar New Year sale on Steam. I picked it up this weekend, and although I doubt I'll get around to playing it for awhile because there are too many other games out at the moment that are demanding my attention, this episode definitely made me curious about it. When it was first announced on kickstarter I definitely assumed it was a spiritual successor to Syndicate, and I didn't have any interest in it for that reason. I loved Syndicate as a kid, but I also knew there was no way that I would think those game systems would hold up. Glad to hear that the developers approached this game with a more thoughtful approach.

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I always felt that the best cyberpunk was an attempt to set a caper flick in a corporate dystopian near future. Strip away the corporate death squads and the technosorcery and it's basically the original 1969 "The Italian Job".  Competence porn.  Watching a team of skilled people pull off a plan in the face of the unexpected.  It's not a shock that the decade that gave us cyberpunk also gave us "The A Team".

 

In that sense, I always found Syndicate a little ham-handed. It was big on transgression, but far less so on logic.  You somehow took over the world (assuming you beat the game) with no more than four agents, despite leaving enough evidence of your actions around that everyone else should have been teaming up on you from no later than mission three.  It's not like you were particularly stealthy or subtle as you mindwiped whole city blocks of civilians and cops and left at trail of burning wreckage to your target.  Were there no video cameras?  Even at the time, I found Syndicate's rendering of cyberpunk to be crayons-on-construction-paper at best, and it hasn't aged well.

 

Satellite Reign sounds like it's more subtle and more thoroughly considered.

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"Competence porn" certainly fits Ghost in the Shell very well.

 

So Syndicate pops up a lot, but I only played Syndicate: Wars for Playstation.  Did I experience what the hype is about or is the Syndicate: Wars not a good representation of the original?

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"Competence porn" certainly fits Ghost in the Shell very well.

 

So Syndicate pops up a lot, but I only played Syndicate: Wars for Playstation.  Did I experience what the hype is about or is the Syndicate: Wars not a good representation of the original?

 

It's been a while, but IIRC if you imagine Syndicate Wars with a fixed camera and EGA graphics, you've got the experience in a nutshell.

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Great episode! I always love it when Austin is on. Surprised there was no mention of Deus Ex in the "cyberpunk action game" discussion. I've only played Human Revolution, but I thought it captured the aesthetic pretty well, along with having a least a touch of the politics.

 

Also, Austin didn't mention it, but if anybody wants more of his cyberpunk credentials, you should listen to the tabletop RPG podcast he hosts: Friends at the Table. They're current game is a cyberpunk-anime-mech story that features a smuggler that used to be a pop star, a parking robot that gained sentience, a pseudo-Greek exiled prince and a hacker who accidentally convinced a piece of ICE that it was him and now has a computer program living in his head. It's great.

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Yeah, the Deus Ex series fits the cast's argument rather well. Certainly Human Revolution is a strong piece of evidence that the action-y bits are going to be the worst part of cyberpunk games.

 

Coincidentally, I'm currently rereading Neuromancer, and while the heist element is certainly there, my big takeaway is how much of the language (especially the dialog) is from Raymond Chandler. This might be an obvious insight for most people, but I hadn't read any Chandler when I first read Neuromancer in high school so this is a bit of an epiphany to me. In my head the connection to cyberpunk and noir was always via Bladerunner, but it is cool to see this connection through literary techniques.

 

That noir connection makes explicit the importance of neon in the cyberpunk setting. The neon isn't cool, it represents delirium, lost detectives stumbling around in the dark looking for faces they once remembered. They think they've found the light, but it's just the neon.

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Picked this up on the sale after listening to the show. Was a bit disappointed to see that 7 months after release there are currently 0 mods for this game since as far as I can tell, the devs are working on co-op multi-player rather than the modding API. 

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Great episode. Cyberpunk is a tricky thing, especially as it so close to reality even when it was just conceived.

 

Syndicate (2012, the action game) is not on Steam. And, big surprise, it didn't sell well. Screw you, EA. Screw you.

 

And what were other two games, Austin?!

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Oh man, I just thought of another one: Transistor. Is Transistor cyberpunk?

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No, Transistor is an apocalyptic Sci-Fi, cyberpunk is dystopian sci-fi relatively close to our future.

 

Transistor's world itself feels like a setting for cyberpunk with all this Matrix stuff. But by the time you are there it's all gone and left only as a reminder. If it's cyberpunk than Transformers movie is a historical drama - there are important events there happening a century ago.

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No, Transistor is an apocalyptic Sci-Fi, cyberpunk is dystopian sci-fi relatively close to our future.

 

I don't know that you can nail it down that firmly.  Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Machinist stories were written as part of the cyberpunk movement, and they are far more concerned with transhumanism in a distant enough future that interstellar space flight and alien contact are commonplace.  Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", which strongly influenced the cyberpunk movement but predated it, was set in a similarly distant future where

humans were long extinct, and *everyone* was an android, whether they realized it or not

.

 

Consider 'Mirrorshades', the anthology of short stories that built the movement on the firm foundations laid by Neuromancer and Burning Chrome.  Several of the stories are pure near-future dystopian sci-fi, but others aren't; 400 Boys, for instance (which is kind of A Clockwork Orange with psychers in an allegorical deep future domed city).  Mozart in Mirrorshades is about corporations using time portals to colonize the past to steal resources from their own history.  Tales of Houdini is more about attitude than setting, and can actually be seen as a very precient (if futile) shot across the bows of Reality TV.  The Gernsback Continuum is set in the present and is all about past ideas of the future that never happened.

 

Post/transhumanism was one of the pillars of the cyberpunk movement, and I think Transistor qualifies on that front.  Brigandage occurring under the shiny veneer of a collapsing social order (by individuals, corporations, governments, crime syndicates and so on) is another pillar. The movement never acted constrained by its pillars, however.

 

A lot of cyberpunk was set in the near future because it helped explore the themes the movement was interested in, but it's also largely because the movement was a reaction to the sterile austerity of 70s deep-future science fiction.  A lot of cyberpunk can be seen as a humanist response to the lack of deep characters in 70s sf; the Asimov/Clarke/Niven tradition of characters as thinly veiled exposition devices.

 

I see no problem with calling Transistor "Cyberpunk".

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I think Transistor is cyberpunk, but very much in a style over substance way.

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Transistor captures lots of different elements. One of its triumphs is weaving together so many thematic strands seamlessly. We get the noir you often see in cyberpunk, the world as a system to be subverted with intelligence and technology, the total integration of tech into daily life, utopia made dystopia by greed...

 

Ultimately citing influences is more useful than seeing if a label fits.

 

Great episode, by the way.

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Maybe I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding something, but I always felt a lot of cyberpunk (sort of driven by the "punk" part) was the opposite of competence porn.  Broken or near broken people stumbling their way to maybe a temporary victory in a system that was way more powerful than them. 

 

Gibson, in particular, is very stingy with true success and more often it seems like characters almost completely fail, and then the system tears itself apart from their disruptive influence more so than their competence. 

 

The success is just the punk ideal that absolute corporate power will be broken down by sort of haphazard disruption more than protagonists actually accomplishing specific goals/tasks.  That comment about neon and noir sclpls made resonates with this reading for me.

Maybe that's just the type of cyberpunk I like, and so those themes stand out a little more to me.

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Maybe I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding something, but I always felt a lot of cyberpunk (sort of driven by the "punk" part) was the opposite of competence porn.  Broken or near broken people stumbling their way to maybe a temporary victory in a system that was way more powerful than them. 

 

Gibson, in particular, is very stingy with true success and more often it seems like characters almost completely fail, and then the system tears itself apart from their disruptive influence more so than their competence. 

 

The success is just the punk ideal that absolute corporate power will be broken down by sort of haphazard disruption more than protagonists actually accomplishing specific goals/tasks.  That comment about neon and noir sclpls made resonates with this reading for me.

Maybe that's just the type of cyberpunk I like, and so those themes stand out a little more to me.

 

I've been thinking the same thing, especially when you consider proto-cyberpunk stuff like Blade Runner. There's a feeling of oppression and powerlessness that permeates so much of that movie (" It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?"). The moody depression of it all... I love it.

 

I still have a lot of fun with competency porn like Snow Crash. It's energetic. But my favorite cyberpunk is heavily blended with noir themes.

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Maybe I'm oversimplifying or misunderstanding something, but I always felt a lot of cyberpunk (sort of driven by the "punk" part) was the opposite of competence porn.  Broken or near broken people stumbling their way to maybe a temporary victory in a system that was way more powerful than them. 

 

Gibson, in particular, is very stingy with true success and more often it seems like characters almost completely fail, and then the system tears itself apart from their disruptive influence more so than their competence. 

 

The success is just the punk ideal that absolute corporate power will be broken down by sort of haphazard disruption more than protagonists actually accomplishing specific goals/tasks.  That comment about neon and noir sclpls made resonates with this reading for me.

Maybe that's just the type of cyberpunk I like, and so those themes stand out a little more to me.

 

I think I agree (although I don't know that much of the genre). This is certainly the set up that I find more interesting. I'm starting to think that where my taste diverges from Rob's is that he's enjoys power fantasies too much for me. Sure, I enjoy winning, but I like to think that the winning was well earned (I'm either playing well in the game, or i've practise, studied and mastered the game's systems over multiple games). And without the possibility of everything going horribly wrong at any moment, the suspense goes and I feel like I'm a bit bored mindlessly hitting buttons. This is course, is all just my personal likes and dislikes.

 

ie, one shotting an alien with 100% success in XCOM is boring. one shotting an alien with 50% chance, in a situation in which if you miss, your prized assult marine is going to be eaten, is a great feeling. And then, in a later mission, having a good sniper who you can depend on it s great feeling, as I feel like I've learnt it via playing well and keeping the gal alive for long enough. [And I can then play deeper strategies and get risk elsewhere]/

 

it does make me think that "the role of power fantasy in strategy games" would be an interesting topic for a show. I think they're fine in some genres (rpgs, fps?) but I don't enjoy them so much in strategy games. I find playing a game with easy systems and/or dumb AI similar to playing a weaker opponent at go or hearthstone, and its just not all that satisfying (for me).

 

But then again, maybe I'd enjoy Ck2 more if I embraced the power fantasy and opted to play as a King/Emperor more often. So I could just well be wrong.

 

Maybe it all comes from being Scottish, and constantly losing in the football and rugby? Perpetual underdog!

 

 

And regardless of all this, it sounds like I really need to play Invisible Inc sometime soon.

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Going to revisit this topic since I've just finished playing Satellite Reign over 30 hours while sick during the New Year weekend.

 

1) I never really felt as cornered as Rob seems to have felt as the AI is not particularly inquisitive and the energy reserves of your characters is often enough to outrun the sight radius of reinforcements.

2) There are many approaches to executing a compound infiltration, but I found that the first step was always to brainjack a guard for a very leisurely casing out

3) Cyberpunk is a multilayered beast - and the elite blackops teams coexist with lots of incompetent and corrupt forces and lots of more desperate ragged bands of ne'er-do-wells.

 

Gameplay-wise, combat had a strange sensation of familiarity that irritated me until I figured it out: It's like Dawn of War 2. There's even a support/heavy weapon/leader/sneaky dude class breakdown, character levelling, and equipment. The only things missing (and would have added to the scavenger nature of the operation) were loot and squads (which captive drones/mind-jacked guards kind of fill in for).

 

The open-world nature and ability to initiate combat at any time reminded me of Fallout 1/2, and the sneaky infiltration/heist timing is (as was noted in many reviews) reminiscent of the Desperados/Commandos genre (or the newer Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun).

 

And that is exactly how I would describe it: An open-world real-time tactics game with a major in infiltration and minor in small-unit combat - referring to RPGs for the open-world nature, Commandos/Desperados for the planning and suspense, and DoW2 for the way the combat feels (reinforced by the way my Soldier kept blowing himself up with heavy weapons - the friendly AI is not very good at determining minimum ranges and what cover can be shot through)

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