Alpha Centauri - the darkest, most disturbing game ever?

[Heresiarch]

Thanks to my recent addiction to Civ 5 and XCOM, Firaxis has brought me back the interest to go with a run with Alpha Centauri again. I fondly remembered how nice the fluffs, movies, and quotes the game's tech, buildings, secret projects etc had. As I was browsing through the Prima guide to do some knowledge refreshment, I just found that this is probably the most dark and gritty game ever yet and we didn't realize that.

Some favourites:

Bioenhancement Center:

"We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?

Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467
TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED"
​

Cloning Vats:

"We shall take only the greatest minds, the finest soldiers, the most faithful servants. We shall multiply them a thousandfold and release them to usher in a new era of glory.

Col. Corazon Santiago, “The Council of War” " <- The quote alone wasn't scary. But combined with the ingame movie, and replacing the chicks in the movies with human babies in my mind (as that's what the tech is about), all of a sudden it becomes nightmarish:



Clinical Immortality: So, being immortal is good... No?



Bulk Matter Transmitter: Teleport is awesome...Except when it present you that after teleportation your soul is not on your body anymore:



RECYCLING TANKS:

"It is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Ethics for Tomorrow” " <- This is fucking scary for me. I can imagine on the Planet people would regularly say stuff like "He went to the tank" "We got new supply from the tank" "I don't miss him, he's already with us".

Mind Twister: This all time favourite always gives me a huge chill:



And many, many others, including the movie of Cyborg Factory, Self-Aware Colony, etc etc. Several things of the game are so disturbing for me now that makes me feel it's straight out of some sick Japanese guro or horror games. For example, Bioenhancement Center + Clinical Immortality remind me one Jap indie guro game in which the protagonist best (and worst) ending is to became stuck in a virtual world (with only her brains being practically alive in the real world, stuck in a machine) without being aware it's unreal at all, and got killed over and over again there. Also, the best ending of Alpha Centauri: all humans Transcended and becomee "one with the planet" - now I think of it is fucking like the ending of Saya no Uta or the final goal of Dead Space's Unitologists. Only instead of all humans become fleshy monsters in Saya no Uta, or all humans become necromorphs then melded into a huge flesh moon, now all humans become beings that live in perfect harmony with the planet...which could be becoming HUMAN-MINDWORMS (I know the actual story is not like that, but still "transcending" to anything sounds too like fishy to me).

There are other things that make the game feel damn dark, unforgiving, or even depressing as well, like how the captured leaders screaming and locked up in stasis, how the mindworms kill people, the moody music, the black and white photos presenting the past of the leaders (making me feel even worse when destroying them), and all the atrocities like nerve stapling or destroying whole cities. Despite the game's context is supposed to be "build a new world" it's actually feeling more like "getting closer to apocalypse".

It's a pity that after getting used to today's games UI, going back to Alpha Centauri is also showing how clunky old games' UI were. I missed how you can immediately access Civilopedia in Civ 5 with just a right click for instance. Or how you can choose a whole stack by just double clicking in Civ 4. As for now I still haven't figured out how to move a whole stack of units in AC. I know there's a spiritual successor of AC recently and saw its Let's Play here but it's shitty. Oh well.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

I still have never gotten around to playing this game. I think you've just changed that.

 

[Berekän]

I still have never gotten around to playing this game. I think you've just changed that.

Heh, just what I was thinking

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Do you have the expansion pack as well, Heresiarch ?

EDIT: BTW, I found your chicken scene from the game:



(Wait 'till you see the part they didn't include in the game.)

 

[Heresiarch]

Do you have the expansion pack as well, Heresiarch ?

I have Alien Crossfire but I've never seriously played with it. The new civs factions and aliens and tech and mindworms are neat, but also an immershun breaker.

First off, the original Alpha Centauri has a sophisticated plot centered around the core factions. The introduction of the new factions feels completely like out of nowhere and don't feel canon at all. What's worse, the ingame player limit makes that if you're putting any of the xpac faction in, you'll lose one or more core faction. It'll make the game's story missing a great deal of sense (especially since a lot of the logs and quotes are from the leaders of the core factions).

Secondly, the aliens and their backgrounds with the Planet destroys the mysterious feeling of the Planet. It renders the Planet down to just an experiment of the Aliens instead of being something cool and incomprehensible. Even if you decide not put the alien races in, there are still lots of leftover references, like those battle ogre mecs, and there's even a tech that gives you knowledge about aliens. So it's impossible to completely get rid of the influence of the alien races as long as you play with the xpac.

If you don't care about the fluffs (which is a major thing for Alpha Centauri) then playing with the expansion pack isn't that bad. It gives some good spice ups if you're a veteran of the game already. But otherwise it's not necessary at all, and absolutely not like WL/BTS for Civ 4 or G&K/BNW for Civ 5 which are musts. In fact, playing with Alien Crossfire feels like reading a mediocre fan-fic of an excellently written scifi story.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Very good points. I was aware that three of the seven new factions (the two alien ones and the seafaring one) are totally overpowered and break the game pretty badly, but your words make the expansion seem even inferior.

But I was mostly asking in case there was more nightmare fuel in there for you.

 

[Pegultagol]

I must say, for people to venture out into the new world and settle, the amount of expediency required for them to survive in hostile and unfathomable environments is going to stretch the definition of being 'human' to the extremes.

Being one with the planet is disturbing because it is from the cause of people not being one with the planet that triggered the race to the Alpha Centauri in the first place, borne out of tens of thousands if not more years involving process of evolution adapting the ability to consume and exploit.

Thought provoking and can only imagine what the future thousands of years from now can hold.

 

[Silva]

Alpha Centauri isnt disturbing. Human nature is. The game is only a mirror. Perhaps the most clear and beautiful one ever created for any platform.

 

[taxalot]

Fuck you, Unkillable Cat, I just became a vegetarian for the next hour or so.

 

[Nim]

As I was browsing through the Prima guide to do some knowledge refreshment, I just found that this is probably the most dark and gritty game ever yet and we didn't realize that.

Seriously, Prima guide ?

It's a pity that after getting used to today's games UI, going back to Alpha Centauri is also showing how clunky old games' UI were. I missed how you can immediately access Civilopedia in Civ 5 with just a right click for instance. Or how you can choose a whole stack by just double clicking in Civ 4. As for now I still haven't figured out how to move a whole stack of units in AC. I know there's a spiritual successor of AC recently and saw its Let's Play here but it's shitty. Oh well.

F1 gets you to the datalinks in one keypress ? True, you can't move stacks but the UI ain't that bad. Lots of way way worse stuff to complain about unfortunately.

 

[Heresiarch]

The prima guide is actually pretty good, it listed every single tech, facility and secret projects, along with their whole in game description and speech script on single pages. It's a godsend because the game's speech for finishing facilities or secret projects has no subtitles at all, can't be repeated, and can't be read conveniently otherwise. Similarly the tech's paedia pages don't even show the background information, only a famous quote. Or the other way around? I forgot for now. Therefore the prima guide serves excellently as the perfect centauripaedia for reading. It's pretty hard to download one though, I got mine PDF copy since a looooong time ago.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

They just don't make games like these anymore nowadays.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Also, fuck EA for sitting on the IP idly and not sell it to 2K/Firaxis instead.

Fuck them hard into their corporate anus.

 

[jcd]

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[Shadenuat]

Surprised it hit you just now. SMAC has some of the most delicious examples of where uncontrolled scientific race can bring humanity.
Here's another one right from a horror movie. Belongs more to System Shock 2 kind of game:

 

[The Great Deceiver]

Instilling a constant and very palpable feeling of dread in the player is quite an achievement for a 4x strategy game (a genre which generally fosters a rather detached and impersonal experience). You're always in total control (after all, isn't that one of the foundational principles of empire building games?), which also should theoretically lessen the impact, but Alpha Centauri somehow circumvents even that. I'll just add some additional examples :

Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours-- the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers.

That quote highlights an oft employed method : concepts which appear entirely innocuous at first are often underpinned with very disturbing associations.

Secondly, the aliens and their backgrounds with the Planet destroys the mysterious feeling of the Planet. It renders the Planet down to just an experiment of the Aliens instead of being something cool and incomprehensible.

I wholeheartedly agree. The way in which the Planet was represented in AC reminded me of Lem's "Solaris"; a sentient being beyond our comprehension. The introduction of Aliens and the reveal of Planet's nature spoiled that great atmosphere somewhat.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Fuck you, Unkillable Cat, I just became a vegetarian for the next hour or so.

(This clip is from Samsara, the "follow-up" film to Baraka, from which the original chicken scene hails.)

And now you're a vegetarian for life. Enjoy your tofu.

 

[Heresiarch]

Also, fuck EA for sitting on the IP idly and not sell it to 2K/Firaxis instead.

Fuck them hard into their corporate anus.

Wow I didn't know that. I was wondering why hasn't Firaxis did a remake yet. The IP is in...fucking EA's hands? That's just...

Good thing they haven't made an Alpha Centauri FPS or F2P strategy game yet. Even mindworms can't come up with such horror.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Imagine Alpha Centauri re-done with the Civ 5 engine...




But we can't have nice things. No sir.

 

[Infinitron]

Wrong forum

 

[Spectacle]

Imagine Alpha Centauri re-done with the Civ 5 engine...




But we can't have nice things. No sir.

I'm sure they would fuck it up hard. The disturbing quotes and philosophical concepts would be removed in favour of comical faction leader avatars and awsum combat animations. At best it would be over the top grimdark.

 

[Jaedar]

Alpha Centauri is the best civilization game. I don't see that changing soon.

Feel free to prove me wrong Firaxis.

 

[Silva]

Beware of he who denies you information. For in his heart, he dreams himself your master.

 

[Cassidy]

Beware of he who denies you information. For in his heart, he dreams himself your master.

If Alpha Centauri was made more recently, that video would possibly have brief footage of indiscriminate drone strikes, SOPA and Patriot Act.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Cool thread. It's pretty amazing how much effort and creativity have gone into the design of the lore in Alpha Centauri. I don't rate it quite as high as a strategy game as I once did (goes for the whole 4X genre though, which i realized is not as hardcore and complex as I once thought it to be) but I keep coming back to AC on a regular basis, because the atmosphere draws me in.

You can see this game was made with love by people with a broad interest in science, history, cinema and literature -people with rich sources of inspiration to draw from. I suspect most of today's younger game designers are illiterate consumer drones and/or strongly influenced by the shitty cultural tropes of the new millennium. They don't even know what they don't know and that's why a game like AC would be impossible today.