Tag: digitaleclipse

Getting Started in Digital Eclipse’s Remake of Wizardry, Part 2: The First Level

It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to explain what playing Wizardry is like. There was once a time when this basically was what a CRPG was. JRPGs obscured that greatly and became the new default, but before Final Fantasy took over the world, there was a whole pile of what we might now call Wizardry-likes: The Bard’s Tale series, Dragon Wars, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder among them.

All of these party-based CRPGs have a lineup, a list of characters that are generally considered to be in order. Dungeon Master arranges them in more of a 2×2 grid, but there’s still a front line and a rear. Key in all of these games is that the front line is where you should put your melee fighters, who are in substantially more danger and need more HP and equipment protection (often directly using the D&D term Armor Class). The rear is where the characters who can’t take a licking go: the thief and your mages. Clerics/Priests generally can go in either area. By tradition they they can still still use most armor, but the problem is they’re usually the party healer, so being in the front line also means they’re more likely to get taken out by Paralysis or Petrification, leaving the rest of the group in the lurch.

It’s vitally important that the front line holds. Characters who get knocked out will get automatically shuffled to the back of the group, putting the squishies in range of the monsters’ unkind claws and teeth. It might be possible to hurriedly cast some AC-increasing spells, but it’s usually just as fast to cast strong attack magic and end the fight, then cure the downed fighters in camp. If you can’t do that… well, then it’s best to find your way back to town by the most expeditious route.

What route might that be? Well that’s why you’ve hopefully been working on a map! You might have played labyrinth games before, or think you can rely on a spatial sense build from playing first-person shooters, but those are not going to suffice here, you need a map. The Digital Eclipse remake of Wizardry maintains one for you, but as previously said it can be “tricked” by two particular types of maze phenomena: spinners and teleporters. Spinners change your facing randomly but leave you in place; suitably, they’re almost always placed in four-way intersections, so it’s not obvious which why you’re now going, or even if you’re going back the way you came. Teleporters usually leave your facing the same, but now in a different location.

Once you’re in the dungeon, then what?

I said last time that you should make your own characters, but that will also leave them at experience level 1, which is really weak. Until you reach level 2, every expedition into the dungeon should contain a single encounter. The starting quadrant of the first level has just three rooms. Enter one of them, fight or run from the inhabitants, then run to the stairs. If you used any spells or took any damage, have the affected characters stay at the Inn. It takes a lot of stays to lose even one point of Vim, so it’s nearly free.

If you’re playing with the original Inn, then stays will be more expensive unless you stay at the Stables, which gets you your spells back and nothing else. But that’s okay, because you can then dip into the maze and have your priest cast DIOS on your injured. You can repeat that cycle as many times as you like, and it won’t even age your characters. It almost feels like cheating, but you want to push every advantage you have as far as it will go.

Get used to training up level 1 characters, you’ll be doing it several times. You’ll want a B-team of characters to rescue your main group if need be, a Bishop of moderate level to identify found equipment without paying Boltac’s insane prices, maybe a separate Evil/Good team if you want to try out a Ninja/Lord, and maybe characters to replace failed resurrections from ash. The only time you’ll have to train up a character unaided, though, is the first time.

It is true, one of the modernizations in the Digital Eclipse remake is the ability to outright hire characters of levels approaching your highest experience level reached, but it’s not free, and could end up being really pricey. If you’re broke, then you can’t hire anyone over level 1, and if you have no characters you won’t be able to earn more money. Also, you should know that there’s a limit of 20 characters you can have among all those you have at one time. I don’t know what happens if all of your characters are dead and in the maze at once. Seems like they should have accounted for that possibility, though.

How to handle those first fights

Use every advantage you have! Mages begin with the sleep spell KATINO, and while it’s almost useless later in the game it’s the key to surviving the first floor, that and the priest’s Dispel Undead ability.

There aren’t many monsters that can appear randomly on the first level:

Bubbly Slimes: the weakest monsters in the entire dungeon. They never flee and are immune to sleep spells, but are almost never a danger.

Kobolds: easy to beat unless they outnumber you. KATINO, the sleep spell, works quite well.

Orcs: Like kobolds but a little beefier. Both kobolds and orcs are very prone to running away if you’re even slightly above their level. Use KATINO.

Level 1 Rogues: Also weak and prone to fleeing, and vulnerable to KATINO.

Undead Kobolds: one of the very few (possibly the only) monster in the game with a description of “Skeleton.” For first-level groups kobold skeletons are pretty dangerous, all the numbers of kobolds but without their tendency to run away or vulnerability to sleep. You might be tempted to fight them hand-to-hand for the experience points, but this is just the kind of thinking that gets first-level parties slaughtered. You have a priest; they should be trying to dispel them every turn. (If you don’t have a priest then go right back to town and make one!)

Bushwackers: the horrors of the first floor, they do around a d8 of damage, making them deadly. If a group of first level characters encounters a group of Bushwackers without any KATINOs available it’s best to try to run. Bushwackers can be a problem even for 2nd level parties, but against higher level groups they’re just as prone to fleeing as their lower level compatriots.

Zombies: about one time in five, a group of Bushwackers will be generated with an assisting team of Zombies. This is by far the most dangerous encounter possible on the first floor, pretty much impossible for a first-level group to defeat without a lot of luck on their side. I’d have the priest try to dispel the Zombies, and use your mage(s) to cast KATINO on the Bushwackers. If you can get all the Bushwackers asleep, maybe use any remaining extra spell slots on HALITO on the zombies, but there is no really good way to survive this. Fortunately Bushwackers+Zombies is a rare combination, I’ve only seen it happen once on the first floor.

There is one more monster that can appear on the first floor….

Murphy’s Ghost

A beloved monster among Wizardry fans, and something of a legend in the annals of CRPGs, is Murphy’s Ghost. It’s a special encounter that can occur in one specific room on the first level of the dungeon. It’s in a region behind a secret door, so you might not find it until you learn the light spell MILWA, or possibly its longer-lasting version LOMILWA.

In the original, stepping onto its encounter spot was enough to make Murphy’s Ghost appear. Now you have to search to fight them. In both cases though the fight is easily repeatable.

On the first floor, Murphy’s Ghost can appear in groups of up to two. The fight isn’t that difficult, and even against low level characters it can’t do more than 4 hit points of damage every round. The main problem is that Murphy’s Ghost has a very low (that is, very good) Armor Class, at -3, and has many hit points. No attack magic works on the ghost, but spells that worsen its AC, or improve your characters’, work well. It takes around 40-50 melee attacks, on average, to fell a Murphy’s Ghost. One ghost earns 4,450 experience points, which split six ways it still over 700 XP apiece, and a pair of them can be enough to gain a whole level’s worth of experience at once. It is possible, rarely, to earn more experience from other groups on the first level, but Murphy’s Ghost has the advantage of only getting one attack per round, and of appearing every time its room is entered/it’s searched for, even if you just fought it a couple of moves before.

Murphy’s Ghost is slightly less useful in the Digital Eclipse version because the new unskippable battle animations take up a lot of extra time. It was always the combination of easy repetition, battle speed and relatively low difficulty that made fighting Murphy’s host appealing. After your group gets a couple of extra levels on their bones the first floor starts looking a lot less treacherous anyway.

Getting Started in DE’s Remake of Wizardry I

Wizardry hates you

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, a.k.a. Wizardry I, is a classic and venerable CRPG from the early days of computer gaming. It’s thought to be the very first computer RPG where you played as a party of more than one character. Even the early PLATO RPGs didn’t have a single player control a whole group like that.

Wizardry took D&D as its inspiration in ways that now even D&D itself doesn’t know. Its Armor Class value counts down like it did in olden times. And death is meant to stick, and be costly to recover from. Dead characters can fail to be revived, which turns them to ash and costs even more to fix. And that can fail too, and the character is just gone.

Pit traps in the dungeon have no counter, most of them have no hint they’re waiting there, their damage scales with the dungeon level so they’re nearly always a danger, and frequently kill your mage characters. Yet, they are not the worst the game has to offer, especially when you get to the second game, which contains what may be the single cruelest trap ever put into a computer game, and I am not exaggerating.

Then there’s the mazes themselves. They’re tricky, and although there are many quality-of-life improvements in the new game, including an automap, the game purposely doesn’t protect you from its map-foiling tricks. If you get teleported or spun around, the game’s automap won’t notice, and it’ll mess up your map! This is by design, because playing Wizardry with an infallible map is a hugely different experience. You’re supposed to get confused.

So you see, Wizardry hates you.

Wizardry doesn’t hate you that much

These stories are frightening, enough that I imagine they’ve scared some players away from the game. But despite (and in a way, because of) them, Wizardry is still a lot of fun to play. For the first seven experience levels characters grow gratifiyingly quickly, and the play, due to its challenge and its consequences, is rarely boring. The original game underwent a year of playtesting before it was released to the Apple II-owning public, and the balance bourne of that time and work shines through. Wizardry is still a fun game to play, and while many of Digital Eclipse’s changes to adopt the game to current tastes are appreciated, I’m not convinced they’re all positive ones. It is what it is though, and I want to emphasize, what that is, is still fun.

Make backup saves of your game

Still though, one change that I can only regard as positive is that it’s really easy to make a backup copy of your save file. This isn’t just anyone telling you this! It’s me! I wrote a roguelike column for years for GameSetWatch insisting that permadeath was okay and that players shouldn’t back up save files to avoid it! But roguelikes are designed to be replayed many times, and anyway are usually pretty short so your time investment can’t become too large. Wizardry is not a long game, but it isn’t short either.

While Wizardry’s mazes don’t change, the game can throw all kinds of enemy parties against you, and even advanced parties once in a while get screwed over by the RNG. It is a rite of passage to rescue a deceased group one or two members at time from the dungeon, but it gets old after the first time or two. I don’t suggest winding back time every time a character dies, I think that’s going too far. But it will save you if, say, a character fails their revive from ash roll, or your party wipes beneath a set encounter space.

Backing up your save on the Apple II meant backing up you Scenario Disk, was a time-consuming option. Here, Digital Eclipse outright encourages you to make a copy of your save. The option is right there on the file menu, and I encourage you to use it too.

Use Old-School Creation and Advancement Rules

Under Old-School Options, you should use the original game’s character creation and stat advancement rules. I played through most of the game with the updated rules under the impression that they would take the edge off the difficulty, not knowing that these two actually make the game harder.

Character creation gives each character lineage (formerly called race, a term that’s become more loaded since 1981) set stats, and a number of points to distribute between them. The new system gives all characters a flat 12 points to spend. Under the old system character creation system, most characters got between 7 and 10 points to distribute, but 10% of the time would get ten extra points, and there’s a slim chance to get even more. Players could reroll endlessly to get bonus points in the range of 17 to 20, which was a huge boost! 10% of the time really isn’t that uncommon, and stats matter quite a lot in Wizardry, so it wasn’t hard to give all your characters a substantial boost right out of the gate, enough to start with a Samurai.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. The old rule gives each stat a chance to advance, based on the character’s Age/Vim, with a chance that it could go down as well. The possibility of losing a point should be considered, but often characters gain four or five points upon level gain. It’s more a matter of taste, but I’ve had good experiences with it, at least at low levels.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. Each has about equal chance, so it averages out to two points, which is really low generally, and even lower if you aspire to creating a Lord (a range of stats from 12 to 15) or a Ninja (all 17 or above).

Fortunately, you don’t have to stick with one option or the other, but can switch between them when you want. If you have a character who’s closing in on Lordship or Ninjahood, but just needs a couple of more points in a specific stat to obtain it, you can switch to the new style just before claiming that character’s next experience level, and even switch back afterward.

Creating characters

The game offers you to start you out with a group of pre-made characters of an appropriate mix and starting out at Level 2. I whole-heartedly suggest that you don’t use them.

Wizardry is not a game about helping an Overlord get an amulet back from a wizard. The quest is largely bunk; while Werdna is definitely not on your side, there’s is nothing in the game to suggest that Trebor is in the right either. No, Wizardry is a game about watching your characters grow through adventures, and overcome hardships, and possibly succeed in a great challenge. You really want to make your own characters for this.

While Level 1 characters are very fragile, and somewhat disposable, they’re yours. Under the new rules reviving Level 1 characters is free, and it doesn’t take them many fights to advance to Level 2, where they’re sturdier, and at Level 3 your group even starts learning good spells. Make your whole group and stick it out, you’ll have more fun.

Even once your group starts exploring the dungeon and gets a few levels under their belt, the game will continue to offer you new, randomly-generated extras, with levels approaching those of your highest-level character, in the Tavern. These can be useful as a B-team, to supplement your group if you want to play around with different party compositions, and to help rescue your own characters if they wipe in the dungeon. The original game didn’t have them, and they’re expensive to hire, but they can come in handy.

Party composition

In many classic party-based CRPGs in the Wizardry style, the ideal party is pretty obvious: a fighter, a thief, a cleric and a mage. Wizardry doesn’t buck that trend entirely, the game seems designed around three fighters, a thief, a priest and a mage, but there are interesting tactical possibilities that can be explored with non-standard party composition, and since the game lets you have up to 20 characters on your roster in total and switch them in and out of your main group at any time in town, you can even try them out without restarting your whole game.

Here are some ideas:

  • The basics: Figher x 3, Thief, Priest, Mage makes it harder for the monsters to break through that crunchy front line to get to the tasty low-HP classes behind them.
  • Go thiefless: I go over this below, in the section of Chests and Traps. In short, you have to forego a lot of treasure, but having an extra priest or mage lets your group rule in other ways.
  • Any number of Samurai instead of Fighters: it isn’t hard to make a Samurai in initial character creation, and that’s actually the recommended way to play one, since when a character changes classes their stats in play, they are all lowered tremendously. Samurai start out with more HP than Fighters, but earn slightly less with each level. But in return, they start learning Mage spells at level 4, giving you a few extra uses of DUMAPIC, and eventually MAHALITO, which can make a big difference against some enemy groups.
  • Having a Bishop instead of a Priest. I don’t suggest this one so much unless the Bishop is an extra character, because getting to higher tier spells as soon as possible is hugely important and Bishops, although they learn both spell types, get them more slowly. They do have the Identify ability though, which saves you a lot of gold at the Trading Post, and makes selling spare equipment found in the dungeon a reliable source of extra funds.

The most important stat for each class is the obvious one: Strength for Fighter types, Agility for Thieves, Piety for Priests and Intelligence for Mages. But after that, for front liners it’s Vitality, and for spellcasters it’s Agility.

However, Vitality increasess HP and helps the front line hold together for longer, since when the back rank falls into it they tend to get eaten quickly. But every class is helped by Vitality, it increases the chance of revival success, and it’s not a bad idea to add some to your Mages for when dragon breath or an enemy MAHALITO gets through.

Agility affects when a character acts in combat, and it’s important that those huge group-size damage spells happen early in the first round before the enemy has the chance to act. The best fight is the one that ends before the monsters get a single turn.

About VIM, a.k.a. AGE

Wizardry has a check on resting too much. Whenever a character stays at the Inn, they lose a tiny bit of VIM. It’s not enough to show on-screen, we’re talking about a small fraction of a point. In the original game it was called AGE, and started around 18 and counted up. You can switch to that name in the Old-School Rules. Each Inn stay is a week of time, although strangely it only counts for the characters who actually stay at the Inn. So long as you try to make the most of your expeditions into the dungeon your characters won’t age much, but the higher their age grows, the greater the chance (if you’re playing by Old-School stat level gain rules) that stats will go down. And if characters get very old, into their 50s, they could just die, period.

The higher a character’s VIM/lower their AGE, the less of a chance they’ll lose stats when playing with random stat gains, but it’s really subtle unless you class change multiple times.

When characters are revived from death, they age by a random amount that could be up to a year. When characters chance classes, they age considerably, by several years! So it’s best not to change classes lightly.

It’s said, of an early release of Apple II Wizardry, that if you quit the game while in the dungeon, and you resume their advenutres by restarting them as an “Out” Party, that the game would age them by ten years. I’ve only heard of this by rumor, and it seems to indicate that this was changed in later releases. I tell you this just to say, even the original designers thought better of that one.

There’s a lot more to say about playing Wizardry! Watch out for more soon, I still have to get some of my notes organized. We’ll talk about how the game actually plays, and give a plan for tackling the dungeon overall.

EDIT: I repeated myself at one point, so I fixed some wording there. Also some minor fixes elsewhere. I notice that the theme is covering some of the text with my screenshots. I’m not sure why it’s doing that. We’re looking into it.

On the History of Wizardry

Once upon a time, there was Wizardry, and nothing else. Welllll-l-l… almost nothing else. Here’s a makeshift timeline of CRPGs and CRPG-like released leading up to the original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Don’t be fooled by this chart, where Wizardry happens to appear at the end. Most of these games were not widely available. Anything for a PDP or PLATO would only have been playable by a select few. Apshai and Ultima I were more widely available than their predecessors, but Wizardry was substantially deeper than either of them, and wasn’t surpassed for a while. For a time, it was the benchmark in the field, and inspired its own substantial subgenre, which we’ve heard called blobbers in the past. (Set Side B on blobbers previously, including an extensive list of them.)

Blobbers get their name because a whole RPG adventuring party is considered to exist filling one space in a first-person view of a dungeon grid, but it’s not really a great name because the defining characteristic of this sort of game isn’t the unity of the party but the view of the maze. Creating a first person maze of this type was a popular early graphical trick, because it was easy to program, and could be drawn on a tile-based display or possibly even a terminal. Blobbers continued to rule the roost for first-person games until the foundation of the first person shooters with id Software’s Catacomb-3D and Wolfenstein 3D, and more atmospheric 3D CRPGs like Origin’s Ultima Underworld.

Video and computer games are a field terribly unkind to their legacy. You might point to Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man and such as examples of games where decades-old originals are still known and played, but numerically speaking they are greatly outnumbered by the lost and nearly-forgotten. Games that used to be well known among all game-playing computer users are now mere footnotes, due to their companies going under, or their IPs being owned by uncaring megacorps interested only in milking their very most profitable properties YES I’M TALKING ABOUT ELECTRONIC ARTS. Ahem.

Wizardry is one of the foremost examples of this. For a while it was the best-selling computer RPG around, and its sequels did well for a long while. Wizardry VII was released in 1992, but then its successor Wizardry 8, a landmark title that finally brought the series into true 3D, took nine years to finish, and was sadly released right around the time of the demise of publisher Sir-Tech, although their Canadian branch lasted until 2oo3.

After Sir-Tech Software shut its doors, the series’ torch was held aloft for a long while by a succession of Japanese developers, beginning with ASCII Entertainment. Many of these games are still extremely obscure to the Western world, which seems odd considering how connected we’ve all become. We don’t even know if Robert Woodhead had anything to do with the first of the Japanese games, Wizardry Gaiden. The Japanese Wizardly line is all over the place aesthetically, but in play sticks by the formula of the very earliest games: spell ranks, permadeath, and tricky mazes. Despite being made for systems as varied as the Super Famicom and the PlayStation II, in gameplay they’re all of the Apple II orchard with limited additions. Despite being much that we don’t know, we still know a fair bit, due to an amazing 2020 article on the blog of the CRPG Addict written by “Alex,” with a great comments thread, that all deserves to be etched in stone and set forever on a monument in the middle of the town square of Llylgamyn.

It is more than a mere shame that all of these games remain effectively locked off from the country of Wizardry’s origin. An aging legion of players from the days of the Apple II has no idea that, in a land half a world away, 35 more Wizardry games, with gameplay with a clear recognizable link to the originals, were made and enjoyed. Maybe some day those games will be made more accessible to English-speaking audiences, the ones that aren’t now lost forever, at least.

I’ve said all of this, and I haven’t even gotten to what I had originally intended to be the subject of the piece, the terrific remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made by Digital Eclipse. Perhaps it’s best to hold off on that for a couple of days. Soon!

P.S. If anyone knows of easy-to-learn open source timeline making software, I’d greatly like to know of it, or even if there’s a good Excel or (preferably) LibreOffice add-on for that purpose.

Making of Karateka Video Review

This is a video review of the making of karateka played with a press key provided by the developer.

My interview with Digital Eclipse

AKKA ARRH on Steam!

Please pardon our lack of a romhack review this week. It’s not always easy to find a good hack to review out of the tens of thousands that are floating around out there. In the meantime, classic remakes are kind of like romhacks, right?

Those who have been following us for the (gosh) nearly one year we’ve been in operation will have picked up on the fact that we love classic Atari. Especially we love classic Atari prototypes. In my humble opinion, Atari treated the output of their stable of brilliant creators with almost a dismissive attitude.

Developers would make a game completely from scratch, spend months working on every aspect of it, handtooling the assembly code, sometimes for hardware platforms that were created specifically to run it, devote their lives for a time to this project, test it in-house, get reactions, modify it, get it running, get approval to make cabinets and put it out on location test, then have all that work get destroyed. Oh well! Back to the drawing board. That’s what happened to AKKA ARRH.

As awesome a title screen as there ever has been!

The only record of all of that effort might end up being those few prototype cabinets put out on test and in the hands of the original developers, and the files in the Atari archives, which were pretty much left out to rot when the company was shut down, and would have been lost to us except for a few people who searched their dumpsters looking to preserve them.

Because of the value of those tiny number of cabinets, collectors guard them zealously, which puts them at cross purposes with the people trying to release the files and get them working in MAME. Two such stories lately have been the prototype for Marble Madness II, which we talked about last year, and AKKA ARRH. (Which, I think, is still one of the best game names I’ve ever heard. It’s fun to say!)

AKKA ARRH’s history is a long story. Long lost except for a few cabinets, somehow, we’re still not sure how, the code got dumped and leaked on the internet. However it happened, that event seems to have uncorked the bubble, with rights-holder Atari (not the same company as the old Atari) commissioning a full remake from Llamasoft and Jeff Minter, the creator of Tempest 2000 and probably the person best keeping alive the spirit of classic arcade gaming.

Minter’s remake of AKKA ARRH is now on Steam. It’s kinda pricey at $19.99, but it looks g r e a t, as you should be able to tell from the trailer below. An emulation of the original arcade game is also in the Atari 50th Anniversary Celebration package from Digital Eclipse, available on Steam and lots of other platforms, which costs more but also gets you many more games, and documentaries and flyers and lots of other plat*.

Seeing that little TM symbol after the logo is oddly heartening. It’s so nice to see this game given a full release, even if only digitally. It’s been a long journey. Welcome home, AKKA ARRH.

* Lately I’ve been chafing against the limits of language. Please excuse my made-up words, I’m kind of sick of having to turn to the same old synonyms, once again, at the moment. You should know what I mean by context here.

News: 8/8/22: All Hail Raytheon

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

At NintendoLife, Alana Hauges notes a dispute between Corecell, developers of AeternoBlade II, and publisher PQube. It’s all a bit tl;dr, and that isn’t helped by the decision to put PQube’s lengthy response up front, undercutting Corecell’s arguments before we can even read them. In summary, Corecell claims PQube didn’t pay them for milestones, and PQube claims Corecell was unresponsive to their requests for fixes and offered to return rights. I mean, it’s rather they-said/those-others-said, but I note that PQube’s bring up the game’s poor sales, an irrelevant issue at best, is bad form. But we’re all busy blobbies and hey, here’s the next article.

“Here at Raytheon, this guy looks thoughtfully at this small bottle, no doubt full of some radioactive isotope or deadly poison. Notice our ‘Social Impact’ submenu, see we’re not evil!”

Even more depressing news, PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield tells us that Girls Who Code, a non-profit dedicated to helping women get careers in the tech industry (good) was participating in a mentorship program set up by US arms manufacturer Raytheon Technologies (awful).

In more entertaining news, Vikki Blake at GameRadar mentions that Halo Infinite players have managed to discover a way to force a split-screen multiplayer for that game.

Isaiah Colbert writing for Kotaku informs us that Nintendo’s ending the gacha elements in their mobile game Mario Kart Tour. I’m glad to see this scourge of gaming slowly wane. Instead, players will purchase unlockables directly instead of hoping for lucky draws.

From Konami, resting on their late 80s/early 90s laurels for literally decades now!

Bryan at NintendoEverything has an interview with Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse and Konami producer Charles Murakami about DE’s collection of 13 classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. Digital Eclipse consistently does such good work these days and it’s a good recounting of the highs of the package and the work involved in bringing it to us.

“This guy is helping us put a tiny portion of our tremendous military profits into these boxes to feed to poor people. We’re actually good!”