In quest of Steam-powered Happiness

So, no thanks to my good friend the Lord Admiral of Her Majesty's Airship Fleet, I've been looking into the steampunk thing recently. For those of you who don't know what that is, take one part Smashing Pumpkins's "Tonight, Tonight" video, one part Jules Verne, one part Charles Dickens, and one part Wild, Wild West, stir very thoroughly (to break up any chunks of Kenneth Branagh from the latter part), and voila! steampunk. Of course, I've known about this for a few years now, and I've read the first "major" steampunk book, The Difference Engine, partly because my lord and master (William Gibson) was one of the people who wrote it. But I haven't really gotten into the whole thing until the Admiral encouraged me to.

Part of my looking into this thing has involved some awesome art, notably a steampunk Dalek.

But most importantly of all, I've been looking for a video game that uses steampunk. Those of you who play World of Warcraft already know what I call steam-pathetic: steam-powered stuff that clanks around, but with none of the elegance or wonder of the Victorian age, and completely lacking that amazing quality of Victorian culture that true steampunk should embody.

That's exactly what I found in Silverfall. The game is a pretty average Diablo-clone. The graphics look good, the characters being the high point, but the story is flat as a Japanese woman, and the voice acting is laughable and pretty spotty:only the most major conversations have a voice element, the voice actor frequently says things differently than the text does, and at one point a character said "cur-stal" instead of "crystal," which really makes me wonder who they get to do these things. Then there was the biggest turd: the monsters level up with you and respawn in all the zones. That's right: when you first leave town, you fight level 1 or 2 zombies. Later, when you leave the same town the same way, you fight the same zombies, except now they're still your level. This completely takes away any point in levelling up and getting new equipment! In fact, you have to struggle to get new equipment just so you can keep killing the same monsters you were killing five or even ten levels ago! It's as if everything cost more just because you got a raise. Imagine if you had to write the exact same paper every year in high school and college, except it got a page longer every year. Yeah, that's basically the same thing. Then, to put the final nail in the coffin, there wasn't a hint of Victorian culture anywhere in it. Sure, there was the very most basic glimpse of steam-powered stuff (a steam-powered chainsaw sword being the high point) and the promise of a flying steam-city as a later base you can visit, but overall, I found it to be a very disappointing mix of World of Warcraft steam-powered gizmos and Diablo. Steam-pathetic indeed.

Then I tried Arcanum. If I can say one thing for Silverfall, it has very nice cell-shaded 3-d monsters and characters. Arcanum is the opposite. Sure, it was made five years before the other game, but its graphics are pre-Diablo. Can you say Fallout-riffic? The story had some very promising Victorian elements, though, even though the first town I came across was more Wild West than Victorian London. Then again, a Wild West character might be very at home in a steampunk adventure as a gunslinger/mechanic. Hmm....

All in all, I might actually buy Arcanum. Its graphics were pathetic one-dimensional crap and the story had me yelling "CHOO CHOO!" because there was no way off the train tracks, but at least it had that hint of Victorian elegance.

And you have to admit, trains are pretty steampunk.