Robots!
How threatening are these bots really? The answer seems to depend on DarkShadow's mood at any given moment.
The introduction builds them up to be unstoppable killing machines, barely under Robo Tech's control, and capable of becoming and extinction-level event for humanity. Ten robots are all it takes for this to be a real possibility with the odds stacked in the robots' favor to such a degree that the president expects to have to make use of the Pickle bombs.
Throughout the game the war bots are shown to be far less potent than the marketing. Ultimately, ten "best men" are sent to deal with ten robots. The final result of that initial clash is a victory for the robots that's Pyrrhic. A score of ten to nine, leaving a single robot that very clearly can be defeated with maybe the president's eleventh and twelfth best men.
This is more an issue with the exact setup of the game's wild story. These robots aren't causing total chaos. They're creating plenty of Death, Destruction, War, Bloodshed, Terror, and other stuff, but they can absolutely be stopped in such small numbers.
At no point does the game suggest that these bots are merely prototypes and thousands are beginning to be manufactured after this pretty successful test run. It could be implied, as Robo Tech is expected to bring in an age of not-evil robots, transforming everyday life which will certainly require mass production. However by the end of the game, Robo Tech's headquarters are being subject to regular bombings, with the final battle of Grak versus a robot set next to the burning building (just out of frame of course).
One woman who witnessed a fight between the soldiers and the robots said it was four men versus five bots, with the lone survivor being one robot. At least until this woman got involved, as she picked up a grenade and blew up the last robot. I'm hoping the soldiers had to do a lot of work to get the robot vulnerable to a grenade, otherwise I can come up with a much better plan on how to defeat the robots than the president could.
A sixth robot is found already defeated just outside the white house. They're still intact, causing Grak to have to actually steel himself as he expects a fight from this one. The cause of this robot's death can be found nearby, where a smashed up microchip is lying on the ground.
So you can also just flip the CPU release switch. Got it.
This is where I decided I should count and see if all the bots are actually accounted for. Continuity error: An NPC seen moments later claims that the president has one man left to fight five robots.
The next time a score is updated, just one bot remains. Good job to that one soldier! You were really putting up a good fight there. Let's take a moment of silence to contemplate his own adventure before we move on.
"Total Chaos" A.K.A. The Script
The recent stream of Compound had me thinking about how it's possible to keep players interested in where a story goes even if stopping and thinking about the story reveals the myriad of holes in it.
Total Chaos is full of obvious questions with no sensible answers. Without much of anything else to prop it up, the game is instead an utter mess.
Some of it is the game itself being inconsistent. There are upper/lower worlds, but Washington D.C and the white house are still around. I'm beginning to suspect that the lower world is perhaps actually underground, and only the wealthy get to live above?
I'm not asking for a history of the world here, I just want to how things are actually arranged. You go up an elevator, then take a subway to DC. Then you have the pickle bomb making the size and location of 2030s society even more confusing.
The pickle bomb is capable of destroying the entire lower world. DarkShadow can't seem to make a decision on whether the lower world is just a section of a city like Midgar or if we're talking something the size of the nation?
Most of these problems could be smoothed over with some small tweaks to clarify things. Go for a Midgar with an upper/lower part of a major city in the future, have Robo Tech plan to take over. The president then has to decide on destroying the lower level to save the upper level from being at the mercy of Robo Tech. Send a spare robot to DC to blow up the white house to show you mean business, and you're 90% of the way there.
Yet another source of confusion is just how aware or not people are of what's going on. Multiple TV news broadcasts were cut off with the staff at one having been killed, while the other if they're lucky was stopped before they could also leak confidential information.
I get not everybody knowing about Robo Tech's betrayal, or the president throwing the lower world under the bus. This isn't me bothered at the lack of speed at which the news travels. It's me wondering about people living in this city that is actively being attacked and the weird split between people who are continuing to go about their business and those who are aware of what's going on that don't seem to be letting anyone else know, even if just to get them to run away.
I've completely glossed over the part where the subway to get to DC is out of oil and Grak has to walk into a nearby store and buy some. (No, he doesn't pay for it, he says the city will.) There's no evacuation or even just basic actions being taken to not make the situation worse.
The government, meanwhile, is well aware that one or more deadly robots are on their way to the white house to kill the president, but the trains stop near the white house are allowed to keep operating normally.
Given the state of things when Grak arrives at the white house, the subway being delayed due to a lack of oil probably saved dozens of lives.
Later as soldiers at Robo Tech's headquarters are packed onto planes to be air-dropped to battle zones, the dry cleaners and toy store next door are happily serving customers. Including genuine Robo Tech guard uniforms. Brilliant.
Even a throwaway line about folks in the lower world being used to random screams, gunshots, and explosions would work wonders. Everyone is just so oblivious to everything going on around them, refusing to maybe learn if they're in danger by being on a certain train or hanging around near the elevators that link the worlds.
This is all background material. The NPCs being kind of oblivious isn't all that important, since those characters themselves aren't important. Even staying focused on Grak's journey, the game eventually finds itself stuck in a corner.
When Grak does manage to reach the white house, perhaps the closest thing the game has to a cool moment, only to discover the robots have blown it up (the maniacs) the game reaches an awkward spot. The entire game up to this point was about trying to find a way to reach the president. At this point, Grak has zero leads.
Luckily, his mentor, the wise man, lives in an alley next to the white house!
After some platitudes such as "How can you save others if you cannot save yourself?", the wise man suggests that the president is probably still alive. His thinking is that the white house would have been evacuated long before any robots reached it. Though later when Grak finally reaches the president's new location, resistance members bring up how they needed to perform major surgery to save "what was left of him".
Nonetheless, his theory is believable. He then suggests that Grak go to Robo Tech's headquarters to try to figure out how to stop the robots. With these insights, he's more of a common-sense man.
Grak being Grak of course, wants to run in guns blazing. The wise man suggests he might have better luck if he can steal a guard uniform and sneak on in. Cliché? Perhaps. Where it really get wild though is when the wise man delivers the good news:
The codes for the white house security systems Grak bought from a man on the subway only for the information to become useless with the building having been destroyed? Don't despair! The white house may be no more but Robo Tech uses the exact same codes! Why is this? Don't ask. How does he know this? He won't tell.
It's not even something silly like bad security practices where both the government and Robo Tech hired someone that uses the same codes everywhere. On the subway, the person selling the information says it's for getting past locked doors. When Grak infiltrates walks into the Robo Tech headquarters, the passwords are asked for by a person to verify that he's really one of their soldiers.
Then, when Grak makes it to the resistance base. (There's been an organized resistance?) It's unnamed leader reveals their plan that has been in development for years? How long ago were the events of this game set in motion? Who was supposed to fight the last war bot if Grak hadn't parachuted down here? Why are these people who currently have the president in their custody "resistance" and not "government"?
Don't try to figure it out. You'll only get a headache.
Inaction/Adventure
When DarkShadow first uploaded Total Chaos to z2, it was tagged with the genres "Action" and "Adventure". You know, the second most common genre combined with the most common. I'm sure I don't need to go in-depth about how genres are messy, subjective, and hard to define.
Even something like "action" can be difficult to place. Just how action-packed does a ZZT game need to be for the label to feel appropriate? There's no universally agreed on answer.
That being said, I think you would be very hard pressed to call this game an action game, despite what DarkShadow may have claimed in his upload.
This game has killer robots. It has soldiers fighting in the streets. Its civilians are shot, exploded, and have limbs removed. A news program's personnel are killed on live TV. The white house is blown up. A woman throws a grenade at a robot to save herself...
Our boy Grak though? He doesn't get to do any of it.
Despite receiving 150 bullets upon getting his gun, as well as finding more lying on the ground or from searching the bodies of the deceased, Grak goes almost the entire game without seeing any actual combat himself.
A single bullet is used after getting the gun to break some glass and begin climbing to the upper world. After that, players can hold on to their remaining 149 bullets until the final chapter of the game where he's airdropped while disguised as a Robo Tech soldier into a government-allied resistance base.
Some guards, seeing Grak as a Robo Tech soldier open fire. Grak finally gets to shoot something that moves, and it's two guys who are on the same side as him! Our hero.
After getting inside, and relying on his usual technique of yelling and threatening people's lives until they listen to him, the resistance members give in and let him join, sending him off on a mission to kill the final robot. A simple "they attacked me first" is all it takes to get everyone to stop being upset that Grak just killed some of their men.
The climactic final battle is just what you'd expect given the rest of the game. The war bot endlessly moves towards the player then shoots towards the player (at a reasonable cycle two). It takes twelve shots to win, with each successful hit marked by the robot slowly losing composure. Starting with the typical "a tiny pinch" to "Ow! I mean, Heh." to "All you [humans] want is power!"
This kind of fight works out in something like Saint ZZT 7th, where the protagonist is intended to be on equal footing with his foes, and these fights happen repeatedly throughout the game. Here in Total Chaos, this is an untrained man who's had a rough day versus a war machine so powerful that ten were considered enough to begin a plan for world domination.
It's hard to be too let down of course, as by this point players will be well aware of what they can actually expect from this game. Nobody who makes it this far is going to believe they'll be blown away with an incredible fight scene. They're just going to be thankful that it moves and shoots rather than moves and throws stars.
This being the only other fight in the game means two things.
One: This is the least action-y action game I've ever seen. Your baseline for what should have the label needs to be "bullets are fired", something that applies to tremendous swaths of ZZT worlds.
Two: Grak, savior of humanity, kills more friends than foes.[2] This is extremely funny to me. Grak's shitty personality is matched by his shitty actions. I'm sorry, I'm obsessed with this dude. I don't think I've seen a less likable protagonist in a game that wasn't like, actively trying to be evil.
Final Thoughts
And that concludes our exciting trip through Total Chaos. Hopefully you're now willing to divest from Robo Tech before it's too late.
This game, mostly through it's faults, ended up being an absolute treat to play. I had a confused smile on my face since I was asked what if computers were bad.
Total Chaos is interesting to me in that it seems like it's trying to be a summer blockbuster turned ZZT game. It's got all sorts of moments you'd expect to see flashy special effects in with its constant fires, explosions, and gratuitous violence. Almost all of which happens off screen.
Unlike, say, Walter's Quest which managed to deliver on its blockbuster feel thanks to its varied set pieces and well paced action, Total Chaos over relies on the player's imagination to come up with anything exciting. The groundwork is there: A typical dystopian future where the corporations and governments face off against each other with little care of collateral damage. Things being made right thanks to a lowly hero forced into saving the world that does a better job than those with power who wouldn't mourn for a second if he were killed in action.
But Grak sucks too hard to root for, and while his adventure suggests high stakes, in practice this game is more akin to a walking simulator with little to see as you travel from point A to point B. The world as depicted is extremely gray and bland, with a very scribbly kind of look similar to (but predating) the technique shown in Vagabond's Cradle. Outside of the introduction sequence where DarkShadow gets to draw things rather than rectangles, the are pretty forgettable.
As a summer blockbuster, this one is a box office bomb. It's a game that may have been a good pick for John W. Wells's short-lived series of ZZT Mystery Science Theater 3000 spoofs. The fun comes from the game's failures at telling a coherent story, it's jerk of a protagonist, and the gulf between how the robotic threat is shown versus how it's told.
I think this game would need a lot of expansion to make it genuinely good rather than good for a laugh. We need to not just see, but to participate in the fights against the robots. The story needs another pass to be more easily understandable. (Did I even mention that Robo Tech is also attacking the lower world with human soldiers after a certain point?) It needs to be a radically different game.
When I found this one, I was too quickly hooked its comical introduction to notice that it actually does have a revised edition. One created several years later in 2006! I would have opted for that version, but it's hardly different, only tweaking some formatting and fixing some minor bugs, not the kind of overhaul you'd expect five six years after the game's release. Perhaps give it a go if you want to see this one for yourself?
Make sure you know what you're getting yourself into before you start. If you want action, look somewhere else. If you want comedy, this is a trivial game to run through that unintentionally delivers more laughs than most games from the era do today.
And Grak, having proven himself willing to shoot and kill even allies if need be, gets his job as a security guard.
Try not to think about the Robo Tech general that says the lower world was indeed destroyed and that their job is to kill all survivors. I'm sure things are actually fine down there.
- [2]The two guards don't have to be killed, and are of course likely to end up shooting each other. While players can simply run past the guards, the game doesn't consider this a possibility with Grak defending himself against the accusations of killing good men regardless of how or if they died.
