From Glastonbury To The Gulf Of Mexico

Wow. Time moves. I thought it had only been a week since the last What I've Been Listening To... but it's been twice that. Maybe ever other Friday would be a good cadence. 

For once, this really is going to be what I've been listening to since last time. I cleared all the deadwood. If it wasn't good enough to make the cut then, why would it be now, with fifty new tunes pushing for a place?

It's forty-eight actually and they break down broadly into five categories:

• New music by old faves
• Japanese video-game-inflected sugarpop
• Random names I liked who turned out to be good
• Mexican trap/reggaeton made by scary-looking people
  
• Everything else
  

If I was going to be literal about it, the music I've been listening to mostly, at least since last weekend, is Blondshell. I may be a little obsessesed with them. Her. Whatever.

Last weekend was the Glastonbury Festival. I don't like festivals and I particularly don't like Glastonbury but in recent years the BBC have turned it into one of the televisual highlights of the year. This time they had continual livestreams running all weekend for all five main stages. 

I was at work for most of it and many of the bands I would have liked to have watched had afternoon slots so I missed them. It is all still available for a month so I could go back and catch up but as I've said before, it's existentially different to see something as it happens than to watch a recording. Add that to my firm belief that few bands, at least the kind I like, show themselves to best advantage on a festival stage in broad daylight and there's not much incentive to revisit.

I did watch Fontaines DC's powerhouse headline performance on Saturday night. That's very well worth seeing in its entirety because of the sheer, murderous relentlessness of their attack. As I said to Mrs Bhagpuss the next morning, it's like Blur came on and did nothing but Song 2 for an hour. The BBC chose to release the two new songs to YouTube and those were among the least bludgeoning so it doesn't quite give the full impression but here's Favourite anyway. Such a good song.

I will catch up with The Last Dinner Party's and Yard Act's sets before they vanish from iPlayer but the only one I've made the effort to watch so far has been Blondshell. OMFG! They are good! They opened with Veronica Mars and somewhat threw it away, I thought, but the rest was just wonderful. On the back of that I've been re-watching all the old videos and I had Blondshell playlists running in the background while I've been writing posts this week.

I guess we'd better start there.

Docket - Blondshell

The thing I like best about Blondshell is everything. 

I love her voice so much. I love how I can just never tell if she's in tune or not. She slides all around the melody. It's gloriously disorienting. Like a drug.

I love her lyrics. They're like she's thinking aloud, They leave so much out. It's all subtext. So, so smart.

I love the dynamics. Every song just builds pressure and keeps on doing it til the end. It's claustrophobic and threatening and joyous all at once. 

I love the guitar. Those random squalls and screes. It sounds chaotic but its so controlled. 

They are just wonderful. I think I said that already. We should have another before we move on.

Sepsis - Blondshell

The lyrics for this one are in the YouTube description and they bear a lot of re-reading. My favorite quatrain:

He wears a front facing cap
The sex is almost always bad
I don’t care cuz I’m in love
I don’t know him well enough

I didn't know a front-facing cap was some kind of signifier. Now I do.

Y'know, I never liked grunge much the first time around but I would have if it had all been like this.

Punk - Girl Ultra & Little Jesus

This has to be about the least punk thing ever but maybe the title makes sense if you can understand the lyrics. Girl Ultra opened a gateway to another world for me. Not that she seems any part of it but it was tracking her through the recent past that made the YT algorithm think I wanted to hear more contemporary music from Mexico.

Turns out I did.

Morfina - Kiddie Gang

It's not that contemporary. Five years old. The first three Kiddie Gang tunes I heard were this one, Manson and Vampiro. That last is the newest. They also have songs called Adiccion, Mortal Kombat and Licor y Hielos. I think that gives you an idea of where they're coming from and quite possibly where they're going.

L.Q.E.P. - 666ATA

Rabbit hole goes deep. This was about the time when I started to be thankful I couldn't understand the lyrics. Or maybe that was here.

Kitty - Kenia OS, La Joaqui

There are a lot of songs about Hello Kitty. I have yet to hear a bad one. I have the strangest feeling they're name-checking Sanrio's superstar while really singing about something else, though...

Teen Titans - Puffy Ami Yumi

The magic of the YouTube recommends algorithm took me from there to here. Honestly, sometimes I'm absolutely certain it picks up on things like hairstyles and hats in the videos so this isn't even a stretch.

I thought we'd had this one here before but search says not. It's more than twenty years old now. Geez.

That got me listening to a whole slew of hyperactive Japanese gamepop. It's as addictive as sugar.

Young Girl A - Siinamota

There are a million versions of this one, including an English-language cover by Will Stetson that somehow has nearly 7m views. God knows why.

Catcher In The UI - Shigure Ui

I mean, come on. That title!

I think we'd better have some "music" now.

Perfect Cinema Weather - Lea's Apartment

Is it 1994 again? I'm not sure there's room for another Pulp. Not with the original still plowing the festival circuit.

Or that's what I thought when I saw this. Then I watched all of their others. They don't have many. None of them sound much like any of the others. Apparently they're a jazz group. Not that you'd know that either. 

They're good at titles but they outdid themselves with Television's like a Babycat with 10% Interest a Year and a Tendency to Fall. I mean, is it, though?

Fish Bird Baby Boy - Georgia Gets By

We've hit that moment in the set where the singer says "We're gonna slow it down now..." and everyone starts talking. Don't do that. Just sit back, watch the waves roll in and the wind blow her hair around and feel the stresses all just leave your tired, old body...

Just me? Okay then. Moving on...

wanna go to the gas station - Martha Sin Del

I lied. Not moving on at all!

Ever Seen - beabadoobee

OK, so I think I covered all the bases. Fudged it a bit on the random names/odds and ends but we're running long already so Aussie glam rock, French people being very French and Sparks being even weirder than usual are just going to have to wait for another day.

There's a new Lana del Rey song out (Official, that is.) so where this finishes is inevitable. Always close strong.

Tough - Quavo, Lana del Rey

Quavo's name first, I see. Then, it is from his YT channel. It's a real era mash-up, too. There's Lana from ten years ago in there and some Chemtrails/Norman Rockwell and a look-ahead to the upcoming country album. I wasn't a hundred per cent sold on first listen but it's a real grower.

Also, furry dice. That's a thing again?

Wuthering Waves: First Encore

Time for another brief (!) update on where I am in Wuthering Waves. I know everyone's been on the edge of their seats, wondering whether I've been able to claw my way over the hump and beat that fight I was complaining about a week and a half ago. 

Remember I said I'd have to go away and "figure it all out"? It also seemed like there was a non-trivial chance I might actually have to l2p or git gud if I wanted to carry on with the main storyline, although it also seemed like that wasn't something I especially needed to do if all I wanted was to carry on having fun with the game?

Yeah, well. Overthinking, right? Bane of the age. 

So, I am not going to start explaining how the game works because

a) it's super complicated

b) there's still way more I don't understand than I do

and

c) no-one cares

But I can tell you I bumbled around and clicked on stuff until at least enough came clear that I was able to move forward. It's a method I use a lot.

As far as I see it, everything levels up or upgrades so you need to do some of that or its like you're fighting mid-level mobs in your starting gear. I mean, it isn't exactly that because one of the things I don't much like about Wuthering Waves and gacha games in general (Noah's Heart very much being the exception but I'm saving that for another post.) is that there isn't really any gear to speak of. In the case of WW it's basically weapons and that's it.

But those weapons really matter. You gotta not just get good ones but you have to keep on boosting them. It really makes a difference although not as much of a difference as getting better Resonators, which is another point of contention between the gacha game model and me that I'm not going to get into here. (Won't do that again, I promise. Mention stuff I could talk about and then not talk about it. It's really annoying, isn't it?)

So, anyway, what I mainly did was figure out how to do the "Pulls", where you spend the special currencies for a chance at a new Resonator, plus I used all the mats I'd been stashing (The ones I had no idea what they were for.) to upgrade anything they'd work on, something the game does for you if you let it, although you can do it yourself once you work out what goes where and that's definitely the better option because, left to itself, the game doesn't always make the best choices.

As with all the games like this I've played, you get a ton of free currency to make pulls. I suppose if you're being competitive you might want more and that's how the money gets made but if you're just plugging through the story I doubt it would come to that. Certainly never has for me. 

I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull. She looked pretty good. Actually, she looked like a ten year old girl, which there always seems to be at least one of in every game like this, but I'm talking about her stats. 

I stopped pulling Resonators and went to try Encore out, which meant making a new team. This, beyond everything, turned out to be where I'd been going wrong until now.

I have a naive tendency to stick with the character I started with. I think of that one as "me". Or "my character". I mean, it would be in any other game but it's not how gacha games work. 

In Wuthering Waves it's even more confusing because that is your character for the main story, the one that appears in all the cut-scenes, but it doesn't have to be in the fights. And if you picked the one I did at the start then it really shouldn't be because she's... not very good.

The way it works is you can have a bunch of teams set up, each with three Resonators, drawn from your pool of however many it is you've got and you're supposed to swap them in and out whenever, for whatever reason. 

I can't be any clearer than that because I have no clue about the finer points but at least now I know it categorically does not work if you just keep going with the character you started with plus the next two NPCs she happened to meet. That is not a good team. Not even if you upgrade them all as best you can. 

I know because I did try it that way first out of misguided loyalty and although the upgrades meant I was doing twice as well as before in that tough fight, I was still only doing half as well as I needed. I really should have saved the mats.

When I swapped "my" character out for the new one I'd pulled, though, and another for one of the others, suddenly everything changed.

It was categorically not because I became any more skilled. I did not learn to play or get good or any of that. I just button-mashed as I always do but now it felt like I was on EZ-Mode..

Okay, that isn't entirely fair on me. I did read up on some of the mechanics I hadn't bothered to pay the slightest attention to before. I found out that every Resonator has Intro and Outro skills which means as you swap between them in combat they buff the others or do AE damage or all sorts of things as they come onto the battlefield or retire from it. So I started swapping between them a lot more actively. Not exactly randomly but not with any real understanding either.

And it seemed to help a lot. If I was going to play the game seriously, I'd take the trouble to remember what each of those effects did and use them tactically. I guess at some point I still might have to do that but not yet. For now, just making sure they keep happening in any old order seems to make a big enough difference.

So does not letting the game auto-select your Echoes, a tip I came across while reading about something else entirely. Echoes are the after-images of mobs you kill. You can collect them and use them like pets to fight or heal or buff. You can have up to five at once and only the first one is active. I'd been using that live one a lot but I hadn't even thought about the others.

It turns out the rest combine to give a bonus effect that I think is called a Sonata although please don't quote me on that. (Also I just now realise combat mechanics all seems to use musical descriptors. I wonder if that's significant...?)

There's an auto-select button to fill all five slots that I'd been using but if it follows any logic I have no clue what it would be. I just let it fill the slots and forgot about it. After I read that was a bad idea I kicked out all my Echoes and hand-picked new sets for all my Resonators, making sure they got all the bonuses they were missing and that seemed to make a big difference too.

I had my new team set up, a team in which the character I'd been thinking of as me didn't even rate a place. I had everyone and their weapons upgraded as far as I could get them. I had all my Echoes in a row. I went out into the world and started picking fights with random mobs to see if I felt any tougher. 

Oh boy, did I!

The improvement was so major I thought I might as well go try the tough fight again right away. I ate some kebabs I'd made and drank some tea to buff up my team's attack power and health and in we went. And we fricken' wiped the floor with them! 

Here's how it went:

Before: Best run - half the mobs killed before the timer ran out.

After: All the mobs killed before the timer hit halfway.

You do the math. I'm an Eng. Lit. grad. I just tell stories.

As I said last time, one of the rewards for winning that fight is everything in the outside world suddenly gains about fifteen levels. (I gained five myself, just from all the XP I'd been storing away while I was stuck at UL 20.) I was wary of what a levelled-up world might mean for my fun but the new team handle the higher stuff about the same as the old team handled the lower, so it all worked out fine.

The other reward is slipping the lock on the next chapter of the MSQ plus a whole bunch of side quests that were waiting for my UL to go up before they'd trigger. Looks like I won't be short of stuff to do for quite a while.

For example, as soon as I dinged, Grandpa Jingzhu got in touch again, wanting Chixia and Rover to help him some more in his amorous pursuit of his elderly neighbor Linghan. We did and it all worked out about as well as could be hoped.

The whole thing also turned out to be a more nuanced, complex story than I was expecting. A very unusual one for a game aimed at teens and twenty-somethings, all about aging and failing faculties and the way life stutters to an end. I do wish the translations were better sometimes. I'm not one hundred per cent sure I got all the implications. I think I did.

Either way, the meaning and the emotional impact of the quests, of which there's often a lot more than you'd expect, always comes through, even if some of the finer details get lost occasionally. And the quests can be packed with stuff so it's easy to miss things.

Case in point: that particular quest has a small sidebar about Chixia's real name and why she doesn't want anyone to use it because it's dorky. Her real name, when you learn it, is Chinese. I have no clue what would be embarassing about it but maybe to a Chinese person it would be obvious. I'm not even sure how you'd translate a joke like that so maybe it's asking too much to expect anyone to try.

Despite all that, the upshot is that the game is great, I'm loving it and now I can carry on with the story, which I was finding kinda interesting. Plus no doubt there'll be a million little stories along the way. 

And the little ones are usually the best. Just like Encore.

The Daybreak Home For Failing Games Is Delighted To Announce A Grand Re-Opening Party: Guest Of Honor - Palia.

The most unexpected gaming news of the week has to have been the gathering of Palia developer Singularity 6 into the welcoming embrace of Daybreak Games, an enfoldment only made possible, as Wilhelm was at some pains to point out, through the opening of EG7's wallet. Then again, with EG7 arguably in the process of being consumed from the inside by the company it thought had devoured and digested, the point may well be moot.

I think it's safe to assume we won't be seeing a similar parasitic assimilation this time around. The announced intention and best case scenario would appear to be Singularity 6 continuing in the current direction of travel, driving its own bus in the proven manner long established by Standing Stone Games, the ostensibly independent owners and operators of Lord of the Rings Online, while somewhere in the back, Ji Ham calls out course corrections and tells the driver when to pull over for a comfort break.

Palia is one of many - almost certainly too many - cozy crafting titles, development of which seemed to proliferate following the Great Sequestration at the beginning of the 2020s. The popularity of sitting indoors pretending you were walking around doing the kinds of simple, natural, soul-regenerating things that had suddenly became forbidden in real life - things like meeting friends, swapping gifts and romancing strangers - made a disturbing amount of sense in the plague years but it was always going to be a risky proposition when the masks came off and hands got dirty again for real.

Palia had a good head of steam behind it when it went into open beta less than a year ago (Really? That recently? Seems like a lot longer.) but the game as it could be played then turned out to be a lot less compelling than many had hoped or more likely imagined. I spent a few hours trying to like it and didn't make too much progress, either in the game or with my feelings for it.

Curiously, in about the only substantial post I wrote about my brief experience, I went on at some length about the existential difference between playing a game solo with other people around and just plain solo. Online or offline, in other words. That is also what I came here to talk about today.

When I heard that Daybreak had taken custody of the failing property, alleged to be teetering somewhere between maintenance mode and utter extinction, my immediate thought was to wonder what the heck they thought they were going to do with it. 

On the surface the acquisition makes sense. Their business, going back through ancestral roots with Sony Online Entertainment, revolves entirely on building, buying or curating MMOs of various kinds and Palia is supposedly an MMO. 

In my admittedly brief time with it, however, my overriding impression was that it neither felt like nor needed to be one and that I wasn't sure I wouldn't prefer it if it wasn't, something about which I was quite conflicted:

"As I've said many times, I hugely prefer playing online, among others, even when all I do is solo and never talk to anyone. I've said that just knowing a game-world is shared with thousands, even millions of people makes everything I do there feel more meaningful than if I was playing wholly alone, entirely unseen."

I'm not sure I feel that way any more. What's more, in ceasing to be convinced of the innate superiority, let alone necessity, of a shared, online existence when it comes to playing games, I may be not so much changing my coat as readjusting it to fit the zeitgeist.

A few years ago, all talk was of Live Service. Everything had to be online, always. From the player's perspective, the idea seemed to be that, once you began playing a game, you'd never have to stop. From the business end, expectations revolved around locking players into an eternal purchasing cycle, mostly involving Seasons, that would mean no-one would ever need to make a new game again.

That never-ending search for the Forever Game seems to have morphed into a peculiar form of mutually assured destruction, with swarms of players descending on every new hopeful just long enough to strip it bare and spit it out before swirling up and away towards the next. Developers are indeed freed from making new games but only at the expense of desperately trying to pump out new content for the only one they ever did make fast enough to stop the last few customers abandoning them forever.

Now everyone's had the chance to see how Live Service works in practice, it seems the story has changed. Like gamification and the metaverse it's no longer a buzzword, more of a curse. Of late, we've begun to see not just resistance but active push-back. The pressure may finally be starting to generate a response.

A couple of formerly multiple titles that each built a similar momentum to Palia's before most people could play them - Nightingale and Wayfinder - have each removed the requirement for an active internet connection while playing.

 Airship Syndicate claimed they were responding to "a shift in the industry where players are OK paying for a premium title if it means respect for their time and wallets". Inflexion made it clear they were responding directly to player pressure, saying "We’ve seen a lot of discussion in recent days around our decision to make Nightingale online-only at our Early Access release. We understand that this can be frustrating..."

The upshot in both cases was to take the games offline or at least offer an offline option. Arguably neither was a full MMORPG but another recent title, Islands of Insight self-professedly was and now that, too, will be adding an offline mode in a week or so. Meanwhile, Amazon Games has been tying itself in knots attempting to rebrand New World for console as an "action RPG". They aren't atually taking the game offline but you get the feeling they wish they could.

Everything has its day. Maybe even the Internet. Tobold seems to think so and he stopped playing MMORPGs ages ago, perhaps in preparation for the day when it would all fall apart.

I'm not quite ready to settle down in my bunker with a diesel generator, a console and a stack of cartridges just yet but I do think the online honeymoon is probably over. The days when it seemed like magic just to be there, wherever there was, alongside hundreds, even thousands of other people, all doing the same imaginary things in the same imaginary space, are long gone. 

Now, when you hear people talking about what it's like being online, they're mainly complaining about how awful it is or reminiscing about how great it used to be. If anyone talks about the "magic" you can bet it's the magic of nostalgia. The zeitgeist seems to be in retrograde right now as people rediscover the ownership rights and privacy they thought ten years ago they'd never need to think about again.

I don't think time rolls back that easily. I suspect internet denial will be a niche movement for the rest of my lifetime, at least. Always online though? Live service? I suspect those will slowly go the way of so many other trends that once seemed unstoppable but which now need to be explained to anyone who didn't happen to be around at the time.

Palia, to swing back to where we began, looks to me like the very sort of game that would be well-served by an offline mode. If you google it you'll quickly see I'm not the only one who sees it that way. 

Daybreak seems to be one of the companies least likely to facilitate such a change of direction. As SOE they first had a reputation for keeping dead games online and then for mercilessly shutting them down but they've never been in the business of packaging them up for offline play. DBG has mostly concentrated on curating the games it acquired after SOE cut back the deadwood.

The upside of that downbeat projection is that they've done a pretty good job of it. DBG are MMO specialists and they seem to have the knack of keeping the games at least ticking over to the satisfaction of enough players to keep them commercially viable. If Palia is going to make it, somehow, as an MMO, they've gone to the right place. 

The question remains whether there's really enough demand for a massively multiplayer gardening game or, as Singularity Six prefers to put it, "A cozy community sim MMO for you and your friends". If I had to bet, I'd say there may be - but if there is it won't be this one. 

Still, at least now the game is under the Daybreak umbrella, it probably means I'll at least be checking in now and again to see how things are going. That'll be one more for the MAU.

Are we still counting those?

I wouldn't have said that a couple of days ago.

One Day I'll Leave This City

This weekend saw another open playtest for the retro MMORPG Monsters & Memories. The servers opened on Friday afternoon and stayed up until midnight on Sunday. The developers, the appropriately and amusingly named Niche World Cult, were clearly expecting increased interest. They not only added several servers but also cloned all the characters from the earlier Stress Test to a server of their own to avoid crowding.

I didn't make a character for that test a month ago and I missed the previous opportunity altogether. My only hands-on time with the game was back in May last year, when I called the build I saw "a hugely impressive achievement". 

After another couple of hours with the game, that remains my impression although I have to temper it  by saying I did pretty much the exact same thing this time I did a year ago, so any changes or improvements made since then were probably lost on me. 

One of the most instructive things about having a blog is that I get to see just how very predictable I can be. In May 2023 I made a Human Elementalist and spent most of my time trying to find the Guildmaster so I could hand in my note and join the guild. This time I did almost exactly the same and it wasn't until I was in the middle of doing it that I realised I'd done it all before.

Anyone got a box I can stand on?

In fact, pretty much the only thing I did differently this time was to go Gnome instead of Human. I even made the exact same mistake when I spawned into the world, heading off in the direction I was facing, instead of just turning around and going through the gate behind me. That meant I had to go all the way around the city walls on the outside, until I find a way in, which also meant swimming across the harbor, just like last year.

At least this time I had the sense to cling to the wall so I only had to swim the very last part. It was a interesting journey, with ramps to climb and ships to hop on and off. Aso a lot shorter than I remember, although only because I resisted the temptation to go exploring and stuck the the task in hand instead.

This time, I also took the trouble to read the note carefully, which was just as well as it contained the only directions I was likely to get. Monsters & Memories is seeking to be so authentically old school there's no in-game map. Not just no mini-map - no map at all. 

The note helpfully tells you which directions the sun rises and sets and, crucially, that the sea is to the south. It also tells you the name of the guild you're looking for - The School of the Fourfold Path - and a couple of salient points about its location. It's in the harbor district, directly south of a named park. 

Step One: Find the harbor. Check!

Observant readers may notice that I haven't provided a screenshot of the note. That's because I neglected to take one. I also haven't checked online to see if anyone else did and I haven't looked any of this up on any kind of wiki or guide. It's all straight out of my memory, which I find kind of remarkable. I can almost remember the name of that park, too...

I think this says something about why some veteran  MMORPG players feel so strongly about restricting or even excluding elements that, objectively, would seem to be nothing more than straightforward quality of life improvements. The kind of supposedly uncontroversial additions to the genre made over the years. I mean, who wouldn't want a map? It's one of the very first omissions that gets a third party solution if the developer is slacking, isn't it?

If I'd had a map, though, would I have remembered all of those details? Or any of them? Wouldn't I have been more likely only to remember that I opened the map and used it to find my way to where I wanted to go? And if I'd had a directional marker on the map or a text prompt or even one of those sparkly wisp-trails that act as stand-in for GPS in fantasy games, would I remember anything about the note at all? Would the note even have told me anything more than "Give this note to the Elemental Guildmaster"?

Well, maybe. There is such a thing as flavor text, although whether anyone reads it is another matter. And I do look around me while I run, most of the time. I imagine I'd still have noticed how mind-bendingly huge the starting city in this game is, for a start. It is - and I rarely use this word because it's so ridiculous but this one time it feels right - humungous! 

Clothwalking. It's a Gnome innate. What? Yes it is!

It feels as though it has to be one of the largest MMORPG cities I've seen. Maybe it isn't really that vast but it feels as though it is, partly because you can see lots of it from everywhere so it always seems as though there's city all around you.

Many cities in games feel quite constricted if you traverse them at ground level. You can see the streets you're in but not much else. This one is very three-dimensional, full of ramps and stairs and parapets and towers. And the streets are a maze. Combined with movement that feels relatively slow, it always seems as though you can see your destination but it's not getting any closer. 

Why the city needs to be so big is another question. It certainly makes it feel convincingly city-like in stature, if that's the intention. One of the big drawbacks of MMORPG cities used to be that they felt more like villages or outposts. If the idea here is to make players feel an appropriate sense of scale then goal accomplished. Since most of the buildings are empty, though, there's not really any greater sense of realism or authenticity than if the city was a tenth the size but every building had a clear and obvious purpose.

The game is still a year and a half out even from Early Access so it's more than possible all that space will have been furnished and populated by then. If so, that's going to make the city even more convincing but also even more intimidating. It's bad enough having to navigate a warren of empty streets and untenanted buildings but at least you know there's nothing there you're missing. Imagine if you needed to check them all and speak to every NPC, just in case they had a quest to offer.

Hey! You're the guy from the note!

And you would have to speak to them all because, naturally, no-one in Monsters & memories is going to wear a punctuation mark for a hat. You have to go up to them and /hail to get them to speak to you. Or I guess you do. I haven't actually found any quests yet, other than the one the guildmaster gave me when I handed in the note. 

When it comes down to it, I haven't really done much. I'd have liked to but I haven't been able to find the time. Unfortunately, NWC (Niche World Cult. Remember?), like many developers, prefer to run their tests at the weekends, which is the worst possible time for me. I work every Sunday and every other Saturday. Also, weekends are when everything interesting tends to happen, so there's plenty of competition. 

This weekend just gone saw the Glastonbury Festival happening, just down the road from me. While I have no affection for festivals in general and a particular dislike of Glastonbury in particular, having been there just once, on the wettest of the wet years, an experience I have yet to wipe from my memory almost forty years later, I do like to watch the excellent BBC coverage, at least when they show one of the few bands playing that I actually like. Consequently, when I got home from work this weekend, I placed a higher priority on watching the likes of Blondshell and Fontaines DC than on a playtest for a game still nearly two years away from becoming a real thing.

Even so, I managed to fit a few minutes in between sets and what I saw remains an impressive achievement. Whose achievement is a moot point. As I suggested in those previous posts, Monsters & Memories isn't so much inspired by EverQuest as it is a remake. So many facets and features are all but identical, from the way the spellbook looks and functions to the names and appearance of the mobs.

Is this what they call an homage?

Of course, many of the mobs are drawn from life so no-one can claim to have invented them. (Except God, if you feel that way inclined. Or named them, for that matter. Except Adam, ditto.) Brad McQuaid neither invented nor named fire beetles and dune scarabs. They're actual, living creatures. Even so, having them wandering around outside the gates of starting cities in both games isn't something that happened by chance.

This time, I even got to kill a few. Well, a few snakes and rotting skeletons, at least. Last year I'm not sure I ever got as far as hunting mobs for xp. This weekend I managed to find a moment to venture outside the Western Gates and try out my one damage spell and my feeble dagger on the local wildlife. I even managed to do it without dying although I did have to run to the guards every time I got an add.

Combat, if you can even call it that at Level One, seemed pretty solid. My Flameburst cast fast and knocked a chunk off the mob's health. Mana dropped about as quickly as you'd expect and I was soon out of spell juice. One resist and I had to finish the creature off with my dagger. At least I didn't have to sit and med for as long as the fight before I got going again but I imagine that joy will come soon enough.

Although maybe not that soon because half a dozen snakes and skeletons barely moved the dial on the xp I needed to get to Level Two. Not that there was a dial, just an undifferentiated block of yellow whose incremental progress was hard to estimate. The whole thing felt unnervingly authentic, if the authenticity you're after is the outmoded gameplay of the late twentieth century.

Even the fricken' spell effects are the same...

And, curiously, I suppose it might be, at that. Having just bounced quite hard off both the 2006 stylings of Anashti Sul and the all mod cons convenience of Tarisland, once again I found Monsters & Memories relentlessly retrograde take on the MMORPG experience disturbingly addictive. That Skinner Box gameplay loop hasn't lost any of its efficacy in a quarter of a century.

It certainly helps that, visually, the game has the same low rent luster that served Valheim so well. The graphics may be simple but they're elegant and easy on the eye. I thought at first there must have been a polish pass since last time I played because everything really did look better than I remembered but looking at the screenshots I took last May it may be my memory that needs polishing. They look very much the same.

One thing that was different was the sandstorm. It began while I was looking for the Guild and never let up until I logged out. I'm not absolutely sure a sandstorm is a positive addition to gameplay per se but if there are going to be weather effects, this is a good way to do them. The sand stormed convincingly around the streets, reducing visibility but not so much I couldn't still enjoy the view, while the wind wuthered atmospherically in the background. 

It's possible that at some point in development weather effects like this will acquire stat penalties or other negative properties, although perhaps not. That certainly wouldn't be true to the status quo ante M&M seeks to restore. When it rains in Norrath, no-one gets wet. 

Pretty sure the city's over there, somewhere.

I wonder at what point the line between authentically nostalgic inconvenience and modern-day quasi-realism will be drawn? There's certainly a masochistic demographic that would like to go back to the way things were, only worse.

I suspect Niche World Cult will avoid traps like that. As I said before, of all the teams working on projects like this, so far they seem like the one that has both the clearest idea of what they want to achieve and the best shot at achieving it.

Once again, I wish them all the luck with the game and I hope there'll be plenty more opportunities to test it for free before the paywall comes down in 2026. Next time I might even remember to try a different class and see a little of the world beyond the starting area. Always assuming I can find a zone wall to hug, that is.

We can do that, right? If not I don't imagine I'll be traveling very far. Not alive, anywa