On A Journey

There's been a lot going on Chez Bhagpuss recently, one way and another so I haven't been able to put anything substantial together for a while. I don't want to miss my regular cadence so I'm going to keep tossing stuff up as I can but posts might get a little random. Fair warning. 

Also, really, would anyone have noticed if I hadn't said anything?

Today's little pleasure is a bounce off a post by Aywren about a game I hadn't heard of, called AFK Journey. That, I have to say, is not an inspiring name for any game but Aywren made it sound pretty interesting, the screenshots in her post looked pretty and it seemed like it might make a possible replacement for the recently-shuttered Noah's Heart, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

The first thing I'd say about it is that it's absolutely gorgeous to look at. I spent more time staring at the pictures and admiring the art than I did playing the game. I don't really need to describe it because the look comes over well in screenshots and I took a few of those.

Secondly, the writing isn't at all bad. As Aywren mentioned, the plot isn't anything new but the prose is sprightly, the dialog sparkles and the characters have plenty of personality. It's a fun read, although reading is optional because all dialog is also fully voiced and the voice acting is convincing and enjoyable to listen to. I didn't skip ahead once, which is always a recommendation.

As for gameplay, I played for an hour or so, enjoying the view and the chat. Other than that, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

Most of what I saw seemed to be an extended tutorial but it didn't teach me anything much beyond how to use the virtual joystick to move. AFK Journey is a cross-platform title but it was clearly designed with Mobile in mind. Few concessions seem to have been made to convert it to a format familiar to PC players.

During the tutorial, messages kept popping up telling me to click on things so I clicked where I was told and on we went. Unfortunately, I rarely had much of an idea why I was clicking ,so when it came time to do something on my own I was often none the wiser.

Following the main storyline had me traveling through the world in three-quarter perspective, stopping mostly talk to people, which seemed straightforward enough. Coins popped into my bag occasionally for no reason I could fathom but who complains about free money? As I trotted through the delightful, if sadly fire-ravaged countryside, there were allies to gather, fires to put out (of course.) and baddies to fight (Or were they?) At no point did I feel remotely in control of any of it.

After a while, I worked out how to auto-run to the next quest objective, something I would have appreciated if I hadn't been able to see chests in the hedgerows just waiting to be opened or teleport stones just waiting to be added to my map. If I allowed the game to whisk me on to my next appointment, it ran me straight past all of them, so I kept jumping off auto-run to go grab loot or open a waystone. Then I'd get into random encounters and fights with bandits and wildlife so in the end I decided it would be easier to do my own navigating.

Fights were frequent and incomprehensible. There can be up to five of you in the team and any number of opponents and if you click some icons on the right of the screen, little pointers appear over peoples' heads. What they mean, I have no idea. Luckily, there's one button you can press that seems to make everyone sort themselves out and get on with it so I just used that every time and sat back to watch.

I'm one hundred per cent sure that's not how it's meant to work. I'm certain there are tactical elements you're supposed to be concerning yourself with, if only because the whole point of gacha games is to build teams and swap your cards in and out for maximum effect. Usually it's quite clear how you do that. Not this time. Or not to me, at any rate.

That said, the game does get off to a fairly steady and manageable start. After a while, though, the windows and prompts and suggestions begin and then it's everyone for themselves. 

Games of this kind generally have a ridiculous range of features, mini-games, rewards and gimmicks. AFK Journey is no exception. I generally do anything that's quick, easy and gives you free stuff and or that I find fun in and of itself. After that, I ignore the rest but in this case I ignored everything because once again I was having difficulty figuring out what I was supposed to do.

I realize all of that would probably work itself out over time. I've played plenty of games that confused the hell out of me to begin with but which turned out, in the end, to be much simpler than they seemed. Normally, I'd be happy to carry on for a few more sessions; see if the fog lifted; let the shape of the game make itself known.

In this case, I'm not sure I'm going to stick around that long. The game has potential but there are a lot of games with potential out there, some of them at least as pretty or well-written and many a lot more comfortable for me to play. 

Still, I have AFK Journey installed now and I don't not like it... We'll have to see how it goes from here.

Demos 'n Betas And Stuff

It seems like only a short time ago I was scratching around for new games to try. Not any more. They're coming in clumps now. Too many to keep up with. Just this last few days I've turned down two, tried and failed with another and spent an enjoyable hour in a fourth. And I'm positive there were a couple more I read about but didn't even get round to bookmarking. I'm finding it tough to keep up.

Beginning with one of the two I chose not to bother with, does anyone actually remember Infantry Online, because I certainly don't. I thought I at least knew the names of all the games in the Sony Online Entertainment portfolio back when EverQuest was the pack leader there - I even tried Tanarus once, I think - but I have absolutely no memory of this one at all.

Some people do. It's back on Steam with an even less evocative name, something I'd have would be next to impossible. It's called Freeinfantry, a name not made cooler or more edgy by running the two words together. Whatever it's called, though, there are people who just love it:

"Awesome game."

"My favorite game of all time."

"Best game ever made."

"Outshines games from the last two decades."

And there are plenty more superlatives where those came from, the Steam Store, where Freeinfantry currently enjoys a Very Positive rating from 92% of reviewers. 

As seems to be standard for the era, the game has a very convoluted history, which you can learn about on its Wikipedia page, like I just did. Then you can immediately forget it, like I'm about to. The part that interests me is the way even now, a quarter of a century later, no-one really seems to agree on what the historical facts mean.

Some longtime players think of it as an SOE title, others as an independent gobbled up by a corporate. Some hate SOE for ruining it, "milking" it and/or abandoning it, others are grateful to them for returning it to the players, even though it has apparently been running continuously in some kind of emulator mode since SOE shuttered it over a decade ago.

The MMOBomb report, which was where I heard about it in the first place, places the game squarely in the SOE/Daybreak timeline, while making it clear the current Steam version "operates under a license agreement similar to that of "Project 1999". Presumably DBG picked it up as part of the job lot when they bought SOE. 

It's worth noting the P99 agreement itself only happened after the buyout. Any credit Sony is getting for any of this would seem to be misplaced. The blame for exploiting it then cancelling it in the first place though? That's still theirs.

There's no chance whatsoever I'll ever play any version of Infantry Online. Neither the setting nor the gameplay have the slightest appeal for me. The same cannot be said for another game even more tangentially connected to SOE, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, the game once thought of as the spiritual successor to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, itself occasionally referred to informally as EverQuest 2.5.

Today, a few yeara afer the untimely death of its creative force, Brad McQuaid, the man with a vision™ that, arguably, should always have been prefaced by the word "tunnel", Pantheon is just another crowdfunded wannabe-retro MMORPG but I'd still like to give it a go. I just don't want to pay the required access fee, even though the cost has been somewhat reduced of late with the addition of the "one week every couple of months" option. 

I was, then, more than a little excited to read at MassivelyOP of an opportunity to piggyback into the game for a few days on the back of a code given out for watching streamer Cohhcarnage. I wasn't going to watch the stream, of course, but MOP were kind enough to publish the code so I gave it a try.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. It had already been cancelled by the time I got there and I was quite fast, too. Credit to the Visionary Realms PR department for closing the loophole so quickly, although obviously they must have been the ones who opened it in the first place.

My first visit to whatever the name of the world Pantheon takes place in ( I can never remember.) will have to wait. Fair enough. I've been waiting years already. I've gone right off the boil, anyway.

It is odd how these games bubble up and then just go on simmering, seemingly forever. I can't recall when I first read about the whimsically, if somewhat incoherently-named Swords 'n' Magic and Stuff (Why abbreviate one conjunction but not the other?) but it must have been a few years ago.

If I've thought about it at all since then, which I kind of doubt, it would have been to wonder when it might reach some kind of publicly accessible build. Apparently that happened a while back. As in five years ago. It's on Steam with a release date of 2020. Who knew? 

A lot of people, apparently, because like Freeinfantry, SNMAS (No, not gonna work.) has a Very Positive rating, only this one's from almost a thousand reviews as opposed to FI's 60 or so. It's still in Early Access but given a) that I definitely knew about it as a game in development and b) it's "a cozy, cooperative, open world RPG centered around the joy of discovery", a description which makes it sound almost tailor-made for me, I'm at a loss to explain why not only had I never realised it was available but also why there's not even a tag for it on the blog. Have I really never mentioned it at all?

I've played it now. There's a new demo that lets you go through the very early tutorial, up to the point where you jump off a cliff. I did that. I managed to get my glider working before I crashed to my death but as I landed on the beach next to the starting town, a big banner unfurled in front of me, thanking me for my interest and suggesting I should stop freeloading and get my wallet out.

And I might, too. The game is currently on half-price offer, making it quite an attractive purchase at £10.49. In fact, looking at it more closely, the offer ends in just over five hours as I write, meaning if you're reading this it's probably already ended. I guess I'd better make up my mind. Or wait for the inevitable next sale.

From what I saw, Swords, which is what I think I'm going to shorten it to (I toyed with SnM but, well, y'know...) is a jolly romp of a game with plenty of good ideas but perhaps still some work to do on some of the details. The look is Minecraft-meets-Lego-Minifigures, which I have to say is not one of my favorites, but they do more with it than you might expect. I found it pleasant enough to look at although I can't say any of the scenery made me giddy. Then again, it was only a tutorial.

There's a mildly unusual selection of races including fauns, dryads, orcs, elves and the ubiquitous humans. The potentially divisive and difficult gender issue is handled very simply by not having any. You are you and that's that. I picked a Faun for no reason - they all look much the same and the game doesn't give any indication of practical differences between them.

There are a few customization opportunities - skin tone, hairstyle, facial hair - but none seem very distinctive. They are at least charmingly described, particularly the Face options, which include a whole range of "Cute" looks, many of which come with freckles. It only took me a few minutes to settle on something I was happy with and then it was into the game, where I found myself in the virtual equivalent of an escape room. 

Although this isn't an especially egregious example of the species, I could happily never see another introduction like this. Locked in a cell with nothing but the clothes you stand up and a disturbing inability to remember anything about your circumstances, personal background or even how you got there, your one and only job is to get out.

Why we can't just start in the village or town, with full knowledge of who we are and where we live, beats me. Still, you play the hand you're dealt, so I spent much of the next hour trying to work my way through a series of cells, rooms, caves and caverns in search of natural daylight.

During my time in an orc dungeon (For that is where I found myself.) I learned that resources respawn infinitely, not just mining or logging nodes but obstacles you'd imagine were only meant to be removed once. I had recourse to double back on myself a couple of times (The route out is far from obvious.) and each time I had to break the same crates that I'd broken before to clear my passage. 

I also got loot each time, suggesting you could easily spend the rest of your life just looting the same chests if you were so inclined. They can drop different items as well, which is both exciting and disturbing. Imagine if you missed out on an ultra-rare and could never go back to the tutorial once you'd left.

Sorry. Just messing with you. I have no firm evidence the game has "ultra-rares", let alone that there are any in the tutorial. But there might be...

The writing is uniformly solid. Good sentence structure, grammatically correct, idomatic. I imagine the real quests, once you get to them, might be pretty good. There's also a light puzzle element to the gameplay, although not so light it didn't completely stump me at one point. I couldn't figure out how to open a door so I had to watch someone do it on YouTube, where I learned how important it is to look up now and again, even underground.

There's some fighting, mostly (Entirely?) against dim-witted orc trainees and their teachers. I had four weapons by the end of the tutorial - a limp stick, a two-handed branch, a bow and a magic staff. The bow never runs out of ammo for the basic atack but you can also find all kinds of special arrows that do different damage, like setting things on fire. The staff sets things on fire too, or heals people, depending which magic book you're holding in your other hand. It looks like an interesting combat system; clunky but fun.

Worthwhile, too. There's lots of loot. Really, a lot. Mobs drop stuff, there are chests, you can smash vases and crates... I imagine there's a limit to how much you can carry but I didn't hit it and I picked up everything.

Eventually I found my way up and out into daylight, where I was able to meet my friend Sen, who'd escaped before me. He promptly ran off, telling me to meet him in town, leaving me to kill more orcs and generally goof around until I met the guy with the glider who told me to jump off the cliff and here we are back where we began. 

I've been thinking about it as I write the post and I'm not going to buy the game just now. Not because it doesn't look good, just because I have other things to do and I probably wouldn't play it much. I will wishlist it, though, so I can reconsider next time it goes on sale. 

All things considered, it seems like a very nice game to potter around in, especially impressive given it's all the work of a single developer. Why it doesn't get more attention when so many similar titles get more than they deserve I have no clue but at least it's firmly on my radar now so I guess the demo did its job.

And finally, the other game I opted against downloading, a decision that isn't any kind of negative criticism of the game so much as an observation on just how cluttered the field for open-world, sandbox survival games feels at the moment. It's called Soulmask and it's available on Steam in open beta format right now. 

If you're interested, you have another four days to sign up and join in. There's also a demo that's been on Steam since the start of the year, so that may still be available after the beta, although the proposed release date for the game is Q2 2024, otherwise known as "now", so maybe not. 

The screenshots look very appealing. I'm getting a pre-Columbian, North American vibe although, possibly through someone having learned from Amazon's missteps with marketing New World, I don't think that's overtly mentioned. The detailed description on the Steam store page makes the game sound amazing, too, so if it lives up to its own hype I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more about it. 

As yet, there's not a single review, so either no-one's playing or there's some kind of block due to it being in beta. I'm not sure how that works on Steam. Either way, it doesn't entirely imbue me with confidence. There are still a few days left so maybe I will try the beta before it ends. I've kind of intrigued myself now just by writing about it.

Of course, before I get around to doing anything, some new game will probably have thrust itself into the spotlight, demanding my attention. There are altogether too many of these things to give every remotely interesting game a fair examination.

I guess it's better that way around than the reverse, although some days I do wish there was some sort of pre-registration process you could sign up for, where someone would winnow out the chaff for me and just leave the good stuff. 

Oh, wait, that would be what I'm doing now, wouldn't it...?

Dirty Old Town

EverQuest II's Origins/Anashti Sul beta began yesterday. This morning I took a very quick look at it. I'm not intending to spend much time there but I couldn't resist the temptation to remind myself what  Freeport used to be like. Having spent half an hour or so walking the streets of the old city I can sum it up in a couple of words: shabby and inconvenient.

Before I get to the details, I'd just like to complement Darkpaw on the beta process itself, which is exemplary. I haven't bothered with an EQII beta in a long time, one of the reasons being that it used to be something of a pain installing the client. I remember it involved a lot of fiddling around to get it working and that switching back and forth between beta and Live could be awkward. 

Not any more. It could scarcely be simpler. There's a drop-down menu on the launcher. You just open it, select the server "Version" you want from a choice of four (US English, EU English, Beta, Public Test), apply your selection and that's it. The patcher sets up a separate installation in your EQII folder. It holds the unique data and it uses the same common data as your regular install, so there's no need for an entire duplicate client, which was one of the things that used to put me off. 

When you want to switch from one version to another, you just re-select your preference and everything is done for you. It's flawless and fast.

Am I the first to arrive?

The same can't quite be said for my trip to Freeport but it wasn't too much of an inconvenience. First I had to make a character. That didn't take long. I knew I wouldn't be playing her for long so there was no point in trying to make her look perfect. And ratongas tend to look pretty decent whatever you do with them, anyway. Unlike gnomes. Or most other races in EQII, come to that.

Speaking of gnomes, the captain of the Far Journey can't tell the difference between gnomes and ratongas. All "shorties" look alike to him, apparently, although he doesn't exactly come right out and say it. It's a weird moment, presumably unintentional, possibly related to the game not recognizing player races correctly and it would most likely have gone unremarked in 2004 but it struck me as quite uncomfortable in 2024. 

Of course, the Far Journey Tutorial was re-instated in the live game several years ago, so this may not even be anything specific to the Origins project. I don't think I'm quite curious enough to make a new ratonga on Live and see if it happens there, too, but I might submit a feedback report to the beta team.

I didn't really want to play through the tutorial yet again but by the time it occured to me to wonder if there was a way to skip it, I was in the middle of it anyway so I just carried on. Fortunately, the Origins build does allow you to opt out of all the Isle of Refuge content, something I'm pretty sure you couldn't do at release. I'm not sure when that option was added so I can't say if it's authentic to the 2006 game.

That doesn't look safe...

If not, then I'm very surprised it got left in. The rule of thumb for the upcoming server would appear to be: if it counts as a "Quality of Life" improvement, take it out. After a while it became so obvious that was what they'd done, I started to think more generally about how these retro servers work. 

It's bizarre, once you look at it objectively. The PR for every Old School or Vanilla or Classic server in every MMORPG always goes hard on authenticity, the idea being that by playing there you'll somehow come closer to the ur-version of the game: clean, pure, unsullied by commerce, undiluted by compromise, somehow real in a way the modern game can never be.

What that generally translates to in practice is the removal of most of the changes that players, specifically those who played during the era that's being - faultily - replicated, lobbied long and hard to bring to the game in the first place. While devs often make changes players didn't ask for, those rarely involve things like adding more convenient travel options or reducing loading times.

Old East Freeport. Unfriendly and unkempt.

New East Freeport: Urban renewal and civic pride.

As I was walking around Freeport, looking at but not really admiring the city the way it used to be, I kept running up against things that made my progress slower, more awkward, less fluent. The most striking example was the return of closed gates between each district. Not just the Neighborhoods, which have always required a zone transition, but the cardinal quarters of the city itself.

Each of those districts is now a separate zone once more but the inconvenience goes further. I'd forgotten that none of the internal "Bells", like the one you can click on in West Freeport to go to North Freeport, for example, existed in the original game. I don't know when they were added but it must have been after 2006. 

Even the spiral staircase that takes you from North Freeport to the East Freeport docks has been seamlessly removed. I ran down there, looking to take a short cut, and found myself staring at a dead end. Now that I cast my mind back, I have a vague memory of that stairwell being added at some stage and having to learn to remember to use it. Now I guess I'll have to learn not to.

Other missing conveniences I noticed included missing vendors all over the place. The woman who stands in the corner of the East Freeport bank, to whom I always sell my status items, for example, is nowhere to be seen. Then again, neither is the banker. There is no bank in  East Freeport any more.

I was somewhat surprised to find all the crafting tables are still in the above-ground crafting building in West Freeport. I half-expected we'd be sent back down underground to the crafting instance in the basement. Things don't seem to have gone quite that far but I suspect that's where everyone will end up anyway because there's no broker or anyone to hand out writs or even sell fuel upstairs now.

In fact, if there's any convenience you've become used to in the last ten or fifteen years, I recommend you forget it. It's not going to be there. It feels surreally ironic to realise that the new server will require a subscription to play but for your money you'll be denied access not just to all the in-game conveniences but also to some of the best perks the sub is meant to give you, like instant travel to any portal on the map. 

Old North Freeport - more gargoyles, more firepots, more water-damage

New North Freeport: more mages, more gilt, better paving.

If you think about the popularity of both Classic and Hardcore servers, where more and more options are removed to make the experience more compelling, maybe the ultimate in authenticity would be a server where you'd pay money not to be allowed to log in at all. The terrifying thing is, you know if any developer added something like that, even as a joke, someone would pay for it. And then complain that they hadn't got their money's worth because they could still see the server's name in the list.

I can't really make fun of such people. I mean, I re-subscribed to World of Warcraft just to play Classic and I will surely be making a character to play on Anashti Sul, as soon as the doors open in June. I can't say, though, that the appeal for me lies in the removal of all those basic improvements we were so pleased to see added to the game in the first place.

Neither am I crazy about returning to the original Freeport, now I've been reminded what it was like. It's not just the inconvenience. It's the way it looks, too. I remember now how often the Overlord's city was criticized for its appearance back in the early days. People complained it was dull and tired and nothing like what you'd expect a tyrant of Lord Lucan's pomp and arrogance to call home.

The problem lies in both the textures and the design. If the intention was to suggest a great city worn down by decades of chaos and war, it hasn't entirely succeeded. It looks more like somewhere that used to be important until the trade routes moved elsewhere and which now can barely raise enough taxes to keep the streets clean. There are even pigs wandering around as if Freeport was some market town that couldn't afford to keep its fences in order, not the greatest seaport in the nation.

If you're gonna eat 'em, don't give 'em names.

By contrast, the Freeport that replaced it looks elegant, austere and foreboding. No-one would doubt its military might or its economic power. It's colorful and almost pleasant in parts. You could imagine Lucan's fraternal despots staying on for a few days after a summit, just to enjoy the sea air and the public executions.

The new Freeport is also much busier. There are people everywhere; no wandering pigs to be seen. In part it's that plenty of NPCs have been added to provide services but there are also more citizens just standing around. The older Freeport looks half-empty by comparison, as though anything worth doing must be happening somewhere else.

And yet, Old Freeport does have an atmosphere, downbeat and depressing as it is. The wandering pigs may make it feel as though the city's glory days are long gone but it's still nice to see Lord Oinkles again. I even thought I heard a few insults I hadn't heard in a long time as I jogged through the backstreets. I wouldn't swap the old for the new but it's good to come back for a visit, if only to see how much better everything is today.

And that's about as much as I'm going to say about it for now. I could go on to talk about the Neighborhoods, several of which I visited today, but I'll save that for when the server goes live in a few weeks. 

I'll also save my thoughts about what it's going to be like to level up in an environment like this for later, too. I'll just throw this out there as something to consider, in case you're thinking of playing: if you'd find it humiliating to be chased out of a zone by a Level 3 spiderling, you might want to re-consider your options...

About The New Idea

I've been threatening to do a Covers post for a while now. The day has finally come. I wasn't planning on it but then the former drummer of the Kaiser Chiefs introduced me to my new fad band and I thought yes, it's time.

It's funny how these things happen, isn't it? Synchronicity, I suppose. Or maybe quantum entanglement. 

I'm not sure I've ever consciously listened to a Kaiser Chiefs' song. I certainly couldn't name one. You'd think I'd have less than no interest in clicking through a link to read about some new band their old drummer'd put together. 

And I wouldn't, if Nick Hodgson, to give their old drummer a name, hadn't decided to call his group Everyone Says Hi. First off, that's a great name for a band. Second off, it sounds oddly familiar. 

And it should. It's the title of a David Bowie song. It was on his 2002 album, Heathen, of which I'm pretty sure there's a copy somewhere in the house and which I've certainly heard a few times.

Hodgson didn't know what it was when he chose it:

“I’ve got a list of band names and in my band names list it said ‘Everyone Say Hi’. I thought ‘OK, that’s unusual, I’ll go on Spotify to see if there’s a band already called that’, which is what I always do. Usually there is but this time it just came up with that Bowie song. But the Bowie song is ‘Everyone Says Hi’ and I had Everyone Say Hi and I thought ‘I’ll change it to that because I love David Bowie’. I didn’t know [the song].”

That's a long-winded way of explaining how I came to be reading about a band I wasn't particularly interested in listening to, although their debut single, Brain Freeze, isn't at all bad (It also happens to be co-written by someone who also co-wrote Lana del Rey's seminal Video Games, but if we go much further down the synchronicity hole we may never come out...) but it doesn't begin to explain why I'm writing about it now.

For that, we need to dig deeper into the short interview, in which Nick Hodgson answers the somewhat random question "How do you see the landscape for bands now?" Nick takes it as his opportunity to big up a scene I'm pretty sure no-one reading this knows exists. I certainly didn't and I don't think the NME journo did either:

"There’s some good stuff. Do you know The Molotovs? I love what they’re doing. They’re only about 15 and they’re playing in these venues full of 15-year-olds and they’re throwing themselves around and getting onstage and joining in. It’s like, ‘So the kids are still excited by bands’. They’re in a scene with a load of other bands, all the same age. You need to think of a title for the scene."

As you can see, whoever put the page together for the NME included a link for the one band Nick names, the Molotovs. Since I'd gotten that far, I clicked on it to see who they were but it goes nowhere. Apparently NME doesn't even have a placeholder for the Molotovs yet. 

Of course, that just made me more curious so I went to YouTube to see if I could get a look at these guys, whoever they were. It didn't take long to find out. NME might not know who they are but oh boy, YouTube sure does! I spent about an hour and a half, last night and this morning, going through some of the dozens of live performances uploaded by fans, venues and the band themselves.

The Molotovs are very good, compelling even, which is weird because the very last thing they are is original. It's really hard to do what they're doing without sounding like a tribute act or a pastiche or, god forbid, a covers band. They don't sound anything like any of those. They sound like what they are - a guitar band. Apparently they do still exist. Who knew?

They have a bunch of very solid, convincing originals but we'll get to those in another post. What matters today is that they do a lot of covers. (We got there in the end!) More importantly, they somehow manage to make some very familiar songs sound fresh and thrilling, even though they don't change anything very much. My rule of thumb for covers is that they need to be quite different from the original to be interesting but sometimes just giving it everything you have works, too.

It's not just the performances, which are electric. It's the audience reaction. Nick Hodgson talks about "a scene with a load of other bands", something I struggled to find evidence for, unfortunately, because if there are more bands like this, I want to know about them, but what he says about venues being full of people the same age as the band, who are purportedly still in their teens, "throwing themselves around" is right there for everyone to see. And enjoy.

As for the songs, originals and covers both, I have been known to comment on the way these days everything sounds like everything else. Also, how originality is hard to come by any more, a line which puts me in somewhat uncomfortable company with any number of ageing rockers, whose irritatingly narrow-minded, short-sighted and often just plain ignorant observations litter my feeds day by day. 

It's a valid observation but an unsustainable complaint.  There's nothing remotely wrong with drawing inspiration from the past as well as the present, as Cindy Lee would surely tell you.

Who's Cindy Lee? You may very well ask. She's the widely-acknowledged genius behind the recently-rleased two-hour concept album, Diamond Jubilee, which I've had playing loudly the whole time I've been writing this. It's the album that got a rarely-awarded 9.1 review on Pitchfork back in April, after which it was added to that publication's tally of the best albums of 2024 so far.

As an incendiary live review on Stereogum a short while later went on to explain, Cindy Lee is smoking hot right now and everyone wants to say they were there when it happened, although since she's been recording as Cindy Lee ("the drag queen hypnagogic pop project of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, former guitarist and lead singer of Women", as Wikipedia puts it), for around a decade now and her debut 2020 album was long-listed for the prestigious Polaris prize, it's a bit late to be claiming discovery rights. 

The current album, which is bizarrely hard to buy, being available for a recommended donation of $30 only through a GeoCities page, which also contains links on how to listen to it quite legally for free, is over two hours long and sounds, as one YouTube commenter appropriately puts it, like "All the things I love about the last 50 years of rock and roll distilled perfectly into one collection". The past now present in the future. (I may have used that line before. I said originality was hard to come by.)

But I'm not here to talk about Cindy Lee. She can wait for the next What I've been Listening To Lately post because for all the ineffable familiarity of Diamond Jubilee, I don't believe it features any actual covers. And covers are what we're here for today, right? 

And that was a pretty lengthy lead-in so we'd probably best have some, hadn't we?

A Town Called Malice - The Molotovs (Jam cover)

Unsurprisingly, the Molotovs do several Jam covers. This one, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, When You're Young... They also cover the Clash, the Undertones, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, Supergrass, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Pretty much all rock and roll is here, so long as it's fast and doesn't last longer than three minutes. 

They don't seem to go much on the sixties, or not as much as you'd expect, which is a surprise, but I guess they have that decade pretty much covered with the gear they wear. There's always room for another Mod revival...

What I Like About You - Lillix (Romantics cover) 

Talking of provenance, I have Syp to thank for this one. I knew the Romantics' original, which is great, but I'd never heard Lillix' cover, which is brasher and brattier. Makes sense it ended up on the soundtrack of the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Freaky Friday, which now I come to think about is also a cover. Only with movies, we say "remake". 

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the 2003 movie is the third version... I wonder who's in the one that doesn't star Lindsay or Jodie Foster? Oh, here we are.. it was Gaby Hoffman. No, me neither...

Dancing With Myself - Maren Morris (Billy Idol cover)

If I wanted to claim a thematic link, I'd call on bleached blond hair but I could also play the "everything is everything else" card again because this is seventies-goes-eighties-goes-now and punk-goes-alt-rock-goes-country and every other damn hyphenate you want to pin on it. 

It's also a shill for "Visible — the wireless company for independent people", who presumably not only commissioned it but wrote and directed the video, given the prominent product placement. Uncool, as I believe they used to say back in the sixties, when people pretended to care about that sort of thing.

Owner Of A Lonely Heart - Trevor Horne feat. Rick Astley 

(Yes cover)

This one takes a bit of unpacking. Yes were (Are, I suppose...) a prog rock band who were massively successful in the 1970s but who veered into the oncoming headlights of the pop singles charts in the 'eighties, when they teamed up with electro-pop producer Trevor Horne, the man often ceded responsibility for the sound of an entire decade, thanks to his work with the likes of Dollar, ABC and, of course, Frankie Goes To Hollywood. 

Before he did all of that, Horne had a band of his own, Buggles, remembered today solely for his involvement and for their one and only, annoyingly catchy hit, Video Killed the Radio Star. At the time, Buggles and Yes both happened to share the same management, so when singer Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman upped and left the prog band for reasons I cannot begin to remember or care about, their mutual manager thought it would be a jolly good wheeze to slot Trevor Horne and his bandmate Geoff Downes in to replace them.

I'd been a big Yes fan in my early teens and I still liked them by then, even though it would have been tantamount to an invitation to public ridicule to have mentioned it to anyone. I remember thinking it was a bit weird but these things happen. What doesn't usually follow is that the management-made monster lumbers out of the album charts into the top 40 but that's what happened. Anderson returned to sing the song, whose creative process was unbelievably convoluted, as this laughably detailed Wikipedia article explains, but eventually the track became Yes's most successful single and their only US #1.

Four decades later, Trevor Horne decided to remake a bunch of his old hits. By the time he got to this one, he clearly felt in need of a little light relief after digging through the bones of his past.  As Stereogum quotes him "When “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was mentioned, I thought of a nicely unlikely angle – a dance groove like one I’d heard on an unreleased 12” mix with evergreen Rick Astley singing Yes an octave down. It made total sense."

I'm not sure it did but it sounds pretty good all the same. And I bet Jon Anderson just loves it.

I Wanna Be Adored - Horsegirl x Lifeguard (Stone Roses cover)

Reportedly, Horsegirl get a bit ticked off with GenXers latching on to them while acting as though their timeless sound somehow belongs to only to men old enough to be their dads. I dread to imagine how they'd feel about someone in his mid-sixties grabbing on to it too. I mean, I'm too old even to make a convincing Stone Roses fan...

This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us

 The Last Dinner Party (Sparks cover)

I'm exactly the right age for this one, though, or the original, anyway, which I remember first hearing on the car radio on my way home from school. Like the Molotovs, the Last Dinner Party do a lot of covers and do them exceptionally well. Unlike the Molotovs, everyone knows who they are. It's weird who gets the attention and who doesn't, isn't it? I still can't figure why Starcrawler aren't huge...

Jolene - Beyoncé (Dolly Parton cover)

Then again, when it comes to people knowing who you are, there's famous and then there's F.A.M.O.U.S. That's both of them, of course. Takes some doing to cover a song like this and not have it run you over. That's why she's Beyoncé, I guess.

After Hours - Sandrushka Petrova (Velvet Underground cover)

In case you don't recognize the name (And why would you?) it's her out of Descartes a Kant. Remember them? No? Oh well...

After Hours is one of those songs everyone thinks they can cover. And mostly they're right. it's damn nearly bomb-proof. I bet it goes down a storm in karaoke bars. (Do you know, I 've never been to a karaoke bar? That's a life experience I should probably make for myself some day.) 

I've seen versions by everyone from Eddie Vedder and Antony Kiedis (Not together!) to six year-old Evangeline Lorelei (A lot better than you're imagining.) but I kinda like Sandrushka's slightly sinister take on what is, after all, a pretty bleak lyric. It's her phrasing.

And that, I think, is that. For this time. Be assured there will be more. Just not for a while. Next time it'll be all new stuff.

Well, new to me, anyway. And hopefully new to you, too.

I Only Asked For A Trim!

I said I'd consider playing World of Warcraft again once Blizzard had shifted over to Microsoft but that happened a while back and until today I'd never done anything about it. It's not surprising. I've always had the loosest of connections with WoW. It wasn't like I was desperate to get back to Azeroth. I'd go there when I was good and ready.

It seems I'm ready now, although I'd be lying if I said it was much more than a whim. Mostly it was the buzz building for Cataclysm Classic bumping up against a distinct lack of ideas for anything to post about today.

Whatever the reason, this morning I clicked on the desktop icon for WoW and waited to see what would happen. This being Blizzard, it all went very smoothly, at least in comparison with some other publishers I could mention.

Battlenet recognized my login details and updated itself very briefly before showing me a smorgasbord of titles I could be playing. I had no intention of playing any of them, of course. Neither did I wish to "upgrade" my WoW account, buy the last expansion or pre-order the next. I did not, in point of fact, wish to give Blizzard or Microsoft any money at all.

Luckily for me, you can still play WoW for nothing. There's a small notice somewhere on the Battlenet landing page offering you the opportunity to Play WoW for Free, by which they mean the so-called Endless Free Trial that lets you get to Level 20 before your character is listed as "Inactive". Orwell would be proud of the way language has been wrangled. Or maybe Lewis Carroll.

I'd been away long enough that some of my own characters appeaed as strangers to me. I gave the list of names a brief glance and one stood out: Snapperhead. 

Now that is a great name. I hasten to explain I didn't come up with it. I stole it, like I steal most of the names I use in most of the games I play. In the unlikely event that anyone's interested in its origins, "Snapperhead" is a mildish insult frequently tossed around by Flora, (Full name Flora Nemain Fydraaca ov Fydraaca.) the protagonist of Ysabeau S. Wilce's magnificent and barely describable trilogy, from which I draw many of my character names, in the absolute certainty no-one is ever going to recognize any of them. 

It's a perfect name for a Goblin, which is what my Snapperhead is. I had little-to-no memory of creating her but there she was, Level 12 and ready to go, so I woke her up and set her running.

At this point, coming back to an old MMORPG, I'd normally just log in to wherever the heck I was two or three years ago, take a moment to orient myself, look through my bags and find them full, look at my quests and have no idea what any of them were about, then set off in a random direction, looking for something to kill. After about an hour I'd probably find myself more confused than when I started and either swap to another character or log out altogether to go play something else.

WoW is generally an easy game to come back to, as these things go. I'm usually somewhere I've been before and I generally have bank space, at least, so I can clear a bag or two. As for quests, most of them just ask you to follow an arrow on the mini-map and click on someone with punctuation over their head, so it's not a lot to cope with as you ease yourself back in. 

This time, things went a little differently. I remembered Wilhelm saying something about a new option that had been added for returning players. You can now let the game reset a few things so as to make coming back less of a challenge. I thought I could see a button for that so I clicked it and up popped a "Gear Update" window.

I had another think. New gear and bags sounded good. Clearing my quest log I wasn't quite so sure about. As for my home city, I couldn't even remember which one it was. 

In the end I decided for the sake of science to say yes to everything. A second window popped to let me change my Specialization, if I felt so inclined, but I thought that might be pushing my luck. Also, Beast Mastery just sounds so much cooler than the other two.

The next thing I knew, the game had given me an extreme makeover and very much not in a good way. At the top of the post you can see a picture of the sassy, stylish young woman who stepped into the changing booth, followed by the grim, faceless cipher that stepped out the other side. I was, to put it very mildly, Not Impressed.

Still, helmets can be hidden and gear transmogrified. I mean, it's a pity I have to take the time doing it just to get back the look I was happy with in the first place but it's not like the wind changed and left me stuck like this. I hope...

I hate this city. I hate my clothes. I hate my life!

Leaving that for later, I logged in to see where I was. Oggrimar, apparently. Standing right next to Chromie, which I took to be a hint. Things did not go well for a while after that.

The best part was my inventory; filled with new bags, all huge and almost entirely empty. I'm sure I would have had plenty of clutter in the old ones, so what happened to all of my stuff I have no idea. Maybe it's in escrow somewhere or maybe the game just did me a mercy and binned it all. Either way, I don't want it back.

My quest journal was, as promised, entirely empty. Since I was standing next to Chromie and since I vaguely remembered hearing something about a special event involving Pandaria (I don't really read WoW news very closely.) I thought I might as well take that path. 

Here's where I diverge from the oft-touted idea that Blizzard somehow does these things more professionally than other developers. As has happened all too often before, I found myself confuddled and confused by quests auto-scribing themselves into my book the moment I entered certain areas, while cut scenes unrelated to the quest I thought I was on started to play. I found myself somehow engaged in the main storylines from three separate expansions within minutes of arriving in the game, despite having specifically asked to be given just the one.

It certainly didn't help that Ogrimmar is one of the least-nagivable of cities or that the quest markers on the mini map take absolutely no account of the z-axis. Also, sending someone who's just arrived in town on a quest whose very first step requires locating and using an unmarked elevator is not the friendliest piece of design, in my estimation.

I love my bags, though.

In the end I decided to manually reset myself back to where I'd begun. I abandoned every quest in my Journal and re-traced my steps to Chromie, who greeted me as though she'd never seen me before. This time, after I'd asked for a ticket for the Pandaria bus, I scrupulously avoided going in any buildings or speaking to anyone until I found my way to the airship.

Once on board, everything happened on rails. I did just as I was told, spoke to who I was supposed to speak to, fired my cannon in the direction it was already facing, rapelled down the ropes in front of me and basically acted like a good little soldier until about half an hour in I dinged 14 and decided I'd had enough.

I like Pandaria but it is one of the expansions I've done a fair bit of before. Even though it was a while ago, I could remember much of the opening sequence quite clearly. Also, there wasn't any special event going on, which is hardly surprising since, as I found when I looked it up later, it hasn't started yet.

It's due in update 10,2.7, whenever that is. Soon, I imagine, but not now.

The good news is that, according to the press release, WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is open to players on the Endless Free Trial so, when it finally arrives, I can join if I want to. The less good news is that I'll probably be able to play the new event for about five minutes before the game locks me out.

It took me no more than half an hour to do two levels and I wasn't even trying to go fast. You need to be at least Level 10 to start the remix, one of the key selling points of which is that it offers "Accelerated Leveling". Since Free Trial characters have to go into involuntary hibernation at the end of Level 20, I reckon that should give me a maximum of an hour's play and very probably a lot less.

If I choose to do it anyway, it won't be Snapperhead who has the problem of trying to go slow in the fast lane. I found the details in the FAQ a little fuzzy but I think you have to create a dedicated character for the event:  "a new WoW Remix character, beginning at level 10, which will only be able to play with characters taking part in the event."

It sounds like a lark. I'll almost certainly give it a try. If it's fun, I might even sub for a month or two, which would also lead nicely into Cataclysm Classic. I did say I'd like to take a look at that one, too.

I'm not promising anything but it's possible this might not be the last post about WoW for another couple of years.

Spring Cleaning In Reverse

There's just one more day left for New World's Springtide festival, after which any event currency left unspent will melt away like the morning mist. So I thought I'd better get on and use mine, while I still had the chance. No sense leaving right to the last minute then forgetting about it.

Of course, there was the slight problem of what to buy with the fifty or so tokens I'd collected. I'd been logging in to grab them most days while the event was going on but I didn't really stop to ask myself why. Free stuff, y'know?

I did take a quick look at the holiday vendor right at the start and I could see there were a lot of armor skins, plenty of house items and some consumables but I didn't bother to look much further than that. I figured, when the time came, there'd be something I could buy. I mean, clothes and furniture are always welcome, right?

Well, the clothing was all pretty horrible. New World has some very odd aesthetics when it comes to appearance gear. I used to think it was because the good stuff was in the cash shop but now I think there just isn't much good stuff at all. 

The heavy armor looks like armor, which is just not how it's done in MMORPGs, while the medium and light look like someone had a lot of old curtains and sofa covers lying around and thought they might as well make something out of them.

Too-bright light, slightly scary plant.

The Spring Collection includes a Beekeeper's outfit, which appears to be historically accurate, more's the pity, plus a Springtide set that might do service for a touring company production of Julius Caesar.  There's an in-game Preview feature that lets you see what you'd look like wearing this stuff and I'd include some screenshots, only it uses a peculiar mechanic I couldn't get to grips with.

Instead of showing a separate image in a window, like almost every other game, New World shows you wherever you happened to be when you used it, only now you're wearing the item you selected. Since I had to be at the vendor to see the gear, that's where the Preview put me. The problem was, every time I tried, someone came and stood right on top of me, obviously also using the vendor.

What with that, the terrible lighting and no way I could find to move from the spot I was on, I pretty soon gave up trying to get a good shot. I couldn't even see the gear well enough to decide if I liked it or not. I had to tab out and look it up online to find out I didn't want it.

As well as the skins, you can buy patterns with which to make your own gear, the real thing, with stats. For ten tokens a pop you can get a pattern to make 700GS items, which would be great if I could wear them. Since I'd have to buy the expansion to be able to equip anything that high, I didn't bother.

Aerial Pinwheel. How does it stay up? Magic!

I did grab a few of last year's patterns, which make 600GS gear. Those were very much cheaper and most of my gear is well below 600, so it would be a decent upgrade. Of course, I'd need to be playing the game properly for that to matter but still. It could happen.

The consumables I didn't really look at. I'd been getting a ton of them from the daily gifts anyway and once again they weren't going to be much use if I wasn't out there fighting Corrupted and Lost and the rest of the crew. There were also a few one-off items but I didn't know what they were for and I couldn't imagine I'd ever find out so I struck them off the list, too.

And that just left housing items. Fortunately I love decorating so that was just fine with me. The only problem was going to be where to put them all.

I bought a big, four-poster bed and a chaise-longue, which were clearly going to take up a lot of space. There was a surprisingly wide range of lighting, wall and ceiling lights, table and standard lamps, more than one kind of each. I bought all of them. 

Naturally there were baskets of flowers. There were also a couple of oddities, like some large bags of "pigments" and a hovering device called a Pinwheel. I loaded up on those too.

I can't help thinking these would look better in a palace. Or a cat-house.

I think the only house items I didn't buy were one of the flower baskets and a banner. I thought the banner would be a wall hanging but my next-door neighbor in Mourningdale has something on their porch that I think might be one and it's actually a big pole with banner at the top and some flowers growing up it. It looks good. I wished I'd bought one once I saw it. might do one more round of the camps before the event ends tomorrow so I can get one for myself.

By the time I'd finished placing everything I could barely get up and down the stairs. My bedroom looks particularly cramped, even after I took out one of the beds that was already there.

I know I complained last time about the size of the rooms but it's not so much that - it's more that I seem to have acquired a hell of a lot of furniture for someone who hasn't actively played the game since a few months after launch. It's partly because Amazon keep giving house items away with the Prime Gaming deals but mostly because the one thing I keep coming back for are holiday events and New World seems to have those pretty regularly.

In an irritable report on a recent Q&A with the devs, MMO Bomb revealed that "Going forward, the focus will be less on Seasonal narrative content". At first I misunderstood that to mean less holiday content and I actually felt mildly relieved. It doesn't mean that, of course. It's not that kind of seasonal content they're talking about.

Flowers in barrel from this event. Other flowers... not sure.

Troy Blackburn at MMO Bomb also transmitted the apparent annoyance of the NW player-base with Amazon Games' constant harping on about the much-hyped "June Announcement". Even as a casual observer - and even more casual player - I have to agree that whatever it is they're keeping secret, it's going to have to be something truly spectacular now, just to justify the fuss they've been making over it.

Most of the speculation I've seen revolves around either a Console port or conversion to some sort of Free To Play business model, neither of which seems worth waiting months to announce. I guess either would potentially bring in a surge of new players, which seems to be one of the main expectations everyone has for the change, whatever it turns out to be, but plenty of other MMORPGs have either added a console client or gone F2P but none I remember ever chose to make a big secret of it like this.

If it's not that, though, I don't know what it might be, unless they're going to announce that Amazon's next big in-house video project is going to be a New World TV show. That would be a big deal and it would make a great setting for one, too. 

I doubt it's that, though. What I do think is that when we find out, pretty much everyone is going to be disappointed. I'll be happy to be proved wrong but I think it's a safe bet I won't be.

Failing some amazing development that none of us has even thought of, then, I expect my next visit to New World will be for whatever the holiday after Springtide might be. When it comes, I just hope there's something to get other than furniture. My character lives alone and she already has four beds...

Sun, Sea And Sand. Well, Two Out Of Three, Anyway

Today's the day Noah's Heart closes down but I already said my goodbyes there. Rather than log in for one last look I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer.

Unlike Noah's Heart, Dawnlands did get a relatively recent, very substantial update. Just before Christmas, developer Seasun added the following:

1. New Biome
2. New Enemies
3. New Outfits
4. New Followers
5. New Events

And now you know as much about it as anyone. That is literally the entire patch note for the update, apart from a couple of lines about network performance. 

They did post a video on YouTube.

The full and complete supporting text for that reads "Dawnlands new version update - Desert biome". It's almost like they don't want anyone to know they're working on the game, isn't it? 

Dawnlands is multi-platform, available on mobile and PC. It's possible that there are channels available to mobile users, where Seasun is communicating with players like, oh, I don't know... a company that wants to sell stuff and make money. On PC, though? Tumbleweed, appropriately.

Still, that video makes the new biome look pretty spiffy. I found myself wondering if you needed to progress in the game to open it up or if you could just up and go there. 

If it was the former, I was going to skip it. I've looked at the next big Boss fight I need to do for the level cap raise and the next tier of crafting and I don't much fancy it. Looks tough. And long.

Thinking back, though, I was pretty sure all the other biomes were accessible purely through travel and exploration, just as they are in Dawnlands' spiritual ancestor and inspiriation, Valheim. You might get your ass handed to you in a sack by the mobs in a new biome but there's nothing to stop you trying to play tourist if you don't mind taking the hits.

So I got on my horse and went looking. I packed the makings of a raft in case I needed to cross water but that turned out not to be necessary. I figured Desert would most likely be to the south of the map and since the Plains biome, which I'd already explored, is hot and dry, chances were the desert connected to it at some point.

Which it does. In Dawnlands you can teleport to various points of interest, once you've visited them and gotten them marked on your map. I ported to the most southernly spot I'd opened, which happened to be a dungeon of some sort. Then I got on my trusty horse and started riding. South.

It didn't take long. A few hills and the landscape began to change. More sand. Or, I should say, even more sand. 

I spent about an hour exploring and most of what I saw was... sand. And sun. Other than the lush oases dotted here and there, it's a barren, austere, beautiful region, full of emptiness and pain. By day the sun blazes down from a blank, blue sky. By night bitter cold chills the bleached bones of monsters, half-buried in the sand. 

And night or day, the sandstorms rage. It's a cheery place. I looked out for that cute little rodent from the video but I didn't spot him. 

I did see plenty of cute foxes, although one tried to bite me in the leg when I got too close. Also plenty of wizened mummies and altogether more sand worms than I was hoping for. To my surprise, the mobs were all quite manageable. Once again, taking its cue from Valheim, it seems that top-end armor from the previous biome is plenty good enough to get you started in the new one.

One of the many positive things I'd say about Dawnlands is that the biomes are H.U.G.E. I spent a good hour exploring the desert and barely made a mark on the map. I kept going south and eventually hit the "Turn back now" barrier that tells you you've reached the end of the known world. I tried to make it back to where I started but in the end I had to log out to go do something, so I ported home.

In all that time I hadn't found a settlement or a city or any sign of civilization. I did run across a few ruins, a couple of massive Mausoleums that needed a special item to enter, (An item I didn't have, naturally.), a teleport tower and a very interesting mini-dungeon full of traps. And scorpions. Of course there are scorpions.

I even found the spot where you summon the Desert Biome Boss, whoever and whatever it might be. I was feeling reckless enough to do it, too, just to see what came up out of the sand but when I tried I got one of those warning that goes "Are you sure you want to do this now? Wouldn't you like to think about it? Maybe come back another time, when you're a bit better prepared? Because, I mean, just look at you..." and I let myself be talked into behaving sensibly, for once.

Mostly what I did was take a lot of screenshots, some of which are in this post but none of which really do justice to the visuals in the game itself. For a start, you can't see the sandstorms that swirl up and whip across the desert, lowering visibilty and making the whole place feel claustrophobic despite being open to the horizon in every direction. Or the ever-changing color of the sky as day fades into night.

According to the big World Wheel there are supposed to be three more biomes to come. I'm not counting on the game lasting that long but based on the quality of the ones I've explored so far, I really hope it does. 

Meanwhile, I plan on going back and riding around the desert some more. May as well see what else there is to see. While it's still there...