Passing The Time On Patch Day

With luck, I might have something to say about the new EverQuest II expansion by Friday, so I think I'm going to do the Grab-Bag today instead. I have a few talking points bookmarked... let's see... ah yes!

Absolutely Not Garrisons Mk. 2

World of Warcraft is getting housing. At last. Although not quite yet. It's coming as a feature in the next expansion, which we already know will be called "Midnight" because Blizzard is doing a trilogy and they announced the names of all three chapters before they released the first. 

That led some people (I may have been one of them.) to assume or at least hope that it meant a switch to something closer to an annual release schedule but the newly-issued roadmap for 2025 puts paid to that theory. I guess that means they have a ten year plan, near as makes no difference. That's double anything Mao ever managed, so bravo, Blizzard!

This far out (Midnight won't be with us until mid-2026 at the soonest.) we don't know much about how housing will work in WoW although we have been assured development will be ongoing and not one-and-done with the expansion that brings it or even the trilogy it's part of. Wilhelm looked into the possibilities and consequences at some length and thereby sparked a lengthy and discursive discussion in the comments, to which I contributed thoughts and opinions I will not attempt to expand upon here.

Basically, we know nothing yet except that there will be housing of some kind. Syp, as might be expected, is ecstatic. I'll reserve judgment until I see it. At the moment I have no plans to subscribe again, not even for Classic Classic and its fresh start servers but I'd sub a month or two to see how housing pans out. I imagine I'll have to if I want to see anything. I don't suppose us free trial scrubs will get as much as a poxy inn room.

Any Port In A Store? 

I have generally been willing to try any and every new MMORPG as it appears, always providing I didn't have to pay for the privelige and it wasn't too much trouble. It's fun to see new things and it makes for a few easy blog posts. If the game's on Steam, there seems very little reason not to download it and have a look, at least.

With that in mind, when I read that Gran Saga, a game I'd actually heard of, was releasing globally through the platform, my immediate reaction was to go straight to the Store and download it. I got halfway there...

I did look at the game on Steam, where it currently has a Mixed review rating from fewer than a hundred and fifty responses. I read a dozen or so of the reviews and it quickly became obvious that most of the objections were conceptual; people just didn't approve of a mobile game being ported almost verbatim to PC. 

Mobile ports don't bother me in the slightest and other than those complaints, most of the reviews seemed quite positive:

"Good graphics, a lot of side quest and beautiful scenery..."

"Good Story, Graphics, Visuals & VA..."

"Much more to this than what you'll see at surface level in your first 2 hours"

"If you don't mind gacha it's honestly a decent game ..."

And yet I haven't downloaded it. 

Nothing to do with the game. I just experienced an unusual moment of common sense before I hit the "Download" button, as I realised I don't have time to play another MMORPG right now. I also don't have the space for another to sit on my hard drive unplayed, so why not just leave it there on Steam, where I can grab it should either of those factors change.

I may well give it a try sometime. I'll keep it in mind for when I next run out of things to write about, which at the moment seems unlikely. I admit I am curious...

The Door Swings Both Ways

Although nowhere near as curious as I am about this one. I'm guessing the people who don't take to mobile games getting a PC version won't be any happier to see the trend reversed. I've always had the impression that players of Final Fantasy XIV take their game of choice quite seriously so the news that it's getting a mobile version probably isn't going down all that well. 

The comment thread that followed the news on MassivelyOP was predictably dismissive but what's new? Aywren's response was a lot more open-minded but even she's not all that optimistic about the prospect. 

I find myself surprisngly intrigued. I can't really be doing with FFXIV. I've tried it a bunch of times and there are things I like about it but it's always so much slower, stuffier and more ponderous than I remembered.

I spend less and less time there every time I go back and I thought I'd reached the point where I was done with it but the prospect of a mobile port that's much more solo-oriented and - let's not hedge - much less tedious does sound appealing. I would certainly give that a try, although ironically I'd most likely only play it on PC through an emulator like BlueStacks. I doubt I'll ever have a mobile device that could run it.

A lot of objectors seem to be trying to wave the whole thing away by saying it'll just borrow a few keywords from FFXIV and append them to a completely unrelated mobile game that no-one will care about but that's not what Square Enix is saying. In the trailer, Yoshi P (Do people still call him that?) says the mobile game will "faithfully recreate the story, duties, battle content and other aspects of the original game".

I guess we'll see when it arrives. First, though, it has to go through a period of testing, followed by a release in China before it goes global. When we get there, I'll definitely be taking a look, provided I can find some some way of running it. Whether I'll take to it any more than the PC version is another question but it would be funny if I ended up getting further in the mobile port than I ever did in the original game.

Are We There Yet?

I was watching a video on a YouTube channel I follow the other day when I spotted something in the YT recommendations from another channel I sometimes look at. Both channels deal with AI and how it's coming along but the one I follow is more of a "Here's what's new and isn't it cool?", whereas the one I only check out occasionally is all "Here's how you can make some money out of this thing."

That channel is called Comicscape and mostly the way you're supposed to make money is by using AI to make (NSFW) comics. I'm not interested in the making money part (Or the NSFW for that matter, although the examples on the channel itself are always very tame.) but I would like to see what kind of comics an AI could come up with. That's why I ocasionally come back to see what the latest software is capable of, hoping one day it'll have progressed to the point where you can just type in "Make me a comic about a cat that becomes a superhero and saves the world from invading marshmallow monsters" and it'll spew out twenty-two amusing pages all on its own.

We are, as you probably realise, not there yet. Most of the ideas the woman who runs the channel shows seem to require about as much human effort as it would need to draw a comic by hand, assuming you were good at drawing. It's true that she's able to make comics even though she can't draw but it's clearly still a lot of work. Far more than I'd ever be interested in, just to satisfy my idle curiosity.

Anyway, this particular video wasn't about comics, for once. It was all about how to make an illustrated text RPG using AI, which supposedly is something you can do at a website called RPGGO. I thought that sounded intriguing so I went there to try it out.

Suffice it to say I did not make a text RPG, illustrated or otherwise. Once again, the amount of work required felt like more than I wanted to take on just at the moment. I think I'd have given it a go twenty years ago, when I had a lot more patience for this sort of thing, had the software existed then, but these days I'm not really all that bothered about expressing myself through the medium of Go North, Take Axe.

Still, I might come back to it sometime and meanwhile I'm not averse to seeing what other people have done with the technology. I just tried one of the RPGs on the site, Shadows over Eldoria, to test it for the purposes of this post and I've been playing it for the last twenty minutes. 

It's weirdly compelling. Even though I know the plot is being generated on the fly as I type in my responses, I still find myself thinking "Ooh, I wonder what's going to happen next?" The writing is no worse than plenty of human-authored text adventures I've seen, either, particularly the amateur ones, of which I played plenty back in the days of The Quill et al.

I started this section expecting to conclude that we clearly have some way to go yet before AI is ready to provide us with an infinite supply of perfectly serviceable games but actually we might be closer than I thought...

And now, some music and then I must be off. The EQII servers should be up now and I want to go check out the expansion, about which I so far know almost nothing. It's been all Christmas all the time here for so long I'm not sure I have anything much to offer. Oh, I know! How about this?

Board Game - Dog Hair Dressers

Now no-one can say I never post anything about board games!

Cowboys Vs Aliens

A while ago, I mentioned I'd bought XCOM and XCOM 2 for pennies on the dollar in a Steam sale. I was jonesing just a little for a turn-based, tactical game, having recently finished Solasta, as well as Dungeon of Naheulbeuk a while before that. From everything I'd heard, which was a lot, it seemed the X-COM games would sate that craving nicely.

Well, they didn't. Or XCOM didn't, anyway. I can't relaibly comment on XCOM 2 because I haven't played it. After a few hours with the original I didn't feel like wasting any more of my time on the franchise.  

Which is odd, isn't it? XCOM is supposed to be the apogee of the genre. If I like this kind of thing at all, why would I not like what's widely thought of as its finest example?

Because it's a thick-headed, macho, militaristic power fantasy? Because it's eye-strainingly ugly to look at at and ear-jarringly harsh to listen to? Because it's filled with characters that have the personality of cardboard cut-outs? Because the plot reeks of xenophobic paranoia? Because gameplay is slow and ponderous and fundementally dull?

All of those. Granted, the gameplay probably improves when you get out of the tutorial and the game stops telling you exactly what to do and how to do it but I stuck it out for an hour and there was no sign of that happening any time soon so I thought about the sunk cost fallacy and quit.

There's a small chance I might one day give XCOM 2 a go to see if lessons were learned but I suspect that nothing much will have changed except the pictures might look a little prettier. In retrospect, it occurs to me the main reason I was interested in the game in the first place was because a bunch of bloggers wrote it up in a very entertaining fashion. Other than that, I would never even have looked at it.

No-one that I remember reading has ever written up Hard West in any fashion, entertaining or otherwise, so when I decided to buy the game earlier today, I had no-one to blame but myself if it turned out to be a dud as well. Like the XCOM titles, the game was on sale at a massive 90% off as part of Steam's "Turn-Based Carnival". At less than two quid it seemed worth the risk.

At time of writing, I've played Hard West for three-quarters of an hour. It's not long but it's long enough for me to say that I prefer it by several orders of magnitude to XCOM. I know why, too.

For a start, it's a lot less painful to look at. One of the big problems with XCOM is all that 1980s CRT monitor green. Hard West is typical old west sepia and a lot easier on the eyes.

Graphically, it's reasonably attractive, with some nice spot illustrations and interstitials. There's decent scenery in the gameworld itself and the UI is agreeable. It's not going to win any prizes for design or artwork but it's not at all unpleasant to look at. 

Sonically it's a lot better than that with some nice, atmospheric Western-style music and some crisp sound effects. The overall impression is professional without feeling slick and souless, which is how XCOM felt to me.

The forty-five minutes I played included the tutorial, which took up no more than five of those. It's also optional but the game promises that if you take the tutorial, it will be both short and useful. It keeps that promise.

The premise of the game is that, out there in the isolation and loneliness of the vast, unexplored, as-yet unexploited American west, pioneers and settlers, desperate and untethered from society as they are and believing themselves unobserved, will turn towards the darkness that presses in all around and embrace it for their own advantage. 

Or, as the official description rather more pithily puts it : "... a world where Western legends meet demons, arcane rituals and satanic cults and where the dead can walk the Earth again. For a price."

That is a lot further up my alley than military SF, a genre I've never had much time for in any medium. It's still macho men with guns but at least they're rugged individualists facing down threats to their families and homes rather than infinitely replaceable cogs in a vast, faceless military machine, engaged in a barely comprehensible global conflict. 

The difference between the two takes couldn't be more clearly illustrated than by what happens if one of the team dies on a mission. In XCOM the rest keep going and if they win, their dead colleague is replaced by a new recruit. In Hard West, if one of your team dies, it's game over. 

Or at least you have to start the mission again from scratch, which I'm sure is going to become equally annoying after a while, even if it does serve to emphasize the importance of the individual over the team. Still, I prefer it.

Well, I say I do now, when I've only done two missions and only failed one of them, once. Ask me again when I get stuck on one and can't get past it because some idiot on my team keeps getting himself killed. That's probably when I'll cave and accept one of the well-dressed, well-spoken stranger's repeated offers of assistance. I mean, I haven't been playing an hour and he's already tried it on with me twice. I get the feeling he isn't going to give up easily.

I did read some of the reviews on Steam, which are mixed, so I'm aware it's not a game where you can keep playing the good guy. Eventually you'll have to make some hard choices and take the consequences. For now, though, I'll just stick to straight-shooting and see how far that gets me.

However far it might be, I'm pretty sure it'll be a lot further than I was ever going to get with XCOM.

Too Much And Not Enough

This afternoon I played so much Wuthering Waves I got told to take a break. Not by Mrs.Bhagpuss, who hadn't even noticed I'd been missing for hours. By the game itself.

Apparently, if you don't get up and touch grass every three hours, the devs start to worry about legal action or something. A banner scrolls across the top of the screen, warning you to take more care of yourself. If you ignore it, which I did because I was at a really crucial point in the plot, it scrolls past a second time and then goes away, duty of care presumably... erm... taken care of.

It was only a couple of posts ago I was talking about two hours in Stars Reach representing something of a marathon session. Which it wasn't, really, but it was longer than I normally play these days. I can't remember the last time I did three hours without taking a break.

Actually, it's a slightly misleading figure this time, too. There was a short hiatus when I went to make a cup of tea and then I spent another ten minutes feeding the dog and I did leave the client running through al of that, so I guess it was only two hours and forty-five minutes and not all in one unbroken run either, but even so...

On the other hand, that was just this afternoon. I played yesterday and the day before. I've played a lot. I've done a lot. There's a lot to do.

Today I finished Encore's companion story, which came close to making me tear up a few times. I won't spoilerise it, particularly since Naithin is playing again and I know he may read this, but I will say there are a lot of orphans with unhappy childhoods in this game. There's something oddly Dickensian about the whole affair.

I was very pleased to hear Naithin had picked the game up again since he was the one who introduced me to it in the first place, albeit by saying he didn't think much of it. Just shows how even a failry negative review can be good publicity sometimes.

Naithin has changed his opinion somewhat on a second visit and I'd like to think one or two people might read his post and mine and think maybe it's worth giving the game a go. It is free, after all.

And it's good. Really good, in my opinion. Although you do have to like the anime-inflected style and have a fairly high twee threshold and be at least as interested in the kind of storylines you might get in a slice-of-life drama aimed at teens and twenty-somethings as you are in action and fighting and explosions, although there's no shortage of those...

As well as Encore's excellent tale I've also done the first chapter of the new season or chapter or whatever they call content drops in this game. That was a whole lot of fun, full of doors into nowhere, trans-dimensional trains, soaring skyscrapers, dreamscapes and talking cats. I do like a talking cat.

I met the first of two new Resonators, Lumi, who looks absolutely fantastic. I'd love to add her to my stable (Is that the word? Probably not.) especially since, if I was playing her rather than playing alongside her, I wouldn't have to listen to her talk so much. 

It's not that I don't like what she says. There's nothing wrong with her dialog. I like her characterization, too. No, it's that, for the first time in the game so far, I'm finding her voice acting slightly annoying. 

I'm not entirely sure why. I think it's a combination of minor things. The line readings seem a little stiff sometimes and I found the accent distracting. I couldn't figure out if it was from Scotland or the North of England, let alone which part. I need to listen to it more closely to figure it out or it'll keep bugging me.

It's entirely possible I'll get used to it, even come to love it. That has happened before. Sometimes the voice I'm hearing just doesn't marry with what I'm seeing and the disconnect puts me off but that friction usually smooths out over time. As for line readings and phrasing, there's always room for different interpretations and in this case there's no suggestion any of them are wrong, they're just not how I'm hearing the line in my head.

I haven't gotten far enough in that storyline yet to meet Camellya, the Resonator Naithin was lucky enough to pull in a gacha roll. He describes her as reportedly being "pretty good (if insane)", which sounds like she'll be good fun both to quest with and to have on my team, if I can get her.

My current line-up is Rover (Havoc) aka the player character, Sanhua and Verina. Based on some research I did a while back, Rover (Spectro) is quite weak and a bad choice but when you get the option to swap her damage-type to Havoc she becomes decent. 

I did have Encore in that slot before, just because I like her so much, but the build I copied, when I found I couldn't just wing it any more had those three so that's where I am at the moment. I love Verina, who's not just a real healer but a real healer I can play. Sanhua I don't really get on with. If I can find an alternate that fits I'll be happy to swap her out.

I've done a ton of work on upgrading stuff and put a much smaller effort in learning how to play and I'm happy to say I've finally managed to push past the fight that was roadblocking my progress in the Main Quest. When I complained about it again in a comment, Naithin pointed out the mob I was having trouble with was an Elite, which I hadn't noticed and that made a psychological difference that, along with some more upgrades, just about tipped me over the line.

From there on it was all fairly plain sailing to the final battle with Jue, the big dragon, that marks the end of the pre-Black Shores storyline. I was somewhat dreading it but happily the fight turns out to be partly scripted. 

I don't know if it's possible to fail it but I didn't and I had no clue what I was doing so even if it is, it can't be easy. My excuse is that you're thrown into playing as a character you have never played before but honestly it wouldn't have been any easier if I was playing Rover. I don't know what I'm doing there either!

By the time that was over it was well past the three-hour warning so I thought I'd better take that mandated break. I'm guessing there's going to be some debriefing and decompression with my various pals back in ZhengZhou before we move on the Black Shores proper. If so, I won't quite have made it there before the new season like I hoped but I'll have gotten there a lot sooner than I thought I would a few days ago.

The new EverQuest II expansion is due this Wednesday so I may get derailed again but I hope not. I'm really enjoying myself in Wuthering Waves and I feel like there's a lot I haven't seen yet. If I do manage to catch up, I'd just as soon not fall behind again.

So many games...

Christmas Is Coming!

Two weeks to go until the begining of December, give or take. I should probably start thinking about the Inventory Full Advent Calendar. 

Hah! Kidding! I've been working on it since September! Too much so, in fact. I had enough possibles for five calendars weeks ago -literally - and even then I couldn't stop so now I have even more.

Seriously, I had no idea how many Christmas songs there were. There must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands, with more piling up every year. 

There's been an active commercial market in the things for at least seventy years (I'd love to blame blame Phil Spector for it all but he was just riding a wave that formed far out in the great ocean of popular music long before he came along with his wild hair and his wilder ideas. In the year Spector released A Christmas Gift For You,1964, Wikipedia lists ten other Christmas albums, even though Phil's is the only one anyone remembers now.

It's nice of whoever curates that wiki page to keep a tally, although I imagine there are more albums than they know about. The L.P. as we understand it only dates back to the nineteen-fifties anyway but I'm sure people were writing and releasing Christmas novelty songs long before then. 

If so, they can stay lost in the seasonal snowdrifts of time. I'm only really interested in stuff from the rock and roll era onward. I don't plan on digging up whatever it was the big bands got up to for Christmas, let alone the vaudevillians or the music halls. I bet they were all at it, though.

When it comes to pop songs for Christmas, the tip of the iceberg is always the big hit singles. What's going to be #1 for Christmas is a seasonal news story even now, when chart placings really don't mean much to most people any more. (Try telling that to Taylor Swift!) 

For the determined researcher, though, Christmas albums are the root of the problem. Hardly anyone seems content just to release a Christmas single and leave it at that. It has to be an E.P. at least (And isn't it weird that artists still call them "E.P.s" in the age of streaming? They do, you know, when they're not calling them "Mixtapes", which is even more confusing.) 

 Christmas Is Coming Soon - Blitzen Trapper

Have you any idea how many people have made whole albums of Christmas songs? Too bloody many, I'll tell you that for free!

Once again according to Wikipedia, those eleven albums in 1964 had ballooned to an obscene sixty-nine by 2008.  Luckily for all of us, that was the peak, after which numbers began to decline util last year there were only ten. Or only ten Wikipedia wants to admit to, anyway. Who knows how they're gathering their data?

In this modern age, of course, now access to global media has been thoroughly democratized, you don't need to be any kind of professional musician or record producer to go all in on Christmas tunes. In the YouTube era, far too many people have taken it upon themselves to make Christmas playlists. I started putting one of my own together just a couple of days ago. I mean, I had all these Xmas songs so why not? I never said I wasn't part of the problem. 

I don't Spotify but I imagine it's rife over there as well. You're probably putting a playlist together right now, aren't you?

All of this festive fecundity led me to set some ground rules for the Calendar:

• No asset-stripping other peoples' playlists for ideas. Too cheap.
  
• No going through Christmas albums to pick out the best track. Too much work.
  
• No really, really obvious choices. Leave that to the supermarkets.
  
• Aim for originals. Any covers better be pretty darn special.
• No duplication. One song per artist.
• At least try to mix things up. Some genres are way too liberal with the tinsel.
  

All of which may be very noble but it doesn't half make it all take forever. Of course my loving it doesn't help.

I'm sure everyone's just itching to hear my methodology. I started out doing keyword searches in YouTube along the lines of "Christmas song indie" or "Christmas song funk" but that didn't work as well as you might imagine, mainly because it kept bringing up those goddam playlists over and over again. There must be about a bazillion of them. Sometimes I had to scroll through dozens of entries before I got to an actual song.

I had a lot more luck pumping in random band names plus the word "Christmas". For some weird reason, the first I tried was Gentle Giant. I think I was trying to test the possibilities by coming up with the band least likely to have worn party hats and appeared on children's TV. 

It may not surprise you to hear that Gentle Giant did not, as far as I can tell, ever record a Christmas number, although thanks to the search I now know the proggers did once come up with something called Pantagruel's Nativity. It sounds like a free jazz ensemble gamely trying to fulfill the contract after their manager mistakenly booked them to appear at a Renaissance Fayre and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, or not in the ninety seconds I could take of the six and half minutes, anyway.

I Don't Wanna Wait Til Christmas - Summer Camp

For my purposes, it didn't seem to matter whether the band I picked as a seed had ever released a Christmas song or not (Although you'd be surprised who has and who hasn't.) Whether the result was positive or not, there'd usually be a few algorithmic suggestions worth checking out. I found some interesting examples of the craft that way.

When that palled, I tried random, seasonal words like "Santa" or "tinsel" or "snow". I had some successes there but in the end I mostly found myself following the tried and true method of link-hopping, jumping from one likely result to another until the whole thing fell apart in a flurry of metal or slick r&b.

I got into the habit of taking half an hour or so at the end of every evening, after I'd watched a couple of shows on Netflix, switching to YouTube to flip through link after link until I was too tired to judge whether what I was seeing and hearing was any good. Some nights I didn't stop nearly soon enough if a few of the tracks I bookmarked are anything to go by.

The whole thing became quite addictive after a while, which is how I ended up with too many songs to choose from. I ought to have stopped weeks ago but I was having too much fun.

As much as anything, I love the unpredictability of it all. It feeds right into my love of randomness. Some nights I barely find anything of interest, others it seems like every second link I click is worth bookmarking. I even came across a couple of acts who both specialize in Christmas music and are good at it.

Eventually, I just had to force myself to stop, which wasn't easy. I'm still occasionally picking away at the Christmas scab even now. That's mostly why I'm writing this post, to try and draw a line under the gathering stage and move on to the choosing. I need to pick twenty-five winners and it's hard. 

If it is just twenty-five, that is...

I'm still thinking that one over. I considered including multiple tunes per post, preferably very different in style, so as to give readers a better chance of hearing something they liked. Then I realized hardly anyone is going to click on even one Christmas song every day for three and a half weeks (Hi, Redbeard!) so upping the count wasn't likely to help anyone.

I still might do something along those lines. Maybe a crowd-pleaser and a more challenging choice on every page? I quite like that idea but it is predicated on the theory that I have twenty-five "crowd-pleasers" lined up and I'm not at all sure that's true. Twenty five unlistenable rackets, though - that's ought to be no problem at all!

We Need A Little Christmas - Nancy Sinatra

Then there's the art to consider. I've barely given it a thought but sourcing pictures to go at the top of the posts takes almost as long as finding the songs so I probably should get on that right away. 

The first year I did it, I spent hours, trawling through royalty-free seasonal images, looking for anything that wasn't absolutely repugnant. It was fun for a while but then it got to be hard work and the results weren't exactly inspiring. I don't want to do that again.

Last year, I went all-in on AI images and lost several regular readers as a direct result. Some people just can't abide the look, some have political objections, others have an existential dread of the technology. Gonna suck to be any of those people for a few years, I think, because it's only going to get worse. Still, no reason for me to add to their anxieties. This ought to feel like a safe space - especially at Christmas!

On the other hand, I had a ton of fun generating those images, many of which made me laugh out loud. It was also lot quicker than sifting through hundreds of stock images and quite honestly doing that made me feel more grubby than playing with AI. Garbage is garbage, however you source it, but at least AI garbage can be funny once in a while. 

Or it seemed like it could a year ago. Things have changed.

Last year, the results I got using AI were... let's be kind and say variable... but AI image generators are orders of magnitude better now, if by better you mean predictable. I'm sure I could come up with some convincingly seasonal pictures in next to no time.

The thing is, even I'm going a bit stale on AI just now. It was fun when it was all weird and wacky and seemed like it was made by a bunch of crazy little robots all running around with a few cogs missing but now it's slick and ubiquitous and you can't get away from it and it's not nearly as much fun as it used to be. Nostalgia for the early days of AI. It's a thing. Already.

Still, I can't deny it's tempting. It's so easy. And it's right there. I'm toying with the idea of generating the images with AI and then fucking them up manually, the way I do with the pictures I use at the top of music posts. Or maybe I'll just do it myself. If we get some snow or even some frost I could go out and take photographs...

I'll think of something. I've got two weeks. And I did say last year that I had more fun when I stopped prepping and just put the posts together on the day they were due. Maybe I'll do that again.

I mean, it's not like there's much else to do in December, right?

============================================================================================

Notes on AI used in this post: This is an interesting one. I considered splitting it off into a post of its own but I'll carry on here and try to keep it short. 

The only AI is in the image at the top of the post, obviously, and it's only partially AI at that. What I did was take a frame from a video I shot back in the winter of 2017, when we had some snow near where I live. I then ran that frame through a bunch of filters in Paint.net and generally messed around with it until it looked like this:

Then I uploaded the file to NightCafe and used it as the starting image for the following prompt: "1950s car loaded with presents on the roof rack driving down a snowy country road". The model was Flux Schnell and I set the noise at 25% and the prompt weight to 75% to keep the result close to the original.

That got me this image:

Finally, I took that one back to Paint.net and played around with it a little more to get the image I ended up using.

I'd be very interested to hear comments on the process, particularly from anyone who has objections to AI images either in principle or aesthetically. To what extent is this image "mine"? Does the fact that AI was used at all taint the whole thing? Is there a substantive difference between using software to alter an image and using AI to add things to it? What if I'd used AI to change the colors or the lighting but not to add the cars? Where are you drawing the lines?

Probably should have been a post of its own after all and very well might be still. At the moment I'm leaning towards using my own photos and video, enhanced and altered by AI, for the pictures in this year's calendars, not least because it's really fun to do. 

All thoughts and observations welcome.

Second Test, Different From The First

Just a very quick post to explain why there isn't an entirely different post here today...

It's because I spent the time when I should have been writing it playing Stars Reach instead. Well, I say "playing". It was mostly trying to get into the game and then writing bug reports. The exact opposite of the first test, in fact.

I only knew the test was on at all because of a comment someone left on the last post (Thank-you, Anonymous!) I didn't see it until 6.30 PM, by which time the server had been up for half an hour. I logged in straight away and made a new character, which took about ten seconds. I had to do that because the old ones had all been wiped.

Unlike the previous test, when I had no issues getting in, this time the game crashed repeatedly on the very first screen. Other people were reporting similar issues and there were a few suggested fixes on Discord but none of them worked for me so after about half a dozen tries I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it on an SSD to see if that might help.

It did, a bit. Now the game could get past the initial loading screen but it still crashed before I could get into the world. But I persisted and on the third or fourth try I got in!

I'd been making new characters for each attempt, just in case it might have been something to do with either the specific character I was trying to play or even the race/gender combos. I mean, it's pre-alpha - it could be anything. As a result, which character I ended up with felt a little like playing musical chairs and the winner was a Human Female.

I took to her right away, which was good because it seems we might actually get to keep the same characters for the next test. I think Raph said they'd like to see a little more persistence in the world so they can observe how it's changed by players over time. We'll see, I guess.

By then there was about an hour left and I was determined to get some crafting mats and make something. Anything, pretty much. I'll defuse any potential suspense right now and say no, that didn't happen. I made nothing. Again.

I did manage to find the space portal almost immediately and blast myself into orbit to go looking for ore. I realise now, again from the comment I linked earlier, that there's ore and metal on the planetary surface but it's definitely easier to find it in space if you're in a hurry. It's everywhere there.

Of course, I'd forgotten to swap out my Terraformer before I shot myself into space but luckily some helpful person had built a camp on a nearby asteroid so I was able to change tools there. I found some iron and manganese and blasted away until my hopper was full and I was just thinking about what to do with it when some space monster attacked me for absolutely NO REASON!

Mindful of the advice about dropping your stuff when you die, I didn't try to defend myself. I jetted away, spining wildly, and made for the portal back to the planet below. I hammered "F" with the creature still spitting poison at me, expecting to die at any moment, but after a few goes and a lot of swearing the portal fired and sent me home. 

Or to desktop, anyway, because the client crashed. It took another couple of tries to get back in but I reappeared on solid ground, still with all my stuff. Which would have been fine if I hadn't then encountered my first real bug.

I went to someone's camp to see if I could make anything yet. I couldn't. Didn't have the right mats and also han't earned enough XP to buy new recipes. At that point I thought I might as well make my own camp so I swapped tools and started to put down the big, yellow ghost-rectangle that marks your claim, when I had a change of mind and decided to go do some surveying instead.

Only I couldn't let go of the camp marker. It just hung on my cursor, whatever I did. Couldn't put it down to claim a camp, couldn't swap to any other tool, couldn't do anything but wave it around like a giant, yellow fly-swatter.

In the end I stopped trying, wrote and submitted a bug report, then logged out, hoping I would be able to log back in without any more problems. 

That didn't go as well as I hoped.

This time, the game hung at the loading screen but didn't crash. It just sat there, doing nothing. Much more weirdly, after a while all the in-game sounds started to play. I could tell from what I was hearing that it was relaying activity from where I logged out. There'd been a bunch of people shooting stuff there and it was the same gun sounds, sometimes fading away or stopping, then starting up again as they slaughtered whatever it was they were after.

I wrote another bug report for that, closed the client, then logged in yet again. This time I got straight in and everything was working fine. By then there was about twenty minutes of the test left so I decided I'd carry on with the surveying. 

I'd done about a dozen points when Beryl the dog came charging in, jumping up at me and barking. I know when I'm beaten. I surveyed a couple more points, fending her off with my free hand, jumped off a small cliff to shake some owldeer that were chasing me, found a flat, safe spot and logged out for the final time.

All in all it was a chaotic but very entertaining session, at least when it wasn't frustrating and annoying. Pretty much what you expect from an alpha (Sorry, pre-alpha.) I was quite pleased that at least I'd been able to send a couple of bug reports this time and Raph mentioned in chat that the crash reports from my multiple failed attempts would be welcome.

If we do get to keep the same characters next time there's an EU-hours test, I'll make a concerted effort to get a bit further with the crafting. Not that I know what I want to make but I'd like to be able to say I made something!

Also, it could have been worse. I saw in chat that Wilhelm got turned into a pillar! But I expect he'll tell us all about that himself...

Stars Reach My Destination

On Wednesday evening I spent two hours testing Stars Reach. Well, I say "testing". It was mostly running around gawping, taking screenshots and trying to figure out how everything worked. There was a note on Discord suggesting new testers check out a thread that explained the basics before logging in but naturally I didn't pay any attention to that.

Which was fine. I got the hang of things, eventually. I'm all for reading the manual but in this context the settings kind of are the manual. Getting to grips with the controls did take a while but at least now I know enough about the UI to find my way around. If there are specific instructions in another test, I might have a fighting chance of following them.

There will be further opportunities for me to test the game because not only am I now in the current phase but, thanks to a recommendation by Wilhelm, I'm also in the Stars Reach Content Creator Program. That's a first, although maybe not a last because I just got an email from some other game, one I'd never heard of, sending me a beta key and telling me I'm in their program too. I have no idea how or why that happened but it doesn't look like a game I'd have any interest in playing so I won't be following it up and we'll say no more about it.

What I will say is that the Stars Reach pre-alpha is definitely one of the more focused, organized testing programs I've been in. It has schedules and goals and everything! It even has teams, who can have separate testing schedules, although my first test was for both my team, Team Green, and for Team Blue as well.

My character. Yes, he's a cat. Also, yes, he's a he. That's a switch!

It had a nice, easy introduction to the program. There weren't any specific goals. The test was all about "improving server performance and addressing feedback from our previous sessions" so I felt free to do my own thing. Presumably I was doing my bit just by being there.

I will be sending in my bug reports and feedback when I get into the swing of things, I'm sure, although I am a little rusty on that sort of thing. I used to do a lot of it back in the day but it's been a while since I was in a test that amounted to much more than a marketing exercise. I didn't send any specific reports this time, partly because of the aforementioned figuring stuff out but mainly because not much went wrong. 

Other than some major lag that required rebooting the server, it all went pretty smoothly. For a pre-alpha, things both looked good and mostly seemed to work, although obviously what's in the current build is only a very small subset of what there will be one day.

There were a couple of glitches I probably should have reported. At the start of the test I had a tool for setting up camps but it vanished from my backpack sometime after I swapped it out for the one that digs holes. Also, all my tool-belt icons vanished for a while, which was a tad disconcerting, although pressing the keys still worked. 

Dude! Where's my icons?

They came back after I relogged, so I just accepted it and carried on. Probably need to not to be quite so forgiving in a test. I'm just so used to things like that happening in live games I barely think about it any more...

The lag at times was ferocious. Most people seemed to find it a lot better after the server reboot but for me, it actually got a lot worse. I hadn't had that much of a problem with it before then but when the server came back up, I found the game all but unplayable.

The cause was definitely at my end. I logged right out of everything, Steam included, and after that all was fine. My tool-belt icons came back and I had no more lag to speak of for the rest of the two hours. The camping doohickey was gone for good, though, so that might have been a genuine bug. Or maybe I dropped it somehow.

Either way, it turned out to be a good thing in a way. But I'll get to that later.

Now this would be a great spot for a camp. Oh, wait...

The main thing I have to say about the two hours I spent playing Stars Reach last night is that it was a lot of fun. More fun than I expected, considering it's at such an early stage of development and also that it's a sandbox, which isn't my favorite genre.

Fortunately for me, there are lots of goals to latch onto if you prefer some nebulous sense of purpose, as I do. As an Explorer in the Bartle sense, naturally the main task I focused on was chasing down Survey Points and scanning them. I didn't do it to an extreme, not being any kind of completionist, but I was happy to have found about two-thirds of them by the end of the test.

I also tried out all the tools - the aforementioned camp device, the harvester and the pistol. 

Actually, I know what they're all called except the camp one - I have screenshots - so I might as well use the proper names. Also, going through them in turn should give a vague impression of what there is to do in the game so far.

One thing you can do is fight stuff. You do that with the gun, which is called the Omniblaster, which is a really nice word to say out loud. Go on, try it. It seems to fire arcs of electricity in short bursts and I found it quite effective and yet nowhere near effective enough. I kept getting killed.

Uh, guys... can we talk about this?

I hadn't planned on doing any fighting but after I got trampled to death by a herd of Owldeer I decided I ought at least to find out how to use the only weapon I had just so I could defend myself  from the wildlife. Someone in voice chat said the owldeer wouldn't attack unless provoked but that was not my experience. It felt as though they went for me every time they spotted me. For that matter, so did every other damn creature, of which there were many. 

About the only things that ran away from me were regular deer. Everything else was hyper-aggressive. I got killed by owldeer several times, by a pack of Skysharks, by some floating eyeball things, by something that spat poison at me from above that I never even got a look at... 

I did manage to take a few of them with me but their numbers overwhelmed me every time. Someone in chat was talking abut crafting a shield but I'm not convinced that would have helped much. A tank, maybe.

Half the time I got trampled, I was just trying to pick some flowers using a device called the Harvester. I know! Catchy, right? Shouldn't it be the Omniharvester, at least?

One day, someone will put a mushroom in a game and it won't be red with white spots but I don't imagine I'll live long enough to see it happen.

Maybe, if it actually did harvest everything, but it doesn't. It's a picky picker. I started off pointing it a tree, expecting to get logs, but it didn't do anything so I aimed it at flowers and mushrooms instead. Some it stripped of all useful parts, others it ignored. I imagine there's some visual clue to let you know which is which or maybe it needs an upgrade to handle the tougher stuff.

I collected quite a few plant parts but I didn't have any crafting recipes to use them in so I put away the Harvester and got out the Pathfinder out instead. I liked that a lot better. 

The Pathfinder lights up Survey Points all across the world so you can go scan them. They glow bright pink and you can see them for miles. There are sixty-four to collect although what happens when you've scanned them all I'm not clear. I know several people did, because when you complete the set your success is broadcast to the world. 

I think I found about forty in all so my name was not broadcast to anyone, which I have to say would always be my preference. I'm not big on these kinds of global announcements, ubiquitous in so many Free-to-Play games. I do think at the least you ought to be able to set permissions on stuff like that. What if you were in a witness protection program or something?

So, who put these things here, anyway? And who am I doing this survey for?

Getting to some of the Survey Points was fun. I found a few clinging to cliffs and I could see one way, way up high on some kind of floating island. I'm guessing the gravity device you can craft would come in handy for that one but although I did get as far as buying the recipe for that, I never got to make it. I didn't find the mats until the test was ending.

That was because the mats were in space and a) I didn't know and b) I couldn't get there. I knew how to get to space because several people in chat had explained it but I didn't find the supposedly unmissable portal until ten minutes before the end. I kept looking but I never saw it until the devs created a waterfall of lava right next to it. I could see that alright!

Before I made it into space, I became very familiar with the last of the five tools, the Terraformer. I can well believe there are people who do nothing but play with this excellent toy for the whole two hours. 

It's a chunky, hand-held contraption that looks uncannily like a golf bag. It fires a purple beam that rips anything apart. It also never runs out of juice so you can just keep blasting away until either your hopper fills up and you have to go empty it or the roof of the tunnel you're digging collapses and kills you.

Pass me the nine iron, Jim!

As I found late on, the Terraformer is how also you get ores and metals and suchlike for crafting. As for where you find them... in space, of course! And maybe elsewhere although all I got on the surface of the planet was mud and rock. 

Next time, I'll make a point of going to space at the start so I can get the mats to make some different tools and devices (And replace my camp-making tool, which is craftable.) although quite honestly just digging the holes is fun enough to keep me entertained on its own. If mats happen to fall into my packs while I'm digging, that's a bonus.

All of the things I've mentioned doing so far gave me XP. Everything you do gives you XP. The catch is, the XP is specific to the activity you're engaged in, so because I was swapping about all the time I ended up making a small amount of progress in half a dozen talent trees but not enough to get very far  in any of them.

I also found out quite quickly that to swap tools from your backpack to your tool-belt, where they have to be placed before you can use them, you need to be in a camp. You also need to be in a camp to craft anything. Since I'd lost the thingy that allowed me to set up a camp of my own, this looked like it was going to be a problem.

That's a camp over there in the distance. Right next to where someone's set that tree on fire.

But it wasn't. Not being able to make a camp of my own turned out to be the exact opposite of a problem, something I might not have realized if I hadn't lost my own dibber (Not the actual name. I didn't take a screenshot when I had the thing so now I have no clue what it was called.) 

There were camps all over the place that people had set up and some of them had crafting stations. I thought I'd see if it was possible to use someone else's camp to swap stuff around and do some crafting. I felt a bit uncomfortable doing it so I sidled up to an empty camp and stood just barely inside the big, yellow fence, fiddling around in my inventory to see if I could swap out tools. And it worked!

As I found out soon afterwards from a conversation in chat, that is precisely what you're supposed to do. You can use your own camp but you're strongly encouraged to use someone else's. Camp owners get XP from people using the crafting stations they set up or even just from people standing around in their camp, so they're hoping for visitors.

This is apparently all very familiar to veterans of Star Wars Galaxies, a sub-group that seems to make up a large portion of current testers, at least based on the number of times the game gets name-checked in chat. I gather that's how this stuff worked in that game, meaning people are both used to it and like it. 

Cats In Spaaace!

I did not play SWG, at least not until after the NGE and even then only very briefly. I'm neither used to it, nor am I convinced I like it all that much. 

I think I'd be a lot more comfortable with the mechanic if the spaces were clearly designated as "public". At the moment it feels too much like walking into someone's kitchen uninvited and making yourself a sandwich without asking. Now I understand what's going on, I can deal with it for practical purposes but I suspect it may never feel either natural or comfortable for me. 

That, though, was probably the only thing I didn't entirely enjoy during the test. Oh, and the lag, obviously. And being killed by angry deer, which was funny the first time but less so every time after that. (You know they're angry because they flash up emojis to show their mood. That's weird, too and I'm not sure I like it much, either. It's kind of immersion-breaking. I think it would definitely need a toggle when the game goes live.)

Mostly, though, I had a great time. Two hours is actually a long session for me these days so the fact that I didn't start to flag until close to the end is a very positive sign. Even in the games I think I've been playing obsessively recently, like Once Human and Wuthering Waves, I tend to feel like I need a break after about ninety minutes. Two hours is pretty much a marathon at my age.

I'm not sure when the next EU-friendly test is likely to be but I'm looking forward to it. I believe there will be a new build by then although I have no idea what's coming. 

Maybe I should read the instructions next time...

You Do Know You're A Cat, Right?

I don't keep a list of things I never imagined existed. Who does that? If I did, though, a DC comic teaming Superman with Top Cat would certainly be on it. And now I'd have to cross it off because such a wonder, if that's what you want to call it, does in fact exist. 

As of a couple of hours ago, I can also confirm that I've read it and it is... not good. Okay, it's bad. I mean, I cut it as much slack I could but there just isn't enough slack to cut. It's just bad.

I probably ought to make it clear I didn't go looking for a Supes/TC collab just to prove one couldn't exist. I was just following up some reviews I'd read of the Supergirl back-ups in recent editions of Action Comics. 

I'd seen those on a blog I follow by the name of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. I tend to disagree with most of the reviews there, although I enjoy reading them, which is why I like to check the source. It was while I was doing that that I caught sight of the cover of the  Superman/Top Cat Special.

My first reaction? Disbelief. My second? Thrilled. 

Not by the cover, that's for sure. It's horrible. By the concept.

These are two of my favorite fictional characters of all time. I grew up with both of them and in their own very different ways I consider each to be an influence and a role model. I own more than a thousand comic books featuring the Man of Steel in some version or other and I own  - and have watched, multiple times - all thirty episodes of the one and only, 1961 season of Top Cat.

I also have enough experience with both comic books and animation to know that absolutely no crossover, no matter how outlandish, ludicrous or ill-conceived, is ever completely off the table. If you can think of it, someone is going to try it. (Generally applicable almost anywhere, that one...)

Just because TC is an anthropomorphised cat who lives in a garbage can in a back alley is no reason to think he couldn't or shouldn't team up with an alien being powerful enough to lift mountains and turn back time (Superman cannot turn back time. Other superheros who can turn back time are available.)

It is theoretically possible that someone could write a good story featuring a team-up between a three-foot tall talking cat in a vest and a hat with holes cut in it for his ears to poke through and a six-foot tall hunk of beefcake in spandex and a cape. We do, after all, live in a post Howard the Duck: The Movie world. Anything is possible. It just hasn't been done yet and certainly not in this comic book.

I won't attempt to summarize the plot. I'll just say it revolves around the last living Kalien, a race of sentient vegetables living on Earth as the leafy green we know as kale and the villainous billionaire CEO of a global internet shopping business, who just happens to have a really Greek-sounding last name. Whatever that leads you to imagine, the reality is worse.

Oftentimes in comics, a bad plot can be saved by some snappy dialog or some great art. Not here. Top Cat has to have one of the most distinctive "voices" in the entire funny animal kingdom. Granted it's not all his own work , given his whole persona and presentation was lifted almost verbatim from a signature performance in a 1950s TV show, but it's still one of the most recognizable around and, I would have though, one of the most easily imitated. 

Not in this comic book, it's not. I have to wonder why anyone would even bother to borrow a well-known character from another medium if they weren't going to make use of any of the things that made that character famous in the first place. FFS, it doesn't even look like TC. If he wasn't wearing the hat and vest I wouldn't know who it was supposed to be.

Still,it could be worse, right? It can always be worse. They could have teamed him up with Batman.

Ah. You're ahead of me. 

I have a twist, though. The Batman/Top Cat team up, which precedes the one I've been talking about in continuity (Seriously, though? Is any of this canon?) and explains how TC got to be in the same world as the superheroes in the first place, is actually much better! I'm not saying it's good but it's definitely better.

For one thing, TC is drawn as both more recognizably the character we all know and in a style more appropriate to a superhero comic. I don't mean he wears a costume... well, okay, I guess he does... it's that hat and vest again... but he's taller and slightly less cartoonish and just fits the Gotham milieu. Plus I would one hundred percent know who he was supposed to be from his face, without the hat and vest. 

Not that anyone ever saw TC without his hat and vest... oh, wait... that actually happens here, too.

There's a nice bit of interplay between Batman and TC and later between TC and Catwoman and amazingly it all stays broadly in character for all of them, insofar as anything featuring those three characters together ever could. TC still doesn't really sound much like himself but he doesn't sound entirely wrong all the time, like the version that Superman met, either.

I enjoyed it, anyway. There were a couple of good jokes and I liked the way it looked. The story, which is only an eight-pager, appeared as the bonus feature in Adam Strange Future Quest Special, another crossover. In the main feature, Adam Strange teams up with Jonny Quest and his crew but I didn't read that. Jonny Quest wasn't shown in the TV region where I grew up so I get no nostalgic buzz when he turns up in other media, something he seems to do quite often. I'm happy to pass.

The story ends with a "To be continued in Top Cat" teaser, which does somewhat suggest TC was about to get a DC title of his own. That was back in 2017. We're still waiting.

Of course, TC has already had his own comic book. Several, in fact, published, on and off, by Dell, Gold Key and Charlton and running from the early nineteen-sixties through to the mid-seventies. I have a few copies tucked away somewhere. Gold Key, I think.

After that, a company I'm not familiar with, Murray, picked up the franchise until the end of the decade and then, once again to my complete surprise and mystification, it seems in 1983-4 Marvel put out more than thirty issues of something called Top Cat's T.V. Comic Show. I was not only very active in comics fandom at the time, I was working in fricken' comic shop but I don't recall ever hearing about it, let alone seeing a copy.

Which brings us almost full circle, back to comics I didn't know existed, a very long list indeed. But it's not quite the end, not yet. There's still one more team-up featuring the cat in the vest-and-hat I need to mention. It's by far the most natural pairing and the most recognizable version of Top Cat DC has published so far.

I don't have quite the same level of nostalgia for Scooby-Doo as I do for TC, mostly because I was a few years older by the time the original sseries surfaced on British TV, but as I've mentioned a few times here in the past, I do still have a pretty large soft spot for the Scooby and the gang. My favorite iteration by far is the one in Scooby-Doo, Mystery Incorporated. but I like the OG Scooby series a lot, too. 

The original seems to be the main basis for DC's Scooby-Doo Team-Up, a fairly long-running title in which the gang collaborate with a whole range of DC superheroes, as well as just about any other I.P. DC holds the rights to, including Jonny Quest, again, and Top Cat.

The Top Cat team-up was first published in issue #29 and then again, split acoss two digital issues as #57 and #58. It's a far more authentic take on the familiar characters from the TV version. All the Top Cat regulars appear, staying firmly in character, with dialog that wouldn't feel out of place in the show. The plot, involving a ghost that - no spoiler warning required - turns out to not to be a real ghost at all, is the Scooby Gang's schtick but the way it's handled is very much according to TC.

I read all of three of the above comics today and enjoyed two of them. I'd still quite like to see that missing Top Cat comic, too, the one that never seems to have appeared.  We could have followed a more time-worn, cynical TC, searching for his lost pal, Benny, trapped in a world he never made.

They could have made a movie out of it.

Then again, maybe not...