Both Wonderful And Strange - RIP David Lynch

 

I was going to do a grab-bag for Friday as is traditional but the sad news of David Lynch's passing dictates otherwise. Reports suggest the LA wildfires were indirectly responsible for his death at the age of 78. He suffered from emphysema as a result of a lifetime of smoking and could no longer walk without the aid of additional oxygen, and the strain of having to leave his home under threat of the spreading conflagration was apparently just too much.

I make no claim to be any kind of Lynch completeist. I still haven't seen Eraserhead although I've seen a lot of clips from it and once I came home and switched the TV on and it was playing. I should probably watch it sometime. I also have never seen Dune or The Elephant Man, although once again it's been impossible to avoid the odd scene from both, here and there. Lynch's work pervades our lives, wish it or not.

Plenty of people had tried to sell me on the supposed attractions of all of the above over the years, especially Eraserhead, the film that first made Lynch notorious, if not famous, but I resisted. I was for a long time (And still somewhat remain.) opposed to the concept of horror as entertainment. Maybe Eraserhead is a horror movie. Maybe it's not. Either way, back then I didn't like to be horrified, terrified, scared or shocked if I could manage to avoid it and I could, so I did.

Even The Elephant Man could be seen as a kind of body-horror, I suppose. For whatever reason, I avoided that, too. Probably it was just too popular and I was too much the hipster then. As for Dune, it would take more than Lynch or Denis Villeneuve to get me to sit through an adaptation of what I consider one of the dullest, most tedious science fiction novels I've ever read. Fool me once...

My first exposure to the master's work came with his fourth feature, Blue Velvet, which I saw at the cinema on release in 1986. I went to see it at one of the two riverside art cinemas, The Watershed or The Arnolfini, in Bristol, where I was living at the time. I forget which. I went to both a lot.

As I remember, it wasn't my choice of movie. I went with my then-girlfriend, who introduced me to a number of directors I was unfamiliar with, chief among them Lynch and Roman Polanski, who she really liked. Considering she had no issues watching Knife in the Water and Repulsion, which we saw as a double bill, it seems strange now that she walked out of Blue Velvet about five minutes in, at the moment when Kyle Maclachlan discovers a human ear, crawling with ants, lying in the grass.

She left but I stayed to watch the whole film. The relationship survived but didn't endure. My connection with Lynch's work lasted much longer. In some ways, it never stopped.

In other ways, though, it kind of did. It's odd. I was about to write that I haven't seen any of Lynch's recent movies but when I go to check I find there really haven't been any. His filmography is very sparse for a director of his age and reputation. The last film of his that I went to the cinema to see when it came out was Lost Highway in 1997, five years after I'd been to see Fire Walk With Me. I saw both at The Watershed, even though by the time Lost Highway arrived I was no longer living in the same city. Despite his commercial success, there were still only so many places you could go if you wanted to see a David Lynch movie.

After that came just three more features: The Straight Story, Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire, the last arriving in 2006. I have Mullholland Drive on DVD but haven't watched it. The other two I've done nothing about although I've always wanted to see The Straight Story, an outlier in Lynch's canon. Sometimes described as Lynch's Disney movie, entirely accurately since it was released by Disney in the US, it's based on the true tale of a man who rode all the way from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion in Wisconsin - on a lawnmower.

Inland Empire, which I remember receiving excellent reviews, was his last full-length movie. He made just ten in a career lasting more than forty years. And anyone who can count will realize I've only mentioned nine of them. Missing from the list is my favorite, the magnificent, ever-underrated Wild At Heart. If you want a movie that's horrifying, terrifying, scary and shocking, here it is. I love it. Obviously my horror-avoidance policy only extends so far.

David Lynch may have stopped making movies almost twenty years ago but he never stopped making something. I have never seen a Lynch short but according to Wikipedia he's made close on fifty of them, the first in 1967, the last in 2020. He's also directed or written web series, commercials and music videos. Lots of them. And he had a whole side hustle going for many years as a musician, releasing three critically acclaimed albums and a host of singles from the late nineties through the twenty-teens.

For all of that ceaseless enterprise, it's likely Lynch will be longest and best remembered for one thing above all others: Twin Peaks. Frequently cited as the best TV show ever made, even more often as the weirdest, Twin Peaks ran for just two seasons in 1990 and 1991 before making a return for a third and final run more than a decade and a half later in 2017. 

Of those three seasons, the first and the third enjoy stellar reputations. The second was seen as something of a let-down at the time, although it regained much of its lost critical ground in later years. Lynch didn't actually direct all that many episodes of the original two seasons, just two in the first eight-episode run and four of the second season's twenty-two. He took complete control over the final season, directing every episode, another twenty-two-parter, making fifty-two in all.

As a work of art Twin Peaks could be considered inconsistent, even self-indulgent. As a cultural force the show had the impact of a boulder falling into a still, mountain pool. It made a gigantic splash and the ripples are still spreading even now. It was and it remains a phenomenon. 

It is very necessary at this point to mention the involvement of Mark Frost, the writer with whom Lynch created the show and who wrote and/or directed many of its episodes. I actually started watching Twin Peaks as much because of Frost's involvement as Lynch's. Frost was extensively involved with what had been my personal high-water mark of American television prior to Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues. 

I'll leave Mark Frost for a tribute of his own, some day hopefully far away. In any case, Twin Peaks is inexorably linked to David Lynch and always will be. It showed on BBC2 in the UK in 1990, the same year Wild At Heart appeared in the cinema and the mere involvement of a major Hollywood director in a TV series made headlines. The world was changing and Lynch was doing his part to make it happen faster.

There's no need to recap the plot of Twin Peaks, as if anyone ever could. Everyone who cares knows and countless millions who care not at all have unknowingly benefited from the sea-change the show brought to the entire medium. There are a surprising number of shows about which it could reasonably be said nothing was the same after but on any such list, Twin Peaks would be right at the top.

It scared the crap out of me, honestly. I was living on my own in a studio flat at the time and I didn't even like to watch it alone. I remember having at least one nightmare about Killer Bob. Twin Peaks isn't horror per se but it is horrifying. Also surreal, elliptical and often incomprehensible. All marks in its favor.

I watched every episode as it was broadcast and I also taped them all on VHS cassettes, which I still have. The recordings came in very handy when I bought a tiny sampler that connected to my Amiga 500  and with which I put together a three minute "song" entirely composed of samples from the show. If I had it in a format I could access I'd play it for you now. Luckily for us all, I don't.

At the time I held the peculiar and scarcely supportable opinion that the second season of Twin Peaks was better than the first. I haven't seen it for more than thirty years but I'm pretty confident now I was talking nonsense. It's hard to be sure because despite my love and reverence for the show, I only ever watched it that first time, as it was broadcast. I never watched the tapes I'd made and even though I own all three seasons on DVD, they're still in the shrink-wraps.

In fact, somewhat shamefully, I have never watched Season Three. I want to but I also want to watch the first two seasons again first and so far I haven't found the right time. Or just the time...

Maybe now I will. A reissue of the limited edition box set "Twin Peaks Z-A", containing all three seasons, the movie and wealth of ancillary material, was announced, entirely co-incidentally, on the day of his death. Maybe I'll get that and actually watch it this time.

It's an insidious truism that it takes a death to make us remember, sometimes. If nothing else, it reminds us we don't have all the time in the world to get around to doing the things we mean to do. David Lynch made the very most of the time he had. Maybe we should take that as his legacy and follow his example. 

Just without all those cigarettes.

Header Illustration Netflix.©

Woe Is Me!

Sometimes you don't know what you'll do 'til it's done, as Joni Mitchell almost said. Only yesterday I was whining on about how I always mean to play EverQuest II and never do and now guess what? I played EQII!

More specifically, I played some of the new expansion, instead of prepping for it, which is just about all I've done since Scars of Destruction dropped back before Christmas. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I logged in mainly to collect my monthly 550DBC stipend and on a whim I ported into Port Woe, the intentionally unattractive starting area in Sodden Archipelago, the expansion's equally unattractive opening zone.

Place names in the real world often reflect either their physical situation or the attitude of the people who named them. That convention holds true here. Unlike those really annoying games, where everywhere seems to have been named by upsetting a Scrabble board, Port Woe is unironically miserable and its hinterland undeniably waterlogged. Things do improve somewhat as you move further inland but at no point, at least no point that I've reached yet, does any of it start to look attractive.

This, it has to be said, is a risky strategy for a game to adopt. I was skeptical when the EverQuest Show attempted to spin the approach as both worthwhile and successful, claiming "... the direction of creating more realistic unique landscapes like swamps, highlands, and rocky outcrops is a much more demanding task, to do it well. And the artists do."

Yes, well, maybe. A more detached observer, however, might conclude that as a twenty year-old game whose graphics have not aged as well as they might have done, leaning into the things the tools are good at, like the vibrant colors and lush foliage seen in several recent expansions, might be a safer option than trying to make stagnant water and bare rock look appealing.

It's not all about looks, though, is it? It's about story and gameplay and progression. Isn't that why we come here?

Up to a point. I do like to have nice things to look at while I'm playing, all the same. So it is indeed a compliment to the devs that I found time zipping past this morning even while I struggled badly to find anything worth taking a picture of for the blog post I knew I'd be writing later.

If I'm going to be strictly accurate, it wasn't really the story that jollied me along, either. I think there is one but I'd be hard put to tell you what it was. Granted, I did the introduction a couple of months ago and now I'm back to do the follow-up I've forgotten the finer details but I have a feeling that, even at the time, I was never clear on why I was in Port Woe or what the Big Crisis was supposed to be.

Let's see if I can precis the story so far without looking anything up. Hmm....

Some bunch I never heard of before, by the name of The Open Hand, got in touch with me to go someplace I'd also never heard of before, to intervene in some sort of burgeoning problem that was going to be bad because... I have no idea why. 

When I got there the locals didn't like me or trust me. A bunch of adventurers had apparently turned up and started running around, riling up the indigenous bad guys, firstly a bunch of Teenage Mutant Turtle lookalikes and more importantly the inevitable tribe of militaristic orcs that shows up wherever you go in Norrath, with whom the Port Woeians were barely holding their own through a policy of kow-towing and forelock-tugging and basically keeping their heads down. 

Naturally, I got the job of ingratiating myself with the locals, trying to convince them I and my new best friends, who I barely knew, weren't going to cause a huge heap of trouble then vanish, leaving them to deal with it on their own. As always, getting on their right side took the form of doing menial tasks for anyone too busy or lazy to do them for themselves which, again as always, turned out to be everyone.

Along the way I was able to throw in a few noble acts, like finding unsupervised children, who should surely not have been allowed to go wandering about in the alligator-infested swamps in the first place, and rescuing a bunch of fishermen, who'd managed to get themselves captured by orcs. Isn't that always the way?

All of this eventually got the locals to think of me "kindly", at which point a different bunch of villagers, noticing how gullible I was, suddenly thought of a whole new set of chores for me to do. One of those was to go to some haunted village where all the Kerrans who used to live here died in some unspecified purge or pogrom or natural disaster (Or maybe it was specified but I forgot, which seems more likely.) to steal a baker's dozen of their totems, something that apparently was going to put the willies up either the orcs or the turtles or both.

That village turned out to be the first instanced "dungeon" in the storyline, although I don't think we call them dungeons any more. Very few of them are underground, anyway. This one wasn't.

I'll quit with the story-so-far at this point because, as must be clear, I have no clue what it is. The last time I remember there being an actual narrative, as opposed to a string of chores with some flavor text, was probably the first time I zoned in back in December. I'm trusting that at some point an actual plot will develop, probably with guest appearances from a few Norrathian celebrities and a climax featuring a demi-god or two. That is the go-to format for EQII expansions, after all.

What I will say is that the instance was fun. I really enjoyed it. I went in blind, didn't look anything up, didn't even have the Wiki open. I thought I'd try winging it, see how it went, then back off and do the research when things fell apart. But they never did.

There were five bosses. All of them were tank&spank or at least I tanked and spanked them all. That alone would earn the instance at least a B+ in my book. I wish every boss in every game was T&S or more properly T&S-friendly. I don't mind them having clever mechanics for those that like that sort of thing, so long as I can ignore them. I just want to stand there and hit stuff until it falls over and this morning that's what I did.

Which is not to say the bosses didn't have resources. Two of them did serious knockbacks that sent me flying high into the air and at least two also summoned loads of adds. Happily for me, I had my Featherfall cloak on, so all I had to do was gently float back down to carry on the fight. As for adds - I was playing my Berserker ffs. He thrives on adds!

Even better, not one of the bosses had any of the more irritating passive abilities used by devs in recent times to make the fights more "challenging". The one I really, really hate is the huge mana drain every bloody boss used to be given that meant I often ended up spending ten or fifteen minutes auto-attacking the buggers to death. That was fun.

The other, newer trick is for bosses to become invulnerable to all damage except what comes from Heroic Opportunities. That one gained currency right after the big HO revamp, surprise surprise. It's far less irritating than the mana drain but it's still hokey and trite so I hope we've seen the back of it.

With none of that nonsense in play I was able to explore the dungeon (Sorry, Instance.) at my own pace. Not that there was a lot to look at. Some instances in EQII can be genuinely gorgeous, especially the ones with a lot of tiling and statuary, but this was a long-deserted mountain village, originally populated by relatively primitive cat-people, so there weren't a whole lot of photo opportunities. At least one of the bosses had a model I hadn't seen before. though, so that was nice.

As far as mobs went, there were a lot of undead Kerrans and a lot of rats. Really a lot of rats. At one point I was swarmed by what looked like a dozen or so and that was one encounter. I haven't seen a mob of mobs like that since the deer in Thundering Steps. It was novel.

It was also easy because it seems all that work I did prepping has paid off. In the past, the first instance in an EQII expansion has sometimes been a little rough. They have been tuned a little high at times and anyone going in unprepared tended to have a difficult time of it. Since they added the Tishan's Box at the start and put in a tutorial to make sure you make full use of it, that's improved a lot. 

I also had good food and drink, the new mercenary, mount and familiar and I'd had my Jeweller make me Expert level Combat Arts for most of my main attacks, so I was about as well-set as a casual was likely to be. And now I'm better set even than that because three of the five bosses dropped upgrades I could - and did - use.

The other two dropped items a Berserker can't wear but those will be passed on to someone who can. I have someone who can use everything, pretty much. I was happy to see all the boss chests were metal this time around. Last expansion there was a disheartening switch to Treasured quality drops, something I did not appreciate, even though the stats may have been the same. It's the look of the thing, don't you know?

I'm trying to do the Adventure and the Tradeskill questlines at the same time because there are some welcome synergies. The Crafting line is much shorter and faster and you get to fly in the expansion zones as a reward for finishing it. It relies on gaining faction with Port Woe, though, as does the Adventure line, and Adventurers gain that faction much faster.

With a bit of swapping I should be able to make each of them feel easier and therefore more fun. Easier is always more fun for me. I used to wonder about that but I'm pretty convinced now it's true. 

There is a sense of satisfaction from overcoming more challenging content, I'll not deny it, but after decades of playing games like this, I'm convinced a fleeting sense of satisfaction rarely compensates for the hours of frustration experienced achieving it. 

It's the old banging your head against a wall thing, isn't it? Lovely when it stops but surely better never to started all that unnecessary head-banging in the first place.

And since I've clearly wandered off the point and clambered onto my soapbox, I'll leave it there. It's nice to be back on the old horse, anyway. Let's hope I don't fall off again before I get where I'm going.

Here, There And Everywhere

As may already be apparent, my game-playing in recent times has become fractured and fragmentary. I play something every day but what and for how long depends almost entirely on factors not wholly within my control. It's weird and annoying.

Factors affecting my "choices" include but are not limited to

• Dog-related interruptions and demands.
• Changing climactic conditions inside and outside the house.
• Work.
• Television programs to be watched at time of broadcast.
• Cloud gaming queues.
• Scheduled testing slots.
• Inertia, laziness and mithering.

For a few weeks now it's been a rare day when I've been able to sit down at the time of my choice, in the place of my choice, with the device of my choice and play the game of my choice for as long as I choose. I can't remember any point in the entirety of my gaming life, which goes back to the very early 1980s, when I had this little control. It's ironic, considering I am now semi-retired with ostensibly fewer responsibilities or commitments than at any time since I left college.

I only mention it to explain why it's so hard to find any through-line in what I post here any more. Of course, that's assuming there ever was one...

As I say, though, I am still playing games. Quite a few, in fact. The selection I'm mostly choosing from at the moment includes

• Cloudpunk
• Wuthering Waves
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister
• The First Descendant

That seems like more than enough to be flipping between but missing from that list only because I have not, as yet, gotten around to making it possible for me to play them on the laptop are

• EverQuest II
• Once Human
• Nightingale

Those three theoretically remain in my "Currently Playing" pile, a designation flawed only in that I'm not currently playing any of them.

Astute readers will notice the absence of a couple of titles I supposedly was playing

• The Outer Worlds
• Hard West

I'll refrain from listing all the games I've bought recently but not yet played at all or those I've signed up for or am thinking about. I probably need to play some games before I add any more to the heap.

On the positive side, I did finish something! Granted, it was only a demo but still. When I posted about Hard West, an anonymous reader left a comment recommending I try Mutant Year Zero. So I did. The demo, anyway.

And I liked it. The setting is interesting, the characters are appealing, the graphics are attractive and the gameplay is involving. When I finished the demo my immediate response was to go to the Steam Store to buy the full game. It was on sale at the time, although I forget what the discount was.

I didn't end up buying it, for two reasons. The most sensible was that, as I think I've made clear, I already have way too many games going unplayed to start adding more. MYZ isn't going anywhere so it makes much more sense to wait and buy it when I might actually play it.

The real reason I didn't pull the trigger right away, though, was the reviews. I read a bunch of them and they were mostly very complimentary. The game has an all-time Very Positive rating on Steam. Many of the reviews, however, make a point of saying how challenging and difficult the game gets in later stages and how important stealth becomes. 

I am not really in the market for anything "challenging" right now, if indeed I ever was, and I have never enjoyed stealth mechanics all that much, so that put me off somewhat. All of which goes to prove that, yes, reviews can make a difference to purchasing decisions.

Nevertheless, chances are high that I will pick up the game at some point, most likely in a sale. I have it on my wishlist. Thanks again to the anonymous recommender. 

As for the games I have been playing, I have a few notes:

Cloudpunk is really good. The story is really draws you in, helped enormously by the way it's told. It would work as a TV show or a movie but for once playing the game is adding to rather than detracting from the narrative experience. 

Things have opened out somewhat from the endless fetch quest architectonics of the early game and there have been some unexpected twists. Camus gets more and more delightful as does Rania's relationship with him. I'm loving the whole thing.

Divinity: Original Sin, though? Not loving that so much. All the same, I'm playing quite a lot of it, mostly because so far it's the only game I have set up to play directly on the laptop without using some sort of remote streaming. That means it's my default choice far too often just because it's less of a faff to log in. I need to do something about that.

Interestingly, when I visited Can You Run It? to see what games would run on the laptop, I checked D:OS and apparently it won't. The laptop doesn't meet the minimum specs. Weird, then, how it runs smoothly at high settings for entire sessions, with the laptop showing absolutely no sign of strain. I used to trust that site but I'll look at the results there a lot more skeptically in future. 

As for the game itself... it's a bit wordy, isn't it? I mean, I count myself as someone who's willing to undertake a good deal of reading (Or listening.) when playing video games. I generally like to give myself the full quest text/voice acting experience. But even I'm finding this one a bit much. It's all talk. If I play for an hour I'm lucky to get five minutes of combat - and I have to go looking for even that much. 

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the writing was great. It's not. It's good, as in competent, grammatically correct, appropriate and all those professional kind of things so many games fail at but it isn't really doing much for me. The jokes aren't very funny, the characters aren't very characterful and the plot isn't very compelling. I'd rather it had less polish and more heart.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister, by comparison, is less professional in just about every possible way but also way more fun. The plot is much more linear but that means I know what I'm doing every time I log in, something that absolutely cannot be said for Divinity: Original Sin. I need to get Solasta onto the external drive asap so I can play it instead.

The First Descendant, as Tyler Edwards suggests, is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. It's the video game equivalent of one of those dumb action movies your friend drags you along to see and you think you're going to hate but you end up having a really good time even though you don't want to admit it. 

I'd be playing it more if it wasn't that the queues on GeForceNow are pretty chunky in prime time. I dropped out of the line twice yesterday evening because it was taking too long and I lost patience but then I tried again in bed and got in almost immediately. Bad omen. 

I played for an hour and spent my free token on Sharen before the event ends today just in case the option goes away. (I wanted Freyna but she wasn't in the offer.) Then I did two missions in a group to get the parts to make the Bunny costume. I had no idea what I was doing of course. I just followed one of the other players and shot stuff and we beat both missions and no-one yelled at me so op success!

There was some issue with the Bunny rewards. One I got, the other I didn't, which I suspect might be because my inventory was full (Don't say a word...) or maybe it was the wrong mission. I think there's a machine you can go to to get stuff from missions you didn't pick up so I'll have to check that next time. 

It's a fun game, anyway, if insanely over-complicated on the back end. I will be playing more.

Once Human I also want to get back to at some point. It's going to need a post of its own soon, for one thing. They're making even more peculiar changes to the Season system, which is now so ludicrously convoluted I can't imagine most players have a clue what's going on. I know I don't. 

I would have picked a new scenario but there's not much chance of me playing until I'm back on the desktop full time. I will try to make time to go through the process though, so I can at least attempt to describe it, if only so I understand it myself.

EverQuest II is another game I really want to get back to playing. It might run natively on the laptop, too. I need to get it onto the external drive to find out. 

I haven't really touched the new expansion, which just feels wrong. I saw the 2025 Roadmap and as usual it's a case of get on the bus or get left behind. I don't want to get left behind but I do wonder if my days as even a semi-regular player may be coming to an end. If I'm honest, I just like modern games better than old ones now. I enjoy the old games when I play them but when I'm thinking about playing I mostly want to play the new.

Speaking of which, I absolutely am going to get back to Wuthering Waves very soon, not least because Naithin says the new content has raised the bar on storytelling in the game and I already thought it was pretty darn good. I have to finish the Black Shores to get to Riniscita so I'd better get on with it.

And that's where I am right now in regards to gaming. I suppose this almost counts as one of those "My Gaming Plans" posts that I keep reading on other blogs but never do myself. Maybe I need to start. Winging it doesn't doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to.

Can I Kick It? Yes You Can!

On Friday I got an email from Playable Worlds. It was brief and enigmatic. "We’ve got some announcements to share", it said. "Join us tomorrow for our Fireside Chat".

These chats are a regular event in which Raph Koster talks about the game, how it's progressing and what's being planned for the future. So far I haven't felt the need to attend. Anything I need to know will come out in a more concise form soon afterwards and I've always found listening to people talk a less efficient way to learn things than reading. That's why I stopped going to lectures halfway through my first term at university.

Sometimes, though, you just want to hear about stuff as it happens, not read about it later. And I was curious, especially when  a second email arrived the next day, announcing a new build and a four-hour test and reminding us all of an "important announcement during the Fireside" That's Playable Worlds' bold type there, not mine.

Obviously, something was up, not least because the email went on to suggest "we expect a lively conversation and plenty of questions." "Lively" in this context is usually code for angry or upset so it seemed likely whatever was going to be announced could be controversial. I had a few ideas what that might be. None of them correct, as it turned out.

There's no point my building this up to some kind of big reveal because obviously anyone who's interested in Stars Reach will already know what the big announcement was. MassivelyOP had a news item up about it almost before Raph finished talking. I'd have loved to be able to be that quick with my response but the Fireside didn't start until 10.30pm for me and I was working all day Sunday, so this is the first chance I've had to get to it.

Just in case anyone reading this really doesn't know what happened, let me tell you now. There's going to be a Kickstarter for Stars Reach. 

Is that big news? Is it a big deal? Depends on where you stand, I guess. In the MOP piece Bree points out that Raph said only last June that there were "no plans" to do a Kickstarter. If you were of a mind to be upset about it you might work that up into something but anyone who has even a basic understanding of  interview technique would know that "having no plans" at best means "we might" but more likely "we will but we're not quite there yet".

The actual campaign doesn't begin until February but there's a landing page up already. It's worth a read. It lays out what the game is aiming to be in clearer terms than I remember seeing before. 

As one of the "hundreds of players who have been playing for six months", I can't say I recognize everything in the lengthy description of  howStars Reach is supposedly going to look when it's done but most of what I have seen for myself in the pre-alpha is fairly represented. There are a few things I'd quibble with but on balance it seems like a pretty straightforward pitch.

And it needs to be. One of the things Raph came back to repeatedly in the Fireside was the degree of suspicion in which many gamers and especially MMO players hold Kickstarter projects these days. He used the word "burned" several times when talking about gamers' previous experiences with the funding platform and the first person from the audience to raise a question after Raph finished mentioned Star Citizen as an example.

It's true the shadow of huge, over-ambitious projects like Star Citizen, Ashes of Creation or Camelot Unchained looms menacingly over any would-be MMO developer who dares to ask for money for a game as yet unmade. These are games that promised to be done in a year or two but which are still deep in early development, often behind firmly-closed doors, years going on decades later.

Raph took trouble to emphasize the reasons Stars Reach is not one of those kinds of projects and he makes a convincing case. The game has been in development for five years already, something I'm not sure was widely known and which does explain a lot about how "quickly" the current, quite playable build appeared. 

More importantly, it is playable and people are playing it. And enjoying it. Without an NDA, I might add, all of which significantly increases confidence.

He also says it's "5/6 of the way through development", by which I have to assume he means by some specific, technical measure. I can't see how the game as we know it now has 5/6 of the content, or even the systems, described in the pitch.

Undoubtedly, though, there is a real game there already. It's in pre-alpha right now but Raph says alpha is very close and Early Access ought to come within the year. Based on other games I've played that label themselves "alpha" or "Early Access" that seems entirely plausible. 

The main thing that's missing would seem to be scale. The current game has four planets whereas the pitch promises "a galaxy". That is disturbingly similar to Star Citizen, which proposed to have a hundred star systems but after ten years has only managed two.

Nevertheless, I think a much more apposite comparison and one that reflects much more favorably on Playable Worlds would be Project: Gorgon. That game also had a very playable micro-version available well before it started asking anyone for money and, although it famously failed to fund on the first two attempts, once the threshold was reached on the third Kickstarter, most that was promised quite quickly came to pass.

People who pledged Project: Gorgon seem to have been satisfied with what they got, by and large, so there's proof it is possible to run a Kickstarter for an MMORPG and not leave everyone feeling let down or lied to. That said, it doesn't happen as often as it should. 

Mostly, the history of kickstarted MMOs is a trail of unfinished or abandoned projects, scarred by a handful of outright scams. I'm sure that the huge majority of failures come down to a combination of wildly over-optimistic expectations and very poor estimates of the costs and challenges involved. In this regard, Playable Worlds has a considerable advantage. Of all the big names in his corner of the field, Raph has a deserved reputation for being the least hyperbolic and the most realistic. Then again, Dave Georgeson is on the team...

There were several intriguing revelations during Raph's Fireside talk on Saturday, among them the confirmation that "hundreds" were in the testing program but that "tens of thousands" had signed up. The disparity, it was explained, was because Playable Worlds couldn't provide the server capacity for the numbers of people who wanted to join the tests and even if they could it would have meant effectively running the equivalent of a live MMO.

I have pondered here before about the potential popularity of Stars Reach and this casts considerable light on the reality. "Tens of thousands" sounds like a lot but it needs to be contrasted with numerous reported pre-testing sign-ups for MMOs like Once Human or Tarisland or Lost Ark, which regularly run an order of magnitude larger and not infrequently two orders.

For all its ambition, Stars Reach is a small project with a small audience. It seems from what Raph says that the numbers it has already could provide a sustainable income for the eventual live game but even so one of the main reasons for the Kickstarter is to draw eyes. Indeed, I suspect publicity is the main reason.

Raph was very clear about the difficulty of finding funding in the current climate. He confirmed  that being able to show evidence of player interest by way of metrics like Steam wishlists and now Kickstarter followers is going to be instrumental in securing further funding from outside investors. The pledge money we provide is not going to pay the bills.

Or that's how it sounded. Of course, as yet we don't know how much Raph is going to ask for. Again, he was very clear in his talk about the dangers of setting the funding bar too high and, by failing to reach it, ending up with nothing at all.

We'll find out next month how well he's judged it. I am already decided on pledging although it will be at a fairly nominal level, more to show support than in expectation of any eventual reward. I will also almost certainly buy in to Early Access, when it arrives, which I hope will indeed be later this year, always provided pricing is reasonable.

I'm still broadly in favor of Early Access, despite it's many well-known problems. When it comes to MMORPGs, I like to get in as early as possible, partly for the blogging opportunities but also because, in my estimation, the majority provide less fun the more "developed" they become. There are exceptions but it's been my experience more often than not.

Raph didn't mention anything about the future of the current round of testing or how that might change as the game transitions into alpha. So long as I have access, I intend to carry on testing and writing about what I see and do in the game, although while the testing schedule remains as it has been, my opportunities to engage with it will continue to be limited. I couldn't find time to take even a short look at the new build that dropped on Saturday, for example, and I would have liked to because there were reportedly some substantial changes.

Overall, I feel Stars Reach is coming along nicely, even if I still have my doubts whether, as a Live game, it will look anything much like the rosy picture Raph paints. I suspect there will be a lot more mayhem, anarchy and chaos than he's suggesting. As a big fan of emergent gameplay, however, I doubt that will bother him all that much and it will certainly give me something to blog about so I'm fine with it, too.

Until we can all get in and play under some form of expanded testing or Early Access, Raph and the team would very much like everyone who's even a little bit interested to go sign up at Kickstarter to make that interest public and thereby convince some people with real money to send some of it his way.

I'm going to go and add my name to the list. I would have done it already but it turned out I was on the wrong email account or something. So far, only 1,163 people have signed up but it was 1,139 when I started this post so at least it's going in the right direction.

Next step - the Kickstarter itself. I'm curious to see both the pledges and the target. Meet back here when we find out.

"You Don’t Want To Hear The Story Of My Life..."

Time for another What I've Been Listening To post. If I did one a week from now until Easter I might just have a chance of catching up with myself. Am I going to do that? Probably not but it's an idea.

The question is, do I go on digging into what I guess I should start calling the backlog or do I try to keep it in the moment and move forward? I've bookmarked about thirty more tunes since last week so it's not like I'm going to need to go back to the old ones. But there are so many good ones there I haven't used yet!

Oh, the choices we have to make. Better start making some, I guess.

Okay, here's a gimme. If there was a new Lana del Rey song you know I'd have to lead with that. Well, there isn't but there's the next best thing and here it is.

T&A - Blondshell

Sabrina Teitelbaum, aka Blondshell, is now undoubtedly my favorite contemporary artist after Lana. I love everything about her music, from her voice, which sounds like sunlight wearing away sandstone, to the squalls of barely-controlled anger in the guitars, but I particularly, especially love her songwriting, which is just genius. Her ability to evoke specific emotion through both sentence structure and word choice is all but unparalleled. I struggle to think of anyone who can do more with less.

This is from her just-announced second album, If You Asked For A Picture, due out in early May, which is far too long to wait. It's pre-orderable through multiple outlets and the only reason I haven't is because I want a hard copy. I will be pre-ordering the moment the CD comes up on Amazon. It's already on my wishlist.

The problem with opening your career with a near-flawless, critically acclaimed debut is that you have to follow it. Not many can. I'm betting on Sabrina all the same.

This Body - BAUM

Then again, last year's Blondshell album wasn't the beginning of Sabrina Teitelbaum's career. Before she reinvented herself as an alt-rock, post-grunge cult figure, she went out for a while as a would-be alt-pop princess. She released half a dozen singles between 2017 and 2019 under the name BAUM, the most successful of which was probably the excellently-named if radio-unfriendly Fuckboy.

The BAUM material is a revelation, especially the wonderful live set she did for SOFAR. I love the way she sings as Blondshell but I'd made the incorrect assumption that it was a style chosen as much from necessity as aesthetics. Many - quite possibly most - of my favorite singers don't have the greatest range or the most complete control and they're all the better for it. I thought Sabrina was from that school of making the very best of what you have but now I understand she's making a conscious, considered and skillful choice to sing these songs the way they need to be sung.

It's absolutely the right direction for her and for us but I have to say I love what she did as BAUM, too.

American Girls - MGNA Crrrta

Was it all getting a little too earnest and tasteul for you there? Never mind. We'll soon put a stop to that.

MGNA Crrrta are indeed American girls so why they chose to call themselves after a thirteenth century icon of English history is anyone's guess. I happened upon them when they were mentioned in dispatches as I was going through The Hellp's back catalog. Another footnote in the indie sleaze revival, maybe? You need a scorecard to keep track of this stuff.

Yameii - Baby My Phone

At least the MGNA Crrrta girls are real. I'm not at all sure about Yameii. Fifteen million people have watched this on YouTube so far, though, so I don't know if it even matters any more. 

"Where has the time gone?" indeed...

Tetoris - Kasane Teto

I'll see your 15m views and raise you 22m. 

Makes me think of that Russian dance where they're sort of down on their heels and kicking their legs out. What's that called again? Ah yes! That's the one! My mother took me to see a Russian ballet troupe in the 1960s and they did a lot of that. Also there were two bears that wrestled and it turned out the bears were one man in a bear suit. Or something. It was a long time ago...

Kimi to Motorbike - PUFFY

Look, I don't know what to tell you. The feature's called What I've Been Listening To Lately and this really is an accurate reflection of that. Obviously I've been in a bit of an odd frame of mind. Not that there's anything wrong with a bit of PUFFY now and again. 

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, I'm warning you now.

Boku No Migite - PARANMAUM (or possibly PARAN MAUM)

I could have saved this for the next covers post, seeing as it is one, but there doesn't seem to be much point highlighting covers of songs no-one is likely to have heard by bands no-one is likely to have heard of. The original is by The Blue Hearts and the video is from cult Japanese movie Linda Linda Linda.

There really needs to be a U.S. remake of Linda Linda Linda starring the Linda Lindas. 

That would be a much funnier line if the Linda Lindas weren't, in fact, named after the movie Linda Linda Linda. Which they are.

I wonder why they didn't call themselves the Linda Linda Lindas?

I'm Gonna Smash Your Face In - Laurice

Is anyone still there? You deserve some kind of award. As David Byrne always says "You may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

Good question. There was something on Stereogum or maybe it was Pitchfork (No, it was Stereogum.) about an indie band with a new song out, and I clicked on it because it sounded mildly interesting. It was quite nice (It was Sharp Pins doing "I Can't Stop") but I wouldn't have bookmarked it except for some of the names they dropped in the brief notes they gave about how they came to write it.

One of those names was Cleaners From Venus, national treasure Martin Newell's best-known vehicle from the 1980s but the others, Laurice and Peter Jeffries, were new to me. So I looked them up.

Laurice has his own website on which he's described as "Formerly Canada's Number One male dance vocalist " but in the 1970s he was also "a session singer, songwriter and producer in London", although whether that was London, England or London, Ontario isn't made clear.

Sometime around then, he recorded the ditty above as the B-Side of When Christine Comes Around, a single he put out under the deeply appropriate name Grudge. Laurice's current record company describes it as "an underground punk rock classic" but I notice that it turns up on a lot of Outsider Music playlists. 

You've heard it. Decide for yourself.

Immigration Song - This Kind Of Punishment

Since we've had Laurice, I guess we'd better have Peter Jeffries too, here in his role as lead vocalist for This Kind of Punishment. As the person who posted it on YouTube says "...their style may take a little getting used to". 

I probably ought to stress here that I don't much like this one. I just felt it needed to be here.

At least it's short.

Indian Weed - Rasputina

You might be worried Rasputina is going to turn out to be another weirdo but no. She's a perfectly normal cellist who just prefers to wear a ballgown and take her carpet with her when she plays with her friends in the woods. 

Every second mention of her I've seen likes to remind us she was in Nirvana's touring band on their final outing but that was a long, long time ago and she's done plenty since then. I have tunes from her shortlisted both for my Songs About Drugs post and my next Covers post so you may as well get used to her now.

Yellow Cat(Slash)Red Cat - Say Anything

Winding down time. Absent a banging finish, I'm going for the big emotional ending and what better for that than some mid-west emo? To be strictly accurate, most descriptions call Say Anything pop-punk but if it fights like a cat...

Also, any song that has a verse that begins "I watch my neighbor's son/Play with his shotgun in the street" has pretty much labeled itself right there.

The Summer Ends - Blondshell (American Football cover)

And here we are, right back where we began. What a wild ride it's been, eh? Or maybe not.

Whatever, this is just gorgeous. I'm getting to be very fond of American Football and I can't think of anyone I'd rather hear cover them than Blondshell.

Nearly all of those were songs I did actually listen to in the last week so maybe that's it for the backlog. 

Probably for the best.
 

Fleeting First Impressions Of The First Descendant

This morning I successfully logged into The First Descendant via GeForceNow, using a clever trick I discovered: it's called patience. It turns out there isn't any actual problem with the game per se - I'd been giving up too quickly. It takes frickin' forever to load.

Or it does the first time, anyway. I took a second run at it this afternoon and it wasn't nearly so bad. Still took ages but I only had time to tab out and read a couple of items on my news feeds before the game was ready. The first time, I could have taken Beryl for a walk round the block and made myself a coffee when I got back and I still wouldn't have been in.

Was it worth it? Hmmm....

I mean, I've clocked up a little over two hours. I did go back for a second session. I am probably going to play again. So... Maybe?

Let's go through what happened. I'm not even going to call this a First Impressions post. It's more like Fleeting Impressions. Which is a good idea for a new category, now I come to think of it.

The whole thing starts, as these things usually do, with a cut-scene or a video, whichever you prefer to call it. It was slick enough but it felt like whoever wrote the script was really phoning it in. I'm used to these things not making much sense but this was just gibberish.

Also very thin on detail. I'm used to being overwhelmed by tidal waves of lore coming at me from the start, often in the form of some deeply portentous narration that tells me far more about the setting than I have any need to know at that point. I'm not used to getting to the end and finding myself thinking "I could have done with a bit more context there."

Since it's come up, let's talk about the plot. It's nonsense, even by the astonishingly low standard of F2P video games. Earth got overrun by - I don't know... Aliens? Demons? Something nasty, anyway. They came from... no, I don't know that, either. Somewhere bad, I guess. 

Wherever they came from, we fought them and lost. And by "We" I mean Earth which, as always, immediately turned into a single, unified military-political entity in the face of existential threat because that's what would happen, right? 

Then another existential threat, bigger than the last one, arrived and kicked both our asses (That's us and the original bad guys.) or at least I think it was both but maybe the new bad guys were on the old bad guys' side...

Oh, who frickin' cares? None of it matters. None of it will have any consequences. It's there because it's expected and that's all.

It doesn't make any more sense when you get into the game proper either but no-one is playing this thing for the story. In my case, it didn't help that the Tutorial has noticeable narrative similarities to parts of the Black Shores storyline that I'm the middle of in Wuthering Waves, and when I say similarities I mean similar in the way your four year-old niece's fairy cycle is similar to a Harley Davidson Electra Glide.

Let's forget about the storyline. Nexon clearly did. What works a lot better is the voice acting and dialog. Not that anyone says anything that makes any sense there either but they say it with more conviction than it deserves and they say a lot of it, too. There's endless chuntering in the background, even during missions, as the various NPCs talk amongst themselves. It makes the place feel lived-in, if nothing else.

Did I skip Character Creation? No, not really. You don't get to make your own character. It's pick one from a list. A short list. There's a choice of three. There's a blonde woman, a guy who looks like he used to be in a boy band before he was drafted and some musclebound giant in an suit of armor that looks like one of Tony Stark's rejects.

Guess who I picked. Yes, obviously. I did at least look at what they all could do before I made a decision but even though the pretty boy had the abilities I liked most, I still went for the girl.

She has a name. They all have names. I've spent two hours playing her, though, and I can't remember what it is. I know it begins with a "V". Wait! Is it Viessa? I think it might be. Let me check... Yes! I remembered! She must have made more of an impression than I thought.

Viessa has cold powers. She can freeze things. I know she can because it says so in the mouseover descriptions on her skill bar. I certainly didn't know it from anything she did in the many, many fights she won for me. 

A lot of the time the icons had padlocks on them to show they weren't available but even when they were unlocked and I pressed the right keys, I couldn't tell what they were doing. Except for the "Q" key. That one fired missiles. I used it whenever it was off cooldown. I couldn't see anything freezy about the results, though. It just seemed to blow things up.

Mostly I stuck with the gun. Or the guns, I should say. She carries three because in games like this everyone lugs around a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic and a shotgun. It would be irresponsible not to.

In fact, by the time I stopped, Viessa had well over a dozen guns on her. Somewhere. I have no clue where she got them all let alone how she could walk while carrying them. I imagine they dropped off mobs I killed and I picked them up by running over them. That seems to be the preferred method of acquisition here.

And I like it. Saves time. Most of the mobs spew out power-ups - red for health, blue for "MP",which I assume doesn't stand for Mana Points, green for... not sure what green is. Ammo, maybe? 

Ammo is color-coded. It comes in green, amber and purple, which I think tells you what kind it is not what quality. Honestly, I'm going to have to go read an out-of-game guide if I carry on playing because there's just waaaay too much information coming at me in the game itself. 

The First Descendant is very clearly a game for people who like a lot of details. The kind who take notes and fill out spreadsheets. For fun. It would be intimidating if the game wasn't so darn easy.

It was the promise of unchallenging content in Tyler's review that attracted me to the game in the first place and so far I have not been disappointed. I managed not only to finish the Tutorial but the first sequence of missions as well. I think I leveled up at least three times and I opened the second mission area.

It was fun. The environments are visually appealing, for a war zone. Movement is fast and fluid. There's double jump and a grappling iron and you can climb. I bet there are gliders later.

At starter level, mobs seem to have the armor class of a wet paper bag and the hit points of a sickly gnat. Most die in one or two shots but nothing survives a volley. The main way they manage to inflict damage is by sniping or coming at you by the dozen, often in a conga line that means if you line them up just so,  you can watch them explode, one after another, like a string of fireworks.

Since they also drop heals all you need to do is run over them to refill your hit points, I found it next to impossible to go much below 90% health until I hit a bunch of mobs that didn't drop anything at all. That was the only time I died, mostly because I didn't notice it was happening until my screen went red around the edges.

It didn't matter because you get five attempts at a mission before it fails so I just respawned about ten yards away and carried on. I would have assumed this was purely for the newbie zones, to get you into the swing of things, had Tyler not strongly suggested the whole game is that way.

It suits me fine. I am not one of those people who gets bored quickly when things are too easy. More the reverse, really. There does come a point when I start to wonder what the point is but usually not until I start running out of interesting things to see or do.

That kind of attitude does mean I ought to avoid grouping with other players who'd rather take it all more seriously. TFD is a multiplayer game, if you want it to be. The tutorial tells you it's possible to set your missions to be either Private or Public but although I spotted that option, I missed how to set it, so my first time out I ended up in a group.

No-one said anything of course. Everyone just ran around on their own, barely in sight of each other. It was the first mission, after all. Most likely no-one had a clue what to do. My first session ended when I decided I'd better quit before I did something that would get me yelled at.

Next time, I made sure to set the mission as Private, which meant I could take it at my own pace and explore a bit. Not that there's all that much to see. The zones are more functional than scenic. Still, while it's new, it's interesting enough.

Performance on the laptop via GeForceNow's servers was excellent in private instances but the first time I zoned into the hub zone, where all the facilities are and where everyone hangs out, it turned into a slide-show. I could barely move and opening windows from the UI was hit or miss at best. 

I did manage to get Options open and as I expected the GeForceNow default for graphics was Very High. Once I'd changed that to Medium everything was absolutely fine again and the game looked almost as good, too. I see there are a lot of Optimization guides for playing the game on PC, most of which seem to recommend turning things off or down, so I'm quite happy to leave everything on Medium, at least for now.

When I was able to move again I went to the post-robot to check my mail. I had plenty. Even though I only started today, my mailbox was full of rewards for participating in various betas and events I'd obviously never done. I even got something for reaching Level 20, which was a surprise since I was Level 2 at the time.

I'm guessing this is an artifact of the GeF orceNow process but who knows. Tyler did say they were handing out a lot of freebies although I think he was talking abut the Winter event that's still running. I got stuff for that, too.

There was quite a bit of in-game cash in my mail, too. I looked in the shop to see what I could buy with it. I saw a good few things I fancied but I managed to stop myself buying any of them just yet. I think I need to do a bit of research first.

Which does suggest I'm thinking of playing some more. I'd at least like to get the dog. And maybe a few cosmetics.

That's how they get you, isn't it?

GeForce Now And Then

When I said in yesterday's post "I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly.", I knew I was taking a big risk. I ought to have done my due diligence and at least checked Nvidia's cloud gaming service would run on my new laptop.

Well, now I have - and it does. It does not, however, "work perfectly". I've tried two games so far and if GeForce Now was baseball I'd be batting 0.500. Actually, it would have been a strike and a home run. (Help! I'm on an analogy and I don't know how to get off!)

Shorn of the the sporting metaphors, I got one game to run without any issues whatsoever but the other one wouldn't run at all. The good news is that the game that did work is one of my favorites. The bad news is that the one that didn't was the one I wanted to try.

First, though, a little bit about GeForce Now itself. It's been a while since I last used it. A couple of years ago, I was playing New World in the cloud because playing it locally was threatening to set my PC on fire but then two things happened: 

1. I bought a really good graphics card that could run New World comfortably.
   
2. I pretty much lost interest in playing New World, comfortably or otherwise.

That was in the summer of '23. Back then the free version of GeForce Now limited you to an hour per session and put you in a queue each time the hour ran out. You could play any game that GeForce had on their servers and that you owned. Of course, you had to prove you did, in fact, own the game, which meant syncing it with wherever you'd bought it.

In the autumn of '21, when I first engaged with GeForce Now, I had a heck of a job getting it to link up with my Steam account which, as I remember it, was the only option then available for proving ownership, apart, presumably, from buying it direct. Or maybe it was the only one I was interested in at the time. I really can't remember.

Now, there are several ways to tell GeForce Now you own a game. You can link to your Steam account but also to Ubisoft, Epic, XBox and Battlenet.

That's quite a selection. I have all of them, although I only really use Steam. I might branch out now I know I can play on Nvidia's servers, though.

For this experiment, I stuck with Steam, having completely forgotten the problems it gave me last time. Luckily for me, either I did all the set-up then or the information required has been trimed because it took just a few clicks and some confirmatory emails and it was all done.

I didn't have a particular title in mind so I took a look through the list. It was good to see Fortnite featured in numerous flavors because only a few days ago I uninstalled it to make some space. Now if I ever want to log in to watch a metaverse event I won't need to download the damn thing again.

There were several obvious possibilities, not least New World, but it was one of the "free" titles that caught my eye. Only a couple of days ago I read a piece by Tyler FM Edwards at MOP, where he described The First Descendant as a game "with very little genuinely challenging content". That sounded right up my street so I thought I'd start there.

Even though it was free, I still had to add it to my Steam Library before GeForce Now was happy. That lit up the Play button and I pressed it.

Other than the enhanced range of partners, about the only noticeable difference to the process is that now you get adverts while you sit in the queue. And if you skip them it sends you back to the start of the line. 

That sounds much worse than it is for a couple of reasons:

1. Watching ads beats staring at counter, which is all you used to get.
2. You can both mute the ads and tab out and do something else while they run without losing your place in the queue, so you don't need to see or hear them at all. 

There were only fourteen people ahead of me anyway, the perks of playing mid-week during work and school hours. There was barely time for an ad to run before I got in. 

Or rather didn't get in...

It would be nice now to go into a few First Impressions paragraphs, where I either confirm or refute Tyler's opinion. Unfortunately, the game repeatedly hung at login, offering me nothing but a black screen and the blue, spinning ouroboros that's replaced the good old hourglass. 

In the end I had to exit GeForce Now by right-clicking the icon in the toolbar, there being no option to quit on the screen itself. A form popped up asking me to rate my experience from one star to five. I gave it one but only because I couldn't give it zero.

Not a great start. I might have stopped there had I not also noticed, as I was checking the roster of available games, that one of them was Wuthering Waves.

This piqued my curiosity. I currently play WW directly through publisher Kuro Games' portal . I wasn't aware it was available on any other platform so I wasn't sure how it would work in the cloud. 

I guessed that if I tried to play the game on GeforceNow, I'd be starting over as a new player. I didn't want to do that but I did want to see how it worked and also if the spinning PoV issue would recur so I clicked the button to say I owned it just to see what would happen.

To my considerable surprise I was offered a couple of options, one of which was the Epic Store, where I'd completely forgotten the game was also available. Much more exciting for me, there was also a link to the Kuro Games version. I couldn't believe it would take me to my existing account but that's just what it did.

In fact, it took me straight to the exact same login process I've been using ever since I started playing. It let me log in using Google, select my existing character and server and pick up playing from where I left off - except now I was somehow doing it on GeforceNow's servers in The Netherlands.

Honestly, it felt like magic. There I was, sitting all warm and cosy in an armchair in front of the gas fire, playing my familiar character just as though I was at my desktop, only in a great deal more comfort. 

Gameplay felt as smooth as it ever does. I had maybe ten seconds of lag in an hour but I often get more than that on a direct connection.

I worked my way through another full chapter of The Black Shores (Great story. Makes no sense but the feels are off the charts...) before I had to stop for lunch. There was no sign of the mysterious spinning problem. That's clearly down to Splashtop but now I don't need to think about how to fix it.

I mark my laptop trials of both Luna and GeForce Now resounding successes. There are all kinds of advantages to playing this way, not just the top-line benefit of turning a middling business laptop into a high-powered gaming machine but also in the savings in disk space and time sent keeping the games up to date. Let someone else handle all those huge downloads for once!

I might even push some of my gaming to the cloud when I'm back on the desktop. I'm struggling for disk space there and it might make sense to play new games remotely where possible, rather than try to free up space to download them.

Either way, the technology has clearly improved and it looks like remote gaming is here to stay. Now, if I can just get The First Descendant to join the party...