Thirteen Songs for Friday 13th Pt. 2

I was scanning down the list of posts this morning, looking as I sometimes do for any kind of pattern in the viewing figures, when I noticed a draft I didn't recognize. When I opened it up to see what was inside there was nothing but two YouTube links. Obviously I clicked on them to see what they were.

Songs. Nothing but a couple of songs. Obviously ones I'd considered including in a music post. Only I never do it that way. For a long time now, all I've been doing is tagging possible post fodder as "Favorites" in Firefox then, when the time comes, looking through what I've got to pick out a few I haven't used already. It's messy, chaotic and highly inefficient. Suits me perfectly.

It also means that mostly, when I post another episode in my extremely unpopular "What I've been Listening To Lately" series, there aren't all that many songs in there that I have been listening to lately. 

I mean, it's not like there aren't any. There's always a sprinkling. I listened to White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter a dozen times before I posted it. But then, I would, wouldn't I? 

Also, as an aside, I just brought it up on YouTube to play in the background as I wrote this and it took me three search terms to find it. Lana+white didn't work and neither did Lana+feather, although the first finds other songs in her extensive catalog - White Mustang, White Dress - and the other gets you that duet with Billie Eilish she did on Billie's Birds of a Feather. 

I had to go all the way to Lana del Rey+hawk before her current single came up. Does that sound right to anyone? I mean, the damn video has 4.2m views. You'd think the algorithm would be smarter about it. If I was Lana's publicist, I'd be pissed.

Anyhoo, I was only looking at the view-count out of curiosity. I stopped worrying about how many people read anything here years ago. Most counts are contradictory anyway. I don't trust any of them. 

Except, lately, I've noticed the figures down the right-hand side of the list of posts does seem to make a kind of sense. Tells a story, even. That's the one labeled "View Count" on mouseover and it does actually seem to mean something, for once.

I can see the page views trickling in there as soon as I publish. Usually a few people catch the post immediately and then the tally rises slowly over the next day or so until it hits about a third to a half of the number of people Feedly tells me follow the blog. 

From that, I can see fairly clearly which kinds of posts get more attention. Music posts are right at the bottom of the list. Maybe a fifth of my supposedly loyal audience takes a glance at those. TV and media posts, it depends on the subject matter. Gaming posts get pretty consistent views, with the popular games getting the most, as you'd imagine.

The biggest winners seem to be topical posts, especially ones with titles that make it clear what they're about, although people do seem to find those even if the titles I give them skew a little sideways. For example, the most-viewed posts this year so far were on the Steam Winter Sale, Discord asking for proof of age and layoffs at Playable Worlds, in that order. 

It's all notional, of course. Even if I was certain what the numbers meant and even if I trusted them, I still wouldn't tailor my posts to make them go up. Although I do like to see numbers go up...

I only mention it as an introduction to how this came to be a music post in the first place. Oh yes! That's what it is! Did I fool you? Have you gotten all the way to here without realizing you'd been suckered?

Yeah, that won't work. Readers can smell a music post a mile away, no matter how I try to hide it. So, for the handful of you still here, let's get to it! First up, those two mysterious tunes I saved in a draft post several weeks back.  

Bad Bad Milk - Oh! Gunquit

Where that one came from I have no idea. Fourteen years old so I guess it turned up in the sidebar suggestions when I was looking at something else. The self-described "'rumble-bop trash blitz freak-a-billy'" five-piece was formed in 2011 and they’re still going. There's a whole sub-culture of this kind of thing. It never penetrates the mainstream but it's always there. Been around since I was at college, at least, so that's half a century. Must be a fun lifestyle.

Go Away - Junky58%

The answer to the eternal question "What if the Ramones had been Japanese? And girls?" Ok, that's two questions...

Yes, I know exactly what you're thinking. It's "How great would it be if they covered the Carpenters' "Top of the World", isn't it? Thought so. Well, ponder no longer!

Ok. That's those two squared away, plus a bonus cover. Now what have I got marked for real? Oh, I know! How about the UK's entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest?

Eins, Zwei, Drei - LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

Remember post-modernism? Big in the 'nineties? Looked a lot like the future, then. That's the trouble with the future, though. Hang around too long and you have to live in it.

On that note, we'll have to wait until May to find out how it does but you can place your bets now. Here's a compilation of all 35 entries boiled down to just over seventeen minutes of power ballads, flag-waving, and forced wackiness. Should be a fun four hours...

Time - Star Moles

Speaking of time...

Got a lovely roll to it, don't it? Sounds like something Johnny Walker might have played on his afternoon show in the 'seventies, back when I was still at school. Is that a good thing?

Genuine Connection - Swell

Because sometimes you just wanna rock.

 if you wanna party come over to my house- Fcuckers

And othertimes you just wanna dance.

Arms Wide - sadie

Hey! We  had that one last time! 

Yeah, like you remember...

No but it's true. I put it in and wrote eight paragraphs off the back of it and then when I was done I thought "I'd better just check...". Probably should have done that first. Anyway, not wasting all those words so it's a second go for sadie! I think that might be the first time that's happened. 

Also, wow, was it really a whole month ago I did one of these? To the day, no less. And two Friday the Thirteenths in a row, too. Spooky!

Until about a year ago, if you'd asked me (Which, why would you?), I'd have said pop songs were three minutes long. They're not, though, are they? They never have been.

I was thinking about it yesterday, when Mrs Bhagpuss was getting ready to take Beryl to work. (Beryl has a job, by the way. It's only an hour every other week but she gets paid. I won't go into details. Confidentiality and all that.)

Anyway, as she was getting ready, she was had The Weakest Link on (Mrs Bhagpuss, that is, not Beryl. Beryl doesn't really watch TV although it's HD, which apparently dogs can see and recognize, which they couldn't with any earlier definition.). It was a celebrity edition and Pink Pantheress was on, which was bizarre to say the least of it. She did really well, too. Last to be eliminated before the final head-to-head.

Anyway, Mrs Bhagpuss had no idea who Pink Pantheress was, which tells you something about market separation. I'd have said she was kind of a big deal now but everyone's a big deal these days and still no-one's heard of them. (Tell Chappel Roan that and see what it gets you... then again, Mrs Bhagpuss knows exactly who Chapell Roan is so maybe we're on a different scale of fame there...)

Getting back to the point, one of the things Pink Pantheress was famous for fifteen minutes for was saying no song needs to be longer than two minutes thirty. When I was making all those songs with Suno last year, a lot of of them were well under three minutes long. I worried about it a bit until I started to notice so were many of the songs I grew up listening to on the radio.

See Emily Play? 2.47. Happy Jack? 2.07. I Get Around? Two minutes dead, when they did it for Ed Sullivan; a few seconds longer on record. Sure, songs - even some singles - got a lot longer in the proggy seventies but mostly they held that line. 

Later, as I made more and more songs artificially, they got longer and longer. And they still sounded great to me. Short? Long? Doesn't matter, does it? Songs are the length they need to be. Well, the good ones.

Oh, yeah. That all started because Arms Wide starts and ends in media res for a running time of 2.10 and it's perfect that way. Also, I freakin' love autotune! Why do people hate on it?

So, what else do we got? Let me check my laptop a mo... Oh, wow... there's some really good stuff on there... I should have started with a couple of these. 

Never mind! It'll be a bonus for the hardcore. Anyone still here?

Thisworldly - R. Missing

Best one from R. in a while. She knocks them out and they're all quality but this is a dreamer. That stately pace. That ethereal tone. Very, very 'eighties, in the best way. 

Bad Moons - American Football

Remember what I was saying up there about songs being the length they need to be? Case in point.

Is it just me or does it sound like the Smiths? Did Morrissey invent emo? God, I hope not...

Okay, three more then this can be Thirteen Songs for Friday 13th Pt. 2 and it'll seem like I planned it!

American Girls - Harry Styles

Hah! Who had Eurovision and Harry Styles on their Bhagpuss Bingo Card today? No-one? 

Classic title, good tune, clever video. What more do you want?

 The Way It Goes - Aimée Fatale

Remind me - what year is it again? She's playing in the next city over from me in April but if I didn't make the effort for Sunday (1994) I don't suppose I will for Aimée, either. God, I'm so old now! (Not to mention lazy.)

And finally. A banger to finish.

HEELS BROKE = DIED - MGNA CRRRTA

Oh yeah, that one was NSFW just a little. Maybe could have mentioned that. Only the words, though, and who listens to those?

 

Getting Into The Zone

Remember when I said that if I ran out of things to write about, I might start an irregular series on The Zones of EverQuest II? It's time to make good on that threat  promise! The question is... where to begin?

First of all, how many zones are there in the game now? Yeah, like that's an easy question to answer. I suppose I could go round the game and count them. Maybe we could meet back here in a few months?

Or I could look at the wiki. They have lists by various definitions there - level, tier, update and more - and none of them is either complete or up-to-date. The wiki, once transcendent, is fading slowly away.

Still, it's a start. I count 68 outdoor zones on the "By Level" list, which doesn't include the last two expansions so let's say about 75ish. That's way, way more than I'm ever going to cover even if I run this series for the life of the blog. But it isn't even all the outdoor zones, not really.

That count collates the Freeport and Qeynos starting zones into two bundles for a start. And it doesn't include any of the open dungeons, which I'd say count as "zones" rather than "instances", even if they aren't always outdoors. Although some of them are outdoors anyway.

Those are listed separately on the wiki as "Shared Dungeons" and there are 34 of them, a count that stops at the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion, which came out a decade ago. I know shared dungeons have been out of fashion for a while but I'm pretty sure we've seen a couple of new ones since then.

Just sticking to open and shared zones and avoiding any mention of solo, duo, single-group or raid instances then, and the count is already over a hundred. Except that for most of the life of the game the bulk of content has been instanced. 

I'm not about to start counting all of those but maybe one of our friendly AIs could do it for me. That's exactly the kind of thing they're meant to be good at, isn't it? 

I asked Google "How many zones are there in EQII in 2026?" and the AI Overview, which I assume is powered by Gemini, replied instantly

"Based on information leading up to early 2026, EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, with some estimates in previous years exceeding 900, including overland areas, dungeons, and instances."

Previous years? Just how previous? And even at that Gemini wasn't convinced, covering its imaginary backside with the caveat 

"For the most precise number, players typically rely on community-maintained wikis like eq2.fandom.com to track specific zone counts across the numerous expansions."

Well, shoot! That takes me right back to where I started, doesn't it? If I wanted to check the wiki I could have done it myself. I did do it myself! And these things are going to take all our jobs? Something, something, keep a dog, something, something, bark yourself...

How about Co-Pilot, then? Certain bloggers I follow claim Microsoft's AI is better than the rest. Let's give it a chance to prove it. Same question:

"Short answer: EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, and by 2026 the total sits at roughly 867 zones, based on the most complete public listings available. This number comes from the major zone index used by the EQ2 community and continues to grow with each expansion and event update."

Okay, that's a lot more specific. I'll let that fatuous "roughly" slide. It's just trying to pass for human, I guess. A lot of people would give a highly specific number like that and then claim it was approximate. You literally cannot have "roughly" 867 of anything unless you can also count that thing in fractions of a unit, which certainly doesn't apply to zones of Norrath, either before or after the Shattering.

And now here's a twist. I'd finished the post, added the pictures and was about to do the final edit when I noticed Blogger was idling and not updating. The Preview Panel was working normally, showing the complete post with pictures but there were no screenshots in the edit. 

If Blogger fails to update to its cloud servers, it always gives an error message and there hadn't been one so I figured something was glitched locally. I closed the Preview and the Edit and guess what? When I reloaded I'd lost the second half of the post. Everything above the last screenshot was here. Everything below was gone.

Usually I keep a copy of the text outside of Blogger but nothing like this has happened for several years so I'd gotten slack. My bad. Still, it was a pretty short post. I could remember most of it. Just needed to bash the second half out again. 

Only I'd also closed the AI result tabs and apparently Co-Pilot, unlike Gemini, doesn't automatically keep a record of the ongoing conversation, not if you aren't logged in, anyway. I just ran the query in Firefox anonymously and it was as gone as the rest of the post.

Never mind. Easy enough to ask the same question again. I have the exact wording there in the text that didn't vanish. Just need to run it past Co-Pilot again and... get a different answer.

"Short answer: There’s no authoritative public source that states the total number of EverQuest II zones as of 2026. The game has hundreds of zones accumulated over two decades, but no official 2026 count exists. The closest reliable figure comes from large fan-maintained databases."

Hmm. Look at that. The whole very specific, not rough at all, "867" is gone, replaced by the much more wooly "hundreds of zones". And there's a plain statement that "no official count exists".

So where did the 867 come from? Co-Pilot is only to keen to explain:

🧭 What We Can Say with Evidence

📌 1. The largest maintained zone list shows 867 zones

The Fanbyte/ZAM EverQuest II database lists 867 zone entries in its public index. This is the most complete zone list available, though it is not guaranteed to be exhaustive or fully up to date for 2026.

For some reason, Co-Pilot thinks ZAM is the resource most EQII players use. I'm certain that's not true. The ZAM EQII zone database , linked in Co-Pilot's reply, ceased updating with the Age of Discovery expansion, which came out in 2011. No regular EQII player is going there for anything after that.

That "867" number is the count that appears on the first page of ZAM's thirty-five page list of zones, where it warns you you're "Viewing 1 to 25 of 867 entries. You may want to add some filters.". A quick flip through the pages shows quite a few of those "zones" aren't adventure areas at all. The list includes Housing and the Dungeon Maker for a start.

Co-Pilot is happy to build on that shaky foundation all the same:

📘 Best Estimate

If we combine:

• 867 zones listed in the major database (pre‑2026)

• Dozens of new 2024–2026 zones from expansions and updates (e.g., Rage of Cthurath and 2026 map additions)

…it’s reasonable to estimate that EQII has well over 900 zones by 2026, though no source confirms an exact number.

Yes, I guess it is reasonable to assume that, especially given there have been fourteen expansions since ZAM last added any new zones to their database. Not to mention at least twice as many biannual Game Updates.

 

It is interesting that both Gemini and Co-Pilot come up with the same estimate of something over 900 zones, although neither really makes a convincing case for it. Still, it's probably about right. And even if it's not, I sure as heck don't plan on counting them, so I suppose it'll have to do.

 

This wasn't intended to be another post about how flaky AIs can be, even after all the supposed improvements and Great Leaps Forward, but it's always useful to remind ourselves just how unreliable they still are. I do sometimes get sucked into believing the AI summary at the top of the results although never for anything that isn't totally trivial. Convenience trumps caution, occasionally.

 

Then again, as this seems to demonstrate, even the trivial is well beyond the AIs. In fact, the more trivial the topic, the worse the information. The problem with the question I posed isn't so much that the AI's can't answer it; it's that it can't be answered. And since AIs don't like to admit when they don't know something...

 

Someone must know, of course. It's not ineffable. I imagine Darkpaw know how many zones there are. Maybe some players do, too. I bet there's someone out there who still keeps a ring-binder file with every map printed out. And speaking of maps, I guess someone at EQ2Map might have a pretty good idea.

 

Whoever does know, they're keeping it to themselves but it doesn't matter much anyway. It's not like I was going to write a post about every last one. I'm not going to live long enough to do that, even I was crazed enough to try.

 

What I'll most likely do is cherry-pick my favorites and the ones I have something to say about. If I get through a couple of dozen I'll be surprised. In fact, since I'm only likely to post at all if I have absolutely nothing better to write about, I guess the fewer I get through, the better.

 

Not to mention so far I've managed two posts about the feature without ever saying a word about any of the actual zones! I wonder how long I could keep that going?

 

I'll try to close that worrisome possibility down by saying here and now that the first post in the as-yet unnamed feature will either be Antonica or The Commonlands. I did think of starting with the old neighborhoods and city-based starting areas or the two major cities, Qeynos and Freeport, themselves but if I went with that idea, I might never get out of the cities at all. 

 

In fact, now I think about it, when I first thought of this project, if I'm going to glorify it with the name, I was in Antonica. So that's where I'm going to begin.

 

When? That's entirely another question. 

Drug Of The Nation? I Wish...

I let slip a while ago that I'd finally gotten around to watching the first season of Arcane, the animated series commissioned by Riot Games and supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, League of Legends. Everyone else, of course, watched the show years ago. The first season came out in late 2021 and the second and final season, which I have just finished watching, premiered three years later. Talk about being late to the party...

Why did I wait so long? It's not like I wasn't aware of it or how good it was reported to  be. The show has stellar reviews. It won a shed-load of prestigious awards. I remember a bunch of bloggers raving about it when it was new and my close friend, who has very good taste in TV and movies, tried to get to me watch it ages ago. 

It was the League of Legends connection that put me off. I've never played the game and never wanted to, which makes for an educative data point alongside Cyberpunk 2077, a game I've also never played but have frequently considered buying. There's an animated series based on that one, too, Edgerunners, and I didn't have any interest in that either, at least not until I found out Rosa Walton of Lets Eat Grandma had done the theme song.

Apparently, the presence of a gaming IP, even one I approve of, can actively deter me from watching a TV show. For corroborative evidence I offer Fallout, another highly-regarded show I have yet to see. This is clearly a personal foible and one I need to address. It's self-evidently preventing me from enjoying some of the very best work in the field.

Having watched Edgerunners I judged it "very, very good". I'm going to have to come up with something a lot more complimentary for Arcane. 

Arcane is possibly the best animated series I've ever seen. If there's a better one, I can't immediately think what might be. I'm sure most people reading this will already have watched it so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of hyperbolic detail about why it's so good. Everyone already knows and if they don't I strongly suggest they stop wasting time like I did and go find out what they've been missing. It's a lot.

The animation is almost literally breathtaking. It did make me draw in breath in surprise or awe a few times. I've spent a lifetime watching animated movies and television shows and I've never seen anything as rich and deep. The level of detail is astonishing but more astonishing still is the extent to which that detail informs the narrative. It's one thing to dress a set, another to reveal a world.

The writing is novelistic. Characters have inner and outer lives that extend beneath, above and beyond the text. There are no ciphers or stereotypes. Even the minor characters have substance.

The plot is labyrinthine, yet always navigable. The story works on multiple levels, from coming of age to family saga to epic myth, and somehow manages to keep all of them balanced throughout. 

Well, almost. The end shows signs of the elision from five seasons to two as Riot decided they'd accrued enough prestige from patronizing the arts and decided to cut their losses as costs spiraled. The fact that the show bears, by all accounts I've read, almost no resemblance to the video game and consequently had little to no impact on that game's profile or profitability, presumably factored strongly in the decision to fold.

Even so, the truncated ending is barely noticeable. The finale leans hard into the cosmic and it works. It might not be immediately comprehensible but it carries.

Who knows what would have happened across five seasons? Would the quality have held up? Maybe it's better it ended when and as it did.

I was certainly satisfied. And satiated. It was a hard watch in the sense that each episode drained me. I could not have watched two in a row without losing something. I'm bitterly aware of how much I missed but the thought of re-watching is overwhelming. In a year or two maybe. 

One thing Arcane did make me want to do was re-watch Edgerunners. I know it won't be an experience on the same level but now I'm wondering how much I might have missed there, too. One watch is never enough for anything, let alone something good.

I haven't gone back to Edgerunners just yet though. What I'm watching, now I have a space in my schedule, is more Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off from 1999, doubling up from one episode a night to two.

I've had the box set on DVD for years and never even opened it. Once again, my main reason, other than sheer inertia, was that I thought I knew what it would be like. I always know. I'm often wrong.

I thought it would be dark, brooding and serious. Angel, as a character in Buffy, never seemed to have much going for him other than moody good looks and some bad-boy attitude, especially when his come-and-go soul went. Even though I knew the first four seasons of his own show also featured Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and even though it's pretty hard to imagine Cordy ever being even remotely serious, that was still the impression I'd somehow acquired.

As, once again, I'm sure most people who come to this blog already know, I was wrong. Or I was for as much of the first season as I've seen so far, fifteen episodes. Maybe it gets darker later. Usually I like to wait until I've seen at least a whole season to comment but in this case I have an ulterior motive.

Before I get to it, let me just say Angel, the show, does not match my expectations at all. Like Buffy (The show, not so much the character.) it's as much a comedy as a thriller. It does hit some dark notes but so far it's orders of magnitude away from the relentlessly grim later seasons of Buffy, the grim, dour, depressing period, after Willow drags Buffy back from heaven. The very seasons that would have been running in tandem with Angel at the time. Who'd have thought Angel would have been the light relief?

Maybe it won't last. Maybe things will turn bleak in the coming seasons. I hope not. I'm enjoying the monster-of-the-week plots and all the mugging and slapstick (Wesley.) and snappy come-backs (Cordelia.). As for David Boreanaz and his perpetually confused look, it's a big improvement over his Heathcliff impression back in the Sunnydale era.

And just as Arcane made me want to re-watch Edgerunners, Angel makes me want to re-watch Buffy. I have the box set of that, too, which is just as well because, unlike Angel, which I'm watching on Amazon Prime Video for free, Buffy isn't streaming on any of my platforms just now.

The advantage of seeing Angel on Prime instead of DVD is convenience. The disadvantage is adverts. Prime, as we know, despite charging a subscription, wants you to pay extra to avoid ads. And here we come to my ulterior motive in talking early about Angel.

Those ads! What the heck are Amazon playing at? 

I don't mean by trying to make us watch them. I get that they're making money coming and going by charging companies to place ads and then charging viewers not to see them but for that ploy to work, wouldn't you think there'd need to be some pattern to it?

There is none! I watched one episode of Angel last week that had an advert before the show had even started, then another less than two minutes later, between the credits and the show itself . Then there were more ads every ten or fifteen minutes until the end. It was incredibly disruptive and annoying. Obviously I didn't watch any of the ads - I tabbed out and turned  the sound off - but just the constant interruption to the narrative was infuriating.

Prior to that, which was an exception, some episodes just opened with a trailer for another Prime show, something that barely counts as advertising at all in my eyes, then maybe popped in one more short ad much later in the program. That was very easy to ignore. Other episodes had the same cadence but with much longer ad breaks, which was more annoying but manageable.

The last three episodes I've watched, however, have had no adverts at all. None. Not even the opening trailer. It's spooky.

Am I'm being lulled into a false sense of security? Has one of my ad blockers, none of which should affect Prime at all, upgraded itself and taken control? Has Amazon not managed to sell any advertising space in these particular episodes?

It's disconcerting. I find myself waiting for the ads to start. I'm not saying I want them to but the suspense when they don't is getting to be altogether too much. At least when Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch the Great Pottery Showdown live on Channel 4, the ads (Which are universally terrible, by the way.) come at the same time in every episode. That's bad enough but it's far worse knowing they could pop up at any time. Or not at all.

I'd love to know if there's a commercial imperative behind the apparent randomness or whether something's just broken. Clearly, Amazon has the capacity both to target ads at specific viewers and also to place them in shows those people are likely to watch. Maybe no-one wants their ads turning up in random episodes of twenty-five year-old shows. Maybe Amazon thinks none of the ads would interest me. Who knows?

I don't but I'd love to. Anyone else getting this kind of sporadic, unpredictable advertising? Or have any theories what my be driving it?

What I'm (Not) Playing...

Now I'm done with Baldur's Gate 3, it's time to get back to where I was before I interrupted myself. So, where was that, exactly?

I bought BG3 on New Year's Day. It was the last in a line of Steam purchases I handily laid out in a post on the same day, saving me the trouble of listing them here. Except that's kind of what I'm going to do anyway.

There's a nice, neat, round dozen titles in the screenshot I used, which for convenience and out of laziness I'll repeat below. Of those twelve games, six haven't even been installed yet, much less played. The untouched half-dozen are:

Dustborn

Spire Horizon Online

Cat Detective Albert Wilde

Brok the Investigator

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain

Sovereign Syndicate

 

I looked at most of them last night, wondering which I ought to play next. My immediate preference was Sovereign Syndicate, (Currently available in a double deal with Esoteric Ebb if you haven't got either.) which I remember from a previous Next Fest as being quite entertaining, but when I saw it was a 10gb download I balked. 

Why was that? I have plenty of drive space. 10gb on Steam generally takes a few minutes at most. I could have made a coffee and come back to an installed game. And yet it seemed like it would be too much trouble. 

I flipped through the rest. Dustborn is 25gb so that was a non-starter Albert Wilde is 13gb. Ditto. I didn't want another MMORPG so Spire Horizon Online was out. (We'll ignore Ashes of Creation for the same and other obvious reasons.) 

Brok was only 2gb and Penny Larceny just 500mb. It was a toss-up between those two until I noticed three of the games were already installed. Can't get a smaller download than no download at all.

Of the three, Steins;Gate I already played (For 38 minutes.) and it bored me rigid so forget that one. If I want to read a book I'll just read a book and a better book than that, too. That left Beyond Two Souls and Road 96. 

As I said in the post linked above, I have literally no idea what Beyond Two Souls is. Nor do I have any clue where I heard about it or why I added it to my Steam library, much less why I installed it. I certainly haven't played it. I don't need Steam giving me a Time Played of 0 minutes to be sure of that. 

Looking it up, something I didn’t bother to do when I wrote the previous post, apparently, I remember now that I came across it when I was reading about Elliot Page (Ellen Page at the time the actor played the lead role in the game.) although why I would have been reading about him in the first place remains a mystery. It's an action-adventure a little over a decade old. Apparently there's a TV series in development. I might wait for that. 

Road 96, though, I could remember. At least I could remember how I heard about it and why I downloaded it. Tyler F. M. Edwards wrote about it on his blog last November and I thought it sounded right up my street. Naturally, having taken possession of the game, I felt no immediate desire to do anything with it, least of all play it, which is how these things usually go with me.

By dint of already being there, ready to play, and not being a completely unknown proposition, last night was Road 96's big chance. I logged in, answered a bunch of the kind of questions they ask you at training seminars, started to watch a cut scene and then Mrs Bhagpuss came in and said tea was ready so I logged out again.

Actually, the game wouldn't let me log out. I had to tab out and kill it from the taskbar, which didn't endear it to me. These days, games that can neither be paused nor closed down at an instant's notice don't make it far up my playlist. Still, I won't let that put me off. Road 96 will get another chance. Just not right now.

Observant readers may have noticed there's one game on the list I haven't mentioned. That's Slay the Spire. I have actually played that one. For exactly an hour.

I bought it because a) several bloggers I follow have raved about it and b) it was super-cheap. Having bought it, I had the bright idea of seeing if it would run on my laptop. In theory, not many games will. 

As I wrote back on January 2, 2025, I bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480 to replace my incredibly ancient laptop. The T480 is about as far from a gaming laptop as you can get. It has integrated graphics and, according to Can You Run It?, can't run pretty much anything I own on Steam.

Except it can. Officially, the T480 can't, for example, run the Esoteric Ebb demo. It doesn't meet the minimum spec. Only, I played the demo very comfortably for over an hour on the laptop with no problems at all. It doesn't meet the min spec for Slay the Spire either but it runs the game perfectly.

The problem with Slay the Spire isn't running it on the laptop, which is the only way I'm likely to play it, last thing at night before I go to sleep, when there's nothing I want to watch on the streams and I'm not in the mood to go looking for new tunes on YouTube, meaning it's already right at the back of the queue. No, the problem with Slay the Spire is that it's a bit dull. 

It is, though, isn't it? I've put in exactly an hour so far and it's just fights. And they aren't very interesting fights. It's not very pretty to look at, there's no plot to speak of and the fights are all the same. I'm guessing it ramps up as you go along but to get far enough to see that happen, it would have make me want to keep playing and if it hasn't managed to do that in an hour, chances are it's never going to manage it. I may come back to it some day but it doesn't seem likely. 

So, after all of that, what am I playing? EverQuest II, of course.

When I said right at the top of the post that it was time to get back to where I was before I got assimilated by BG3, where I was back then was deep in the latest expansion for EQII, Rage of Cthurath. The last time I posted about that was on December 27, right before I started buying new games on Steam with the Steam cards I got for Christmas. 

At the time, I'd just finished the main storyline of the expansion and I was thinking about getting the final level needed to hit the new cap of 135. The Signature Questline itself leaves you stranded less than halfway through 134. Or it did me, anyway.

Since finishing BG3 I've played a couple of sessions of EQII, one of which I spent almost entirely working on side quests, quests started by dropped items and repeatable quests. I think I played for about an hour and a half doing those and I made barely 10% of a level.

Seriously, it was like the bad old days! It felt like grinding xp in Ye Olde EverQuest a couple of decades ago. I found myself checking the xp bar after every hand-in to see how far it had moved. 1.2% seemed about the average. And I had a 100% xp bonus potion running!

The conspiracy theory explanation would be that Darkpaw have intentionally made getting to the cap as awkward as possible so as to slow people down and keep the subs rolling in and/or increase sales of xp potions in the Cash Shop. Except that makes no sense because surely most regular players will have an annual subscription, if they didn't buy one of the Lifetime Subs that sold like hot cakes every time they were offered. And everyone has more free xp potions from Veteran Rewards than they know what to do with. 

I suspect it's more likely the current xp drought is a response to the complaints that poured in during the period when the signature questlines gave enough xp to hit the cap before you got halfway through. MMO devs have a long history of slewing back and forth, reacting and overreacting to customer complaints so as to be sure no-one is ever satisfied. This is probably just another example.

It's bloody annoying, whatever the reason. I was really in the mood to play some EQII but a session of that nonsense put the dampers on my enthusiasm pretty quickly. I will get Mordita, my Necromancer, to 135 but now I'm thinking I might wait until the new Game Update arrives in the hope it comes with a bunch of new quests that give decent xp. It's currently in beta so I shouldn't have long to wait.

In the past, that wouldn't have been an option. My Berserker has rarely been able to handle the increased difficulty level of a post-expansion GU right out the gate. The Necro, though... she feels a lot more capable. It's why I wanted to switch to her as expansion lead in the first place.

I haven't even upgraded any of her spells yet and she's strolling through the solo expansion content. If I take some time out to harvest enough rares for my Sage to make Expert upgrades for her key spells, I'd hope the new solo content that's coming ought to be in her range. 

And of course, harvesting rares is very relaxing. And satisfying. I can do it for hours in a kind of zen trance. What with that and decorating her new house, which is what she spent most of my second come-back session doing, I ought to be able to keep myself amused for a while.

It does make me wonder what I bought all those Steam games for...

Is The Bag Half Empty Or Half Full? I think We All Know The Answer To That One...

I was going pull out a Grab Bag today but I used one of the grabs yesterday and made a whole post out of it, so now I only have two left. Two grabs do not a bag make, I fear. Still, I don't have anything else so let's make the best of it. Maybe something will come to me as I go along.

Kickstarter Doesn't Work For MMORPGs

Oh, yeah? Go tell that to Artix Entertainment.

As you may know, Artix is the developer behind the AdventureQuest franchise. I've been playing their most recent MMORPG, AdventureQuest 3D, on and off since open beta back in 2016. 

I still play, on occasion. Steam tells me the last time I logged in was just before the end of January. Yes, this year. 

I will almost certainly play some more AQ3D at some point, most likely when I see they've added something new that interests me. And they will because Artix Entertainment is quite possibly the most pro-active of all MMO studios when it comes to adding new content. They drop new content weekly, without fail, and have been doing so, consistently, for the entirety of their existence, at least as far as I can tell.

That's the kind of behavior that generates loyalty, something that's very clear from the response to the company's new Kickstarter. With 31 days still to run, the project has already racked up over a million dollars in pledges from more than thirteen thousand backers. 

Guess how much they were asking for? 

A dollar. One single buck. Talk about over-achievers!

I guess that's one way to ensure your Kickstarter at least doesn't fail. So, what do they want all that money for, anyway? A new game? 

Not exactly. They already have two successful MMORPGs. They don't need another. What they do need, apparently, is one that will run well and look good on phones, tablets and Steam.

Wait, though... Didn't I just say I played AQ3D on Steam already? I sure did. But the Kickstarter isn't for the newer MMORPG. It's for the older one. The original. The browser-based one you can only play on PC, through the in-house Artix Game Launcher.

The Kickstarter is to convert the entire game, AdventureQuest Worlds, into AdventureQuest:Worlds Infinity, remaking virtually everything and ensuring full cross-play and backwards compatibility with existing accounts. So, why go to all that bother for an old game when you have a new one? 

I guess if you still have 8000 people playing every day, despite the game being ancient and only available through a narrow channel, it might seem worth it. Especially if you can get those people to pay for the conversion. Actually, more than just those people by the look of it.

Here's the thing. Artix has established a reputation that allows them to leverage player trust to an extent matched by few other developers working in the genre. They say what they're going to do and then they do it. They also listen to feedback and act on it when it makes sense to do so. 

As Project: Gorgon proved, if you just keep doing what you said you'd do and avoid ripping anybody off, people will give you money and play your game. And the longer you keep doing it, the longer they'll stick around. It's odd how few developers seem to get that, isn't it? You wouldn't think it would be that hard to understand.

I've never played AQW and I don't plan on pledging the Kickstarter. I'll be adding it to my Steam library when it arrives, though, you can bet on that. And unlike most Kickstarters for MMOs, you can also bet on it really happening. 

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's... Supergirl!

 

Observant users of the Blog Roll off to the right may have noticed a few non-gaming entries creeping in over the years. One such is Supergirl Comic Commentary, a blog by Anj. 

I'm not a huge Supergirl fan like he is but I grew up with Kara, like I grew up with the rest of her family. I read her stories but it was mostly Superman and Superboy that had my attention back when I was in short trousers. (Don't get me started on grown men in shorts or we'll be here all day. It's an abomination, that's all I'm saying..)

I always liked her well enough though, especially when she appeared in my favorite Superhero series of all time, The Legion of Superheroes. Over the decades she's been indifferently served by too many writers and artists to remember, as have most DC superheroes. 

It's the curse of the long-running character. For all the endless droning on about "continuity" and "canon", no-one survives the endless revamps and new directions entirely unscathed. I've learned to tune out the changes I don't like. You have to or you'd go insane, as an hour in the bar of any comic convention will demonstrate all too convincingly.

The Girl of Steel's screen career has been similarly variegated. The 1984 movie featuring Helen Slater was not well-received or reviewed. Worse, it lost money. 

It was thirty years before Supergirl got her own tv series. It began in 2015 and ran for six seasons with Melissa Benoist in the title role. I watched every episode and bought most of the seasons on DVD, so I must have liked it. It wasn't an awful lot like the Supergirl I remember, though.

Nevertheless, it may be the relative success of that show, along with an influential, high-profile limited-run comic, Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, that's led to this year's tent-pole release in the DCMU schedule, the very simply named Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock. And in an attempt to drum up interest and media coverage, DC have gender-swapped this year's Superman Day.

Come on! Don't pretend you never heard of Superman Day! Superman Day is on April 18 as everyone knows. Look, I wrote about it in 2024.  

Only this year it isn't. April 18 is Supergirl Day instead. Not sure why they can't have a day each but there you go. Alright, I do know, really. It's just crass to point out the commerciality.

To be fair, if you scroll down that long, long page of events and special issues I just linked, you'll see it turns into a promo for Superman after a while. He's getting his share and I'm sure he won't begrudge his little cousin taking the lead for one year.

I'm not planing on celebrating the day myself but I might log into DCUO if there any freebies to be had, which I'm sure there will be. I might also pick up a copy of Woman of Tomorrow. We have it at work in the excellent and attractive new DC Compact format, which I highly recommend as a great alternative to the more expensive and generally too glossy graphic novels. 

And I will definitely be watching the movie when it arrives in June. The trailer looks very encouraging. I doubt I'll get to see it at the cinema, though. I'll wait for the DVD. I can shelve it next to the TV series.

Finish With A Song

I mean, it worked for Morecambe and Wise...

Sorry Anyway - Rosa Walton

Rosa Walton is, of course, one half of Lets Eat Grandma. Didn't need to tell you that. Sorry, anyway.

The duo is on a break just now and Rosa's pal, Jenny Hollingworth, has been releasing material under the name Jenny on Holiday, some of which has appeared on this very blog. Big surprise!

They both have solo albums either out or coming soon. Jenny released hers, Quicksand Heart, in January and Rosa's, Tell Me It's A Dream, is out on June 5. 

Expect further examples of both right here.

For Every Dawn, There's A Sunset

 

Here we are on Thursday with the sun shining brightly outside and the buds beginning to pop on the trees. What better time to say goodbye to an old favorite?

Well, an old favorite of mine, anyway. Not, I imagine, of anyone else. 

Who remembers Dawnlands? Hands up... 

No-one? Okay, then.

There are fifteen posts tagged "Dawnlands" here and most of them are all about my time with the game, which ranks sixth in my Steam library by hours played at 105. The last time I wrote about that was on April 29, 2024, when I made a brief visit in the wake of the close-down of another of my favorite games of recent years, Noah's Heart.  

Back then, as I wrote, "I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer." I was right about that, although in the event Dawnlands hung on a while longer than I expected. It's still up as I write this but the servers are due to go down for good on 27 March.

Not that you'd know unless you were paying very close attention indeed. I only found out because I happened to see a passing comment about the closure when I was looking for something entirely different. I didn't get an email or see a news item about it on Steam. There's been no word at all from Seasun Games on the platform since December 2023. I had to go to the official website and hunt around until finally I found this closure notice under the News tab.

There's no mention of the shut-down on the Steam Store page, where you can still download the game. Since it's free to play that's not such a problem as it might be but even so, you'd think they might want to warn potential new players of the extremely short time they'll have to enjoy that new game they just downloaded.

Except, of course, there aren't likely to be any new players. That's why the game is closing down. Lack of interest.

It's not that no-one's playing. Dawnlands isn't a dead game, or at least not for a couple of weeks or so yet. Steam records a fairly consistent population over the last year of between fifty and a hundred players, mostly hovering around eighty. There are plenty of games with a lot fewer people playing than that.

 

Still, it's obviously not a viable population for a commercial product, especially one that relies on micro-transactions to keep it going. Then again, Steam isn't the only way to play. Dawnlands is available on mobile devices via both Android and iOS and there's a stand-alone installer for Windows you can download directly from the publisher.

All of those platforms together must not add up to enough income to keep the servers running, or so I have to assume. It's always possible the company has just lost interest in maintaining it but I imagine if it wasn't costing them money they'd have just let it run silent as they have for the last two years.

All of which raises the question of why Dawnlands ever needed to be a live service game in the first place. As Tyler F. M. Edwards asked in his MassivelyOP piece on the about-to-launch horse mystery MMO Equinox Homecoming, "Why is this a multiplayer live service game?"

Dawnlands doesn't even have the excuse that it's trying to be an MMO. You can play up to four-person co-op or solo. There's absolutely no need for it to be a live service game at all, other than to support the business model. It's cartoon Valheim and Valheim has an offline mode. So could Dawnlands - if it was buy-to-play.

Here's the thing. All of these solo and co-op open-world survival-and-craft games, of which there must by now be hundreds, if not thousands, would work perfectly well, not to say better, as buy-to-play titles. It's perfectly possible to be successful using that model as we've seen with Enshrouded, which fully supports offline play.

It's also possible to retro-fit an offline version onto the business model if the live service route fails, as happened with Nightingale. The conversion was a bit clunky, sure, but it works. But Nightingale was also buy-to-play.

With a free-to-play model, though, there's very little incentive for a developer to offer any kind of local solution. Why would they? You get what you paid for and you paid for nothing which is exactly what you're left with when the servers go down. Seems fair.

All of which is a bit notional, if I'm honest. It makes little difference to me whether the games I play persist or don't any more. I rarely go back and never for long.

Still. the collector in me would love to have a copy of the game stored safely away and the nostalgist would like to be sure he could drop back in whenever he felt like taking another look around the old place. It's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have, as Don Covay used to say, even if by "need" you mean indulge the occasional whim.

 

Realistically, I would never have played the game in any meaningful fashion again even if the servers stayed up until doomsday. I last logged into Dawnlands on 27 September 2025, when all I did was wander about aimlessly for a few minutes, soaking up the ambience, before logging out and forgetting all about it. If the game wasn't about to close down, I certainly wouldn't be here writing about it now.

The same applies to any number of titles. Looking at my Steam library, it's unlikely I'll ever again spend a serious amount of time with any of the dozen most-played games I see there. I do, occasionally, log in to a few - Valheim, Nightingale, Once Human, Bless Unleashed, Rift, New World... but the only ones I might ever spend any significant time with again are the MMORPGs and then only if something new happens there.

MMORPGs do need to be both online and Live Service. They rely on lots of players sharing the same space and they stagnate without a continuing stream of new content. When either or, worse, both of those stop, there probably isn't much of an alternative to closing the whole thing down, at least as far as the official, money-making operation goes. They may live on in an emulated afterlife but in most cases only as museum pieces. 

For MMORPGs there's also no real prospect of any kind of offline port. It would be nice for nostalgia but without a population much of the content would be meaningless.

For most other genres, though, and particularly for single-player or co-op titles, there seems to be no good reason, other than money, why they ever needed an online connection or had to be played on someone else's hardware in the first place. I don't generally have a lot of sympathy with the Stop Killing Games initiative but the evidence against both the Live Service and the Online Connection Required models does seem to be piling up now. It's being applied indiscriminately and it doesn't suit many games at all.

I'm a long-time advocate of the better free-to-play payment models but I'd have to acknowledge that what you gain on the ease of access roundabout you often lose on the long-term stability swings. The F2P revolution has meant I've been able to play far more games than I otherwise would but also that many of them are no longer available to me now.

 

Which begs the question would I have wanted them to be? Would I even ever have played most of them at all? 

For example, had Dawnlands been a buy-to-play title retailing at $30, would I have bought it? Almost certainly not. There are dozens of better games at lower prices on my wishlist and I'm not ponying up for those.

There must be scores of games where I spent many entertaining sessions that I would never have played at all, had I had to pay at the door. It renders the question of how much longer those games would have lasted had they charged an entry fee entirely moot, at least for me.

On balance, I think I prefer to have more new games available at zero cost, even in the knowledge they may only hang around for a year or two. Why pay just for the security of knowing I could play them forever when I know I'd only play for a while and then never think of them again?

More to the point, how many would I buy anyway? Even the really good ones stay on the shelf. I still haven't bought Enshrouded, for example, even though I played and enjoyed the demo and keep reading about what a good game it is and how it's getting better all the time.

I guess the flip to that coin is that I can buy Enshrouded any time I feel flush. And having bought it, I can play it for as long as it interests me. It feels like a very theoretical advantage all the same. That's exactly what happened with Nightingale and am I ever going to play that again? I doubt it.

I don't have a good answer to this one. It seems like there are strong arguments on both sides. I guess the ideal would be for the games to be both free-to-play and offline but that's a pipe dream. No-one's making any money with that.

As for Dawnlands, I'll remember it fondly. I had some good times there. Like some holiday I took years ago, though, if I want to relive the experience I have my screenshots and the posts I wrote about it. I'm happy for it to remain a pleasant memory and I'm glad I had the chance to enjoy it while it lasted.

If anyone else had it in mind to get around to playing some day - tough. You missed your chance. 

A Tale Of Two Demos

Next Fest is over for another few months. The timing was bad for me. I didn't get to play many demos. I did, however, manage to spend some time with two I was very interested in; a couple of games that looked very different on the surface but which turned out to be much more alike than I expected.

The two titles are Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades For Dead Spies. The latter, as I explained in an earlier post, is the follow-up to the much-garlanded Disco Elysium, produced by what's left of the same studio, Za/Um, while the former is merely "inspired" by it. 

So, on the basis of the demos alone, which does a better job of continuing the legacy? The original or the copy?

I won't bury the lede. The copy wins by a mile. 

Both the demos are huge. I put just under an hour into Zero Parades and twice that into Esoteric Ebb. In both cases it felt like I'd barely gotten started. In large part that's because they each require an enormous amount of reading and, in the case of ZP, listening. 

Whether the maps are extensive in the demos I can't say. I barely got past the opening areas of either. I suspect there's plenty more I could explore but in each case I felt I'd seen enough, albeit for very different reasons.

With Esoteric Ebb, I didn't want to carry on much further because it's very likely I'll buy the full game. There was an option at the beginning of the demo for progress made there to be carried over and I took it, but I'm not sure it worked. Since I don't want to have to do all that reading again, I think I'll wait until I have the game installed before I carry on (Although I did install the demo on my laptop so I could carry on playing it in bed last night...)

I could buy the game right now if I wanted, of course. It went on sale yesterday. It's been well-received so far, with a Very Positive rating on Steam and a score of 88 on Metacritic. From what I've seen of the demo, that's well deserved.

 

Esoteric Ebb doesn't look much like Disco Elysium in screenshots or sound like it in the description. It's an RPG with a cartoon aesthetic that's very European. It reminds me of any number of strips in publications like Pilote or Metal Hurlante back in the '80s. 

It's also solidly placed in the fantasy genre, even if the specific stripe of fantasy is "post Arcanepunk", whatever the hell that is. It has magic, spells, levels, classes, all the standard RPG trappings, although if you're expecting a standard RPG, you're going to be very disappointed.

Zero Parades, on the other hand, looks almost exactly like Disco Elysium and takes place in a very similar setting. Possibly in the same world, I'm not sure. If you're expecting a faithful sequel you're going to be, once again, very disappointed. 

I was. I was more than willing to cut Za/Um some slack over the controversies that have dominated all news about the studio for the last couple of years. I haven't really been paying that much attention the details, the rights and wrongs of the whole affair. I was just hoping whoever was still using the name would come up with a worthy successor.

On the evidence of the demo, that's not happening. The whole thing felt like a second-rate imitation to me.

Not the visuals, which are up to the standard of the original and look very much like it. Nor, really, the gameplay, which was fine as far as it went. Superficially, Zero Parades is Disco Elysium 2.

The problems start with the writing. It's not bad by any means but it has that awkward sense of trying just a little too hard to be something it doesn't quite know how to be. 

Disco Elysium was truly, genuinely, effortlessly unhinged. That was its glory. By comparison, Zero Parades reads like a bunch of familiar tropes, layered over with a thin veneer of by-the-numbers weirdness. It's like a student review version of a hit show - earnest, eager and unconvincing.

The very premise gave me trouble. Making the game about spies imparts a totally different spin from Disco's police procedural. In DE, you start out as some kind of burned-out detective, stuck with a much slicker partner, working a dead-end case in a no-hope town. In ZP you're some kind of disgraced super-spy, who's just been woken from cryo-sleep and sent on a mission that's gone wrong even before it's begun.

I can see how these are supposed to be equivalents but they really aren't. One is grim, gritty and bleak. The other is exciting, dramatic and adventurous. Still, the settings are equally down-at-heel and the central character equally adrift from the course they're supposed to be following, so that oughtn't to matter so much.

The reason it does matter is that all the info-dump about the political background, so subtle and complex in Disco Elysium, is here thrust at you in wodges of dull jargon that doesn't give much of an impression of nuance below the surface. What was kept to the background in the earlier game is foregrounded here and I found it off-putting, like having to sit through a series of political lectures when all I wanted was to get on with the plot. Or, indeed, find the plot.

Worse than the uninspired writing, though, are the voice-overs. I talked a little about the truly awful narration the last time I wrote about ZP and it absolutely does not improve on further hearing. None of the other voices are anything like as bad but neither is any of them much good. After about half an hour, I couldn't take any more. I switched the voices off altogether. That is not something I do often or feel I need to.

Mechanically, I did like the demo. The controls feel intuitive, it's easy to spot things you ought to investigate and the character animations are very impressive. The game looks good and plays well. Arguably, better than Disco.

 

The problem was, nothing I was doing seemed all that interesting. Long before I decided I'd had enough I'd stopped caring about the political situation people kept talking about and the constant references to spycraft were no more welcome than they are in any game. I just don't find spies a very interesting bunch of people, I guess. As for the mission, it never got started.

It's possible all of the things I'm complaining about are artifacts of the slow-burn design Za/Um is famous for. Disco Elysium took hours and hours to warm up and didn't really get its hooks into me until about twenty hours in. 

But it had something, right from the start. An edge, a sparkle, a glint. A mystery, just out of sight, that I couldn't ignore. On the evidence of the demo, Zero Parades doesn't have anything like that working for it.

Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, very much does. Even though it opens with that exhausted and exhausting cliche, the main character waking up on a slab in the morgue, it grips from the start. 

Mechanically it's very similar to Zero or Disco. You wander about, looking at stuff or talking to people and every time you open a dialog with a person or an object you're set to spend the next few minutes clicking and reading. Seriously, if you aren't the sort of person who's ecstatic at the thought of starting a five-hundred page novel, you'd be better off looking anywhere else than at any game that claims to be inspired by Disco Elysium.

 

There are two huge differences between Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades, though. Firstly, in EE the text is cynical, satirical, witty and frequently genuinely funny. Secondly, there are more than ample opportunities to make choices and choose responses that feel like they might change something.

There are even dice to roll. Where ZP has some indecipherable process involving mental states and meters, none of which seem to be under your direct control, EE has RPG stats and ability checks. And amazingly it manages to integrate those into the process without detracting from the aesthetic.

Another huge advantage EE has over ZP, especially in a demo, is a clear and comprehensible plot. Well, not so much a plot as the starting point for one. And in that way, it's a lot closer to Disco than Zero. 

Disco Elysium begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate a dead body hanging from a tree. Esoteric Ebb begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate an explosion in a tea shop. From there, everything slides in all directions but at least you know what you're supposed to be doing. 

ZP starts with the mission you've been woken up for being terminated and your orders being changed to "Come back to base immediately". From there on, you're on your own. That theoretically gives you complete freedom to act but it mostly left me feeling confused and directionless. In Esoteric Ebb, I always had a purpose, even if mostly I kept getting distracted from pursuing it.

 

Perhaps the most surprising difference between the two demos is the way each explains the political and cultural background that's so important to them both. ZP either layers it in gnomic jargon, presumably intended to feel deep and meaningful but actually just coming across as obtuse and tedious, or reveals it through stilted, unnatural conversations, some no more enjoyable than sharing a bus ride with a conspiracy theorist.

The NPCs in Esoteric Ebb not only have much sprightlier conversational skills, they have much deeper dialog trees that range widely across a range of topics and still manage to keep most of them interesting and relevant. The dialog is far more naturalistic, too, albeit only by the terms of an RPG. The complex social, cultural, religious and political background bleeds through by osmosis. 

Which isn't to say there's no info-dump. There's plenty but it's handled almost wholly through highlighted key-words on which you can, if you wish, click to get a short explanation or gloss. It's like having an internal wiki for the game. I found it useful and enlightening.

I could go on but there's every chance I will, at some point, buy Esoteric Ebb, at which point I'm sure there will be more posts about it here. I wouldn't rule out buying Zero Parades entirely but given I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to finish the demo, that does seem unlikely.

If anyone else has played either of the demos, especially if they've also played Disco Elysium, I'd be interested to hear other opinions, particularly on Zero Parades. Maybe I'm missing something...