Philosophy Of The Dungeon

Today, I was going to knock out a few reviews of things I've started but haven't (Yet.) finished. Mostly because if I wait until I  have finished them, it might be a very long wait indeed.  

There's Chainsmoker Cat for one. I really want to write about it because it's so peculiar but I seem to have stalled on Episode 4. And I still haven't finished the final season of Beaststars. I wrote about the others so it would be nice to round it all off with my thoughts on the ending, if I'd actually seen it. I should get back to that one.  

Then there's Dr. Who. I'm still plowing my way through the original run. I've done Peter Davison and now I'm onto Colin Baker. I have more to say about the former and plenty to say, already, about the latter. I wish now I'd gone at the whole project in a more considered fashion. I could have done a whole series of posts, reviewing each season as I watched it. (I'm not saying I won't, either...)

But all of that is going to have to wait. I just finished the first book in a series and I'm going to talk about that. In fact, I just finished writing  the post and came back to re-do the introduction. It turns out I had enough to say about it to fill the whole post on its own.  The book in question is Matt Dinneman's   

Dungeon Crawler Carl 

Dungeon Crawler Carl is both the name of the first volume and the entire series and I'm guessing I don't need to explain what it is to anyone reading this. I've already seen more than a few blog posts about it so I'm aware it's out there in the sub-culture. Of course, I'm going to anyway. 

The phenomenon seemed to appear from nowhere, fully formed, like Venus from the waves. I first became aware of it when we took delivery of a consignment of extremely thick, garishly designed hardbacks one morning at work a few months back.

No-one was expecting them. No-one had any idea what they were or why they'd been sent to us. The couple of people responsible for ordering stock had never heard of them and certainly hadn't ordered them. The books arrived in totes from our central warehouse, so they'd obviously be sent to us as part of some head office campaign we hadn't been told about.

The books were very striking. I called the design garish just now but that's not really fair, although it's certainly how they struck most people in the shop at the time. Now I'm more used to seeing them on the shelves, I think I'd call the design "striking" rather than "garish". I quite like it, now the shock's worn off.

When we'd all had a better look at the books, we were even more confused. For a start, there were maybe half a dozen different titles, clearly all part of the same series. It's almost unheard of for multiple entries in any series of novels to arrive all at once and in hardback. That's just not how publishing works. Sometimes, when something blows up suddenly, we'll get all the back catalog in together, as happened with Bridgerton for example, but apart from the latest in the series, everything else will always be in paperback.

That's not to say whole series don't continue exist in hardback after the paperback edition comes out. It's unusual, sure, but there is an unfortunate current vogue for special hardback editions, strongly reminiscent, to me at least, of the dark days of comic-book publishing back in the early 1990s, when all the comics houses, majors and independents alike, ran away with the idea they could sell the same comic-book to the same customer several times if only they put a "variant" cover on it or printed it on different paper stock. 

Mostly the variants come out alongside the regular editions, though, and disappear when they do. Only the key volumes get retrospective specials. 

So far, book publishers seem to be handling the whole thing a little more cautiously than their comic-book cousins did, although I suspect the same lessons will eventually have to be learned, namely that readers are not necessarily collectors and don't always respond well to being treated like they'll throw money at anything with a layer of tinfoil slapped on the front. Or in the case of books, a spray of color down the fore-edge, where no-one outside the bookshop is ever going to see it.

Soapboxing aside, receiving a hundred or so massive hardbacks from a series no-one in the shop knew even existed, by an author no-one had ever heard of, was weird in the extreme. At the start, nearly all of the books ended up being stored on racking out the back because no-one knew what to do with them.

Over the next few weeks it became clear there was some kind of market for the things. A lot of them went on order and such representative samples as found their way onto the open shelves sold too. And when they went, more came in to replace them. Clearly it hadn't been a mistake after all.

At that point I did a bit of research myself to find out what the series was about. I hadn't, until then, heard of the litRPG genre. Neither, as far as I could tell, had anyone else in the shop, although we have several people working there who play tabletop RPGs and we occasionally host D&D games in the store. 

I'd already looked at the books when they came in and worked out for myself that they were some sort of fantasy pastiche based around concepts from gaming but that there was a whole genre devoted to turning gaming concepts into fiction had previously escaped me. 

Well, okay, that's not strictly true. I was well aware it was a thing in manga. We've had a large manga section for many years and I've seen plenty of gaming manga, from Solo Leveling to I Don't Want To Get Hurt So I'll Max Out My Defence (One of my favorite titles along with The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't A Guy At All and That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime, not that I've ever read an issue of any of them.)

But RPG tropes in hardback novels from western writers and publishers? News to me.

Anyway, I was interested in reading one of the series but I wasn't going to pay for the experience. They're very expensive for a start. £22 full price, which is high-end for a novel. Even with my 50% store discount that's way more than I'd ever pay for a speculative read of a weird book that might or might not be worth the investment in time and money.

Also I really dislike hardbacks. They're heavy and awkward and uncomfortable to hold. They look good on a shelf and lie flat on a table but that's about all they have going for them. I'd always take a paperback over a hardback, any day.

If you wait long enough, though, eventually something will always turn up. A couple of weeks ago we had a few free copies of the paperback edition of Dungeon Crawler Carl come in. And they went fast. I was lucky I was there the day the they came in because they were all gone the next.

Which is very interesting, isn't it? This was the book not a person in the shop knew what to do with a few months earlier. Something most people thought was some kind of joke. No-one wanted to read them then. But now everyone knew roughly what they were and people were keen to find out more. Well, some people were... I wouldn't say everyone was won over.

I thought I had a fair idea what to expect by then. I'd done my bit of research and I'd read those few blog posts and heard people talking about the series. I was anticipating an amusing romp in which the kinds of things that had happened to me during my decades playing RPGs were going happen to some fictional characters instead. Recognition humor, basically.

And that's something of what I got but not by any means all. There were plenty of jokes based around familiar scenarios from gaming.  Quite a few of them were even funny. Lots of quirky characters getting into the kinds of scrapes we've all gotten ourselves into in a dungeon and then getting out of them again. All of that.

There was also a lot of very solid dialog, some sharp banter and a scattershot of snappy one-liners. All of which I'd been ready and indeed hoping for. I came in feeling optimistic about the prose style, having read a few pages of the hardbacks at work to get the feel of it. I thought it would be competently-written and professional.

And it was. It is. All of that. What I wasn't expecting was that it would be existentially unsettling to the extent that, having finished the first in the series, I think it's quite unlikely I'll read any more and in some ways I'm sorry I read this one. 

I was not prepared for the almost nihilistic bleakness, which sits very oddly with... well with everything else. When I got to the end and read Matt Dinniman's lengthy postscript, in which he warns that things get much darker as the series goes on, I took that very much as my invitation to leave him to it. The first book in the series was already more than dark enough for my taste.

It's not that there's no lightness. There's plenty of lightness. The lightness is the bit I want to read about. The characters are very well-drawn. Carl and Princess Donut make strong leads. The supporting cast, particularly Zev and Odette, contribute much to the gaiety. There's a perfectly serviceable plot underpinning the hero's journey narrative. It ought to be a fun read. But it's not.

Oh, alright. It is, to an extent. I enjoyed it. But it made me think. Too much. Far too much. And the older I get, the less accepting I am of supposedly popular, escapist entertainment that also wants to make serious points. Pick a lane and stick to it is my take, nowadays. Don't lure me in with candy then clobber me with case histories.

I also don't much welcome negative attitudes from one medium leeching into another and corrupting it. It's not like we all haven't already had these thoughts about the games we play. The term "murder hobo" didn't come from nowhere. I'm sure we've all had those uncomfortable moments, when our party bursts into some room in a dungeon, interrupts a bunch of hobgoblins playing cards or just sitting around warming themselves over a burning halfling, then slaughters the lot of them. That's when we ask ourselves "Are we the baddies?"

Then we shake our heads and deny it. If not, we wouldn't be able to carry on playing. I don't really need someone to yoke that suppressed guilt to an analog of the miltary-industrial complex, splice it with The Truman Show and then feed back to me as a profoundly depressing metaphor for all human existence. I especially don't want to be worrying, every time I play an RPG, if the goblin I'm killing has little ones at home or if the gnoll on the end of the fireball I just hurled is kind to his pet wolf - that I just also set on fire!

Having read and enjoyed Dungeon Crawler Carl on several levels I'm interested in reading more litRPG. I found the whole loot aspect fascinating for a start. I could read page after page of Carl and Princess Donut opening their loot boxes. The stats were fun and I liked the dungeoneering parts, at least when they didn't spiral off into what awful things it turned out the adventurers had really done. I can see the attraction of the genre, providing it doesn't start taking itself seriously.

The world-building is excellent, too. Very well-constructed. Just the right degree of infodrip. You never quite know how anything works but the deeper you go the more you think you do. Until you find out you were wrong. 

I liked that a lot, technically. I just didn't go much on what it was that we got to find out in the end. Great world-building is all very well until you realise the world that's being built is somewhere you really don't want to spend any more time in than you absolutely have to.

So that's my review of Dungeon Crawler Carl. tl:dr - Good but not for me.

They're making a live-action TV series of it. I probably won't be able to resist at least taking a look at that. 

I'm guessing it's not going to be entirely live action. If it is, good luck finding a cat who can play Princess Donut! 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

The two illustrations, one a comic book cover, the other a VHS cassette. Both were produced at NightCafe using two freebies I happened to have for GPT Image 2 low. 

Before I went to NightCafe, I went straight to ChatGPT and used the image generator there to make images from the following prompts:

Princess Donut from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, in the style of a Gold Key comic from the 1960s

Princess Donut and Dungeon Crawler Carl in the style of a Classics Illustrated comic from the 1950s 

A cat wearing a tiara and a cape and a rugged, handsome man in a workshirt and jeans (And no shoes) in dungeon room facing off against goblins, as it would appear on the cover of an American comic-book of the 1960s

All three were brilliant. Superb, in fact. Charming to look at and functionally indistinguishable from the real thing. That was the problem. They were so good, I immediately felt uncomfortable about using them, particularly since they included not only the actual, named characters but also the trademarks of the two comic companies. (ChatGPT made the third one a Gold Key comic as well, even though I hadn't asked it to.)

I asked ChatGPT "So, those images you've just produced for me, which are excellent by the way... what's the legal position on using those on a non-commercial blog, given they feature trademarked characters and use the trademarks of specific comic-book companies." 

It gave me a long and detailed rundown of the implications, all of which tallied with my expectations. Fair use would probably cover me for one or two illustrations featuring the characters, since this is a bona fide review of the book on a non-commercial platform, but the Gold Key and Classics Illustrated logos would be more problematic. 

ChatGPT offered to redo the third picture without the identifying imagery but I'd hit my three free images a day limit so that would have had to have waited until tomorrow. Instead, I took the prompt to NightCafe and used the same model to produce a non-branded cover. 

The exact prompt I used there was "A Persian cat wearing a tiara and a cape and a rugged, handsome man in a workshirt and jeans (And no shoes) in dungeon room facing off against goblins, as it would appear on the cover of an American comic-book of the 1960s" 

I also, for once, remembered to turn prompt magic off so my prompt didn't get "improved".

Then I used my last remaining GPT freebie to make "A Persian cat wearing a tiara and a cape and a rugged, handsome man in a workshirt and jeans (And no shoes) in dungeon room facing off against goblins, as it would appear on the cover of a VHS Cassette from the 1980s." 

Oddly, that came out extremely dark. I had to lighten it up in Paint.net. It also included the logos of MGM and Dolby, both of which I removed at Snapedit, hence the watermark. I considered removing the CCA stamp too, but that seemed like paranoia.

It's clear to me now that the image generation capability of ChatGPT is more than up to any task I'd be likely to give it. I find the results aesthetically pleasing. Delightful, even. If we could get past the ownership issues and settle down to some kind of acceptable, automatic attribution process, in the way YouTube has done for music and video for years, I'd be happy to use these kinds of images regularly. At the moment, though, it's still all a bit too wild west for me.

Also, I've only just realised Carl, or rather his analog, isn't wearing his boxers. I remembered the bare feet but I forgot that part. Interesting that ChatGPT forgot it too.

Stupid Is

Wow! What is this? Four times in a row? I know I say it every time now but it always feels like it's only been a week since the last one and then it turns out it's been twice that .

As it goes, supply might have been a bit thin this time and I might have stretched it to three weeks if I hadn't happened across a link in a piece about 2Hollis at Stereogum by Danielle Chelosky. That took me to a very interesting new-to-me blog called Chasing Sundays, which is now in my Feedly.

Reading a post there got me to check out The Femcels, a band whose name I'd seen plenty of times before without ever bothering to click through. My bad, as no-one says any more. And once I was on YouTube going through their back catalog a whole bunch of intriguing options opened up, thanks to the YouTube algorithm, and suddenly I had a full dance card. 

And that's how you find new music. Well, it's one way. Or you could just go to every club in Brooklyn every night like Jarrett Wolfson...

I guess we ought to start with someone I've already mentioned. 2Hollis is another one of those familiar names I keep skipping past. Not surprisingly, I figured he'd be a rapper of some stripe, which he only sort-of is. Danielle's piece, that I already linked, didn't really tell me anything that suggested otherwise but in something else she wrote about 2Hollis a few days before she talked about "industrial techno" and "EDM-infused pop bombast", which sounded a lot more interesting.

The first of those tunes was Warhorse, which I like a lot but which really reminds me very strongly indeed of something else that I can't quite place, which is always annoying. The other was this one

Sex - 2Hollis

Now that's what I call a title. No messing around, just straight to it. I imagine the video's NSFW but I'd be lying if I said I'd watched it carefully enough to be sure. There's a lot of extremely fast cutting and it's all a bit too bitty for me. 

Nothing bitty about the chorus and the hook, though. If I'd programmed it at the end you'd have "Sex with me" in your head all day. Luckily, I've got plenty more earworms lined up to push it out. See how considerate I am?

 She Seems Kind Of Stupid - The Femcels

Yeah, well, maybe she is but she can't be anywhere near as stupid as me for not catching on to The Femcels faster. First time on the blog and it is not going to be the last, I'll tell you that right now.

This is the finest example of telescoping I've heard for a while. Time just folds when you listen to something like this. There's a lot of people doing other eras like they're copying old masters but not as many magpieing the shiny bits and gluing them together with spit and string. Not enough.

I hear the Shop Assistants and Fuzzbox in there somewhere but really I hear the culture elided. Plus, great video! So cheerful and bright! Makes you happy to hear it and see it. And I'll tell you this, just in case you're one of those who worries; AI will not be making any songs like this any time soon. I mean, I like what I've been doing with the tools and all but I'm not stupid enough to think I'm going to make anything like that. That's organic, that is. All the way down.

Stupid Song - Olivia Rodrigo

And so is this. I thought we'd had the original before but I just checked and we haven't so that's good because look how well it programs! If this was radio I'd be pretty much obligated to run Garbage next. 

I just love the way this builds. She's a genius when it comes to relentlessness. It's such a talent.

Thanks to Robert Smith's imprimatur amongst other things, Mrs Bhagpuss is now sold on Olivia, too. Girl got reach.

 Danceteria - Madonna & Charli xcx

Charli's universally accepted in this house as A Good Thing, too. Madonna, Mrs Bhagpuss keeps claiming not to know much about but she bought Ray of Light when it came out, that I do remember. Ray of Light is a great album.

This one goes everywhere. It's all club beats and name-checks, which is a combo that never stales, you ask me. The nod to Lou's Factory faces takes it to another level, what with Madge's unimpeachable Warhol cred. Charli would have been a shoo-in at the Factory, naturally.

Wannabe - CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso (Spice Girls cover)

Okay, anyone wanna volunteer to unpack this one? If we're talking drop-ins, these guys have it all figured out. 

So, I have never heard of them but I'm going to guess they're Dutch. I'll check in a minute to see if I'm right. Also, how you're supposed to pronounce a name with the number 7 in it I have no clue. 

The reason I think they're Dutch is because not only do they interpolate Focus's freakish yodeling, brilliantly, towards the end there but they preface it with the riff from Golden Earing's Radar Love. Welding one Dutch hit from the 70s onto the Spice Girls' 90s classic could be considered an idiosyncratic indulgence but two is making a statement.

Aaand... they're from Argentina. So much for theorizing. Also, now I check, that's not exactly the riff from Radar Love, either, although it's close. What is it from? It's from something...

 Hello - daine (Martin Solveig and Dragonette cover)

It's been a long time since I did a covers post. Looks like we're going to get a mini-edition in the middle of this, right now. 

Attentive readers and listeners may remember the original of this one cropping up in a previous collection after I heard it on that episode of Ted Lasso where, as I put it at the time, "they do After Hours, only with Coach Beard in the Griffin Dunne role." Anyone seen the third season of Ted Lasso, by the way? Is it any good? I don't have an AppleTV+ subscription any more so I wouldn't know.

I'm listening to the original Dragonette version of Hello as I type this and it's a lot heavier than daine's. Weirder, too. And longer. I wouldn't have thought daine would straighten anything out but she has this.

dreams - the booyah! kids (Fleetwood Mac cover)

I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I like Fleetwood Mac. Alright? Satisfied?

Always really liked this song, too, even if I was far too cool to admit it. And this is a great electro version. Really thrums. Can't say I'm taken with the band's name, although it might be one of the best bad band names I've seen in a while. It's memorable, for sure.

 Spilled - swell foop

Talking of bad band names, I almost didn't click through on this one because of how awkward the name landed but then I couldn't leave it alone. I watched half a dozen other videos and I kept thinking "I wonder what a band that thought that was a good name would sound like?" and finally I couldn't stand it any more.

So I guess that means it's a good bad name. And as we all know, once a band gets successful, whatever it calls itself turns into a noise no-one hears any more. So maybe all that matters is picking something that gets attention, good or bad. It's not like they told you in school.

Oh, as for what they sound like? They sound good. 

 easy rider - untitled (halo)

I was, as I tend to do, searching my mind for who or what this reminded me of and I wasn't coming up with anything much and then I saw in the comments on YouTube someone pegged it as Stereolab meets Drugstore. Nailed.

We all know what happened to Stereolab but whatever happened to Drugstore? I always thought they were fearsomely underrated.  

Stone Fruit - Blondshell

Blondshell's third album, Violins, is out now. This is from it. Soon I shall have my own copy, assuming someone's checking my wishlist. The whole album is up on YouTube and Amazon Music so I could listen to it for nothing but I want to own it because I'm a fan and that's what fans do.

This isn't my favorite track. I don't know what my favorite track is because I haven't listened all the way through yet. I only found out it was there last night. This is the song with the video, though, so that's what we're going with. Hell of a video, too. Disturbing. Does it make you worry about all those peaches going to waste, though? It does me and I don't even like peaches all that much.

Expect more tracks here when I find out which I like best. Videos or not. (I'll say now that Sea Legs and New Age Trojan Horse are in the running. Sea Legs even has a fucking tune!)

Woof - Esme Emerson

When I first heard this yesterday, I thought it sounded quintessentially '70s. It could be one of those wonderful, folky one-hit wonders that occasionally lightened up the Top 40 when I was still at school. Something like Brian Protheroe's Pinball or Duncan Browne's Journey. 

And it does have something of that lost, singer-songwriter, afghan coat, lava lamp, roll a joint on the back of your battered copy of Blonde on Blonde vibe about it, sure, but on a re-listen it feels more nuanced. More '90s. Which means it's only thirty years out of time, not fifty, I guess.  

Chemicals - Always Bethany

No, wait a moment... it wasn't Esme Emerson that sounded so seventies. It was this one. I mean, they both do but Chemicals could be a Lyndsey de Paul B-side. And that's a compliment. I love Lyndsey de paul. Well, the hits. Can't say I ever heard anything else but Sugar Me is a stone classic. I have a great cover of that lined up, too. Maybe next time.

Is Love Real - Aimée Fatale 

Aimée occasionally gets a little too authentically sixties for me but this is how I like her, doing her absolutely exemplary Lana. A lot of people do Lana but no-one does her better. 

Aimée has the writing chops to back it up, too. Hell of a lyric on this one. I particularly admire anyone who can write

"Now I’m stood here singing these songs 
And I don’t even really like them that much 
but I don’t got nowhere to go but here" 

and then have the nerve to really do it.

Oh, and that ending:

"Is love real? 
Is love mine? 
Is love just a fucking waste of time?"  

She's a good time, that's for sure. 

Okay, enough soft play. Let's go hard to the end. 

Hello Again, Jim - Caroline Rose

I clicked through to this because I saw it was from an upcoming album called "Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall".  I mean, you'd have to, wouldn't you? I was expecting some brand of country. That's not what I got.

In the endless spirit of claiming everything sounds like everything else I'm getting Angel Corpus Christie with notes of Jim Carrol. I think we talked about wheelhouses last time or the time before...

Wish You Luck (feat. kid on air) - 1tbsp

Not much to say about that one. And this has run really long. Better wrap it up. I got almost everyone in (Sorry Troy Sivan and RIP Magic) although several people had to make do with one song where I'd bookmarked two or more.

Never mind. Come back in a couple of weeks and we'll do it all over again. 

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

 I was in my late teens when I learned to ride a bicycle. I think I only ever owned one, a heavy, green Hercules with white plastic handlebars and a comfy, padded seat. When that fell apart, I never replaced it. I doubt I've been on a bike since the 90s.

They do say you never forget how to ride a bike, though, and that's certainly true for Neverness To Everness. I get myself into all kinds of trouble on the streets of Hethereau in anything on four wheels but motor-scooters and even motorbikes feel like a much safer way to get around.

When I saw that pushbikes were going to be added to the game with the last update, I knew I wanted one. Pedal power. That should suit me fine. Going too fast around corners is my downfall.

Not that I did anything much about it. Not at first, anyway. As soon as the update dropped, I forgot all about the bike in all the excitment. My only excuse is that there's always so much to do I just lose track. When I eventually remembered, I couldn't seem to find any way to get one other than through the Mystery Boxes, the drop rates for which are not great.

Fortunately, Mailvaltar mentioned in the comments yesterday that there's a bike shop somewhere in the north-east of the city where you can buy a bike for the bargain price of 800k Fons. That makes a bicycle eight times the price of the cheapest car! More than three times as expensive as a motorcycle! As Mailvaltar says, that's got to be one hell of a bike.

Even at such an outrageous mark-up, I bought one without a moment's hesitation. I must've really wanted one. 

 

I'd just finished the Breezy Ride event, in which you get to cart ten different characters about the city on the back of your bike. I loved this event. It might be my favorite in the game so far. It has a delicious disregard for logic that's like catnip to me. 

As I said, I didn't buy a bicycle until after I'd finished the whole thing but apparently Flora already had a bike and she's been riding it all around Hethereau without letting me know. 

Every step in the quest chain, if we can call it that, involves the Appraiser just happening to run into one of her friends or acquaintances, standing around on a street corner or siting in a bar somewhere in the city. Conversation ensues, as it would, and inevitably concludes with the Appraiser offering to give whoever it is a ride to wherever they're going. 

On her bike. That I had no idea she had.

What bike, Flora?! When did you get a bike? Why didn't you tell me? I guess there's a lot about our characters we don't know but this really brought home to me how they must all have their own lives, about which we know nothing.. 

Flora even seems to have given her bike a name. It's called Yesteryear. You can see the name next to it when it's parked in the street. 

Wherever, whenever and however she got it, it's hers, not mine. She can summon it when she needs it for a quest but if I want her to ride it to go somewhere I'd like her to go, forget it. For that she needs a different bike altogether. One I'll have to pay for. Albeit with her money. Sometimes I think you need a degree in Metaphysics to play these games.

 

The Breezy Rides themselves are wonderful. I loved all of them. Not just the bike-riding itself, although that was always fun, but the little stories and the conversations along the way. There's always a bit of chat at the start to set things up and then whoever's on the back of the bike carries on talking for the first few minutes before conversation eventually runs down. 

Then, when we get to wherever we're going, there's a little coda at the end of which we both, inevitably, decide we'll do something together again, soon. It's all just so nice. 

I would literally play a whole game based on this concept. Actually, come to think of it, I already have, kind of. It's basically Neo Cab but without the commercial interactions and on two wheels instead of four.

When I say this series of quests is "nice", I maybe ought to caveat that a little. Most of the encounters are really sweet but not exactly all of them. The really charming ones involve the younger characters. Linko and Iroi are positively childlike. Chiz is shy and a little bit lonely; Shinku is funny; Mint and Nanally are confident and effervescent as they always are...

Lacrimosa would probably have been the most bittersweet. She's an enigma. 

I did the quests in the order they came up and she was the last. I was really looking forward to seeing what she had to say but I was interrupted by real life just as she was about to get on the back of the bike and I had to log out briefly. I thought I'd be able to pick up where I left off but when I got back in, Yesteryear and the little vampire were nowhere to be seen. 

Luckily, most quests in NTE that involve travel can be completed just by teleporting to the end-point so I was able to finish it easily enough but I missed out on all of Lacrimosa's on-bike dialog. I just watched it on YouTube and it's possibly the weakest of the lot so I didn't miss much. All the best bits are before and after the actual ride. Her very best line comes just after she gets off, when she says

 

Lacrimosa really is not of this world. 

The other three characters aren't quite as "nice" as the rest, though. Not to say they're unfriendly in any way. It's just that there's something a little darker about all of them.

When the Appraiser meets Hotori she is, as you might expect, drunk. Very drunk. The woman has a problem, there's no hiding it. 

The main reason the Appraiser offers her boss a lift is because she's worried she's too out of it to get home safely on her own. Hotori warns the Appraiser to take it slowly because she wouldn't want to throw up over the bike but when they get back to Eibon she's sobered up enough to tell Flora she needs to be ready for work tomorrow, which even the easy-going Appraiser finds a tad awkward.

Jiuyuan, another business owner with one eye always on the account book,  has an ulterior motive for accepting the offer of a ride to a good place to watch the sun set. She cheerfully tells Flora, when they get there, that her main reason for going was to have another opportunity to make a psychological assessment of her. She's clearly still thinking about what use she can make of the Appraiser in future. Flora isn't entirely happy about that and Jiuyuan's promise never to use the intel she's gathered against her isn't as reassuring as it could be.

Finally, there's Fadia. Fadia is always scary. Flora comes across her drinking alone at a bar. Not, I believe, the first time that's happened. Fadia, as always, is flirtatious and that's being generous. She comes across as a borderline sexual predator sometimes. 

Again, as we've become used to from her, all her talk is drenched with subtext. She purrs about how everything feels so much freer under cover of darkness and suggests the two of them go "do something more fun". As she says, "The city has fallen asleep and no-one will ever know what we did together..."

 

Unsurprisingly, Flora is wary but it turns out Fadia just wants go to the Hethereau Sky Tower. When Flora expresses surprise that it's something so innocent, Fadia makes it very clear it could be something more "dangerous" - if the Appraiser's up for it. 

Which she is not. In the end, nothing untoward happens, despite a bleak aside about mortality from Fadia on the journey. But who knows what goes on ion Fadia's mind? As Flora says right at the end "Fadia, it's hard to get you, sometimes."

As with many of the character quests in NTE, there's a lot going on under the surface but one thing that's hard to miss is all the drinking and sexual tension. I just looked up the game's PEGI rating, which is 12 for "for moderate violence, simulated gambling, in-game purchases involving random items, and online user interaction." and I can't help feeling whoever did the assessment might not have gone deep enough.

It's also very noticeable where the divisions between the characters lie. All the potentially problematic behavior, the drinking, the sexual innuendo, the general louche moral attitudes, comes from the mature female characters. I think that means something but I haven't got a handle yet on what it might be.

It's always been very clear who the grown-ups are in NTE. While there's often some confusion over exactly how old the younger characters might be, it's always been clear which are children, which are young adults and who is fully mature. 

In that regard, there's no questioning the maturity of Hotori, Jiuyuan and Fadia. Allowing for the inevitable perfect skin and lack age lines peculiar to the graphical style, Hotori and Jiuyuan are most likely in their thirties or even forties. Fadia is at least in her late twenties. 

 

The mature male characters - Baicang, Chaos, Adler and Skia - are distinctly less prone to drinking and flirting than their female counterparts. In fact, they're mostly so stiff as to be made out of cardboard. Only Baicang really steps outside of his professional persona in any of storylines I've seen and he's a lot milder in his rebellion than any of the three women I just mentioned.

All of which seems like a long way to go on a bike ride. It's another reason why I like this game so much. There's a depth to the triviality that makes an impact. And there's so much subtext, all the time.

A couple more examples before I go. Things that speak to the complexity of the world-building here. 

I'd forgotten all about Shinku, the "dragon" who we met in the fantasy land of 999 Nights. When Flora met her outside Little Sparrow, the maid cafe, I had to stop a moment to think who she was.

 There's a whole bit where the Appraiser teases Shinku for her interest in whatever the heck happens in Little Sparrow, an interest Shinku most unconvincingly denies, but more interestingly perhaps, as Flora gives Shinku a ride back to her home in the suburbs, Shinku talks about how her house isn't really all that messy and how she knows where everything in her collections is. It's a beautifully natural, organic conversation and it told me a lot I didn't know about the character.

After Shinku got off the bike and disappeared inside and Flora was standing outside the house, I noticed the door was open. I was curious to see if I could look at Shinku's place so I took Flora inside. It turns out you can go into her apartment and look around. It feels a tad transgressive because Shinku isn't there but it's highly revealing. The whole place is exactly as I imagined it from the conversation. 

 

It's quite untidy, with all kinds of things lying about all over the place, but it's clean and feels pleasantly lived-in. And there are a lot of collectibles. Shinku has display cabinets filled with figures and dioramas and there's a whole wall of board games stacked semi-neatly on shelves al the way to the ceiling. I didn't spend a long time there but the detail is impeccable. Someone's clearly taken a lot of trouble mirroring  Shinku's personality as it's written. I don't know if there's a storyline that supports that level of effort or if it's just someone having fun but either way it's powerfully immersive.

And finally, there's Linko and her Tamachi obsession. When you meet her, she's near the coast, talking to herself. It transpires she has a day off and she's going to spend it looking for rare water Tamachis.

I had never heard of Tamachis [Edit: I must have because apparently both Linko and Mint talk about them a lot but it obviously didn't stick in my mind.] but it quickly became clear from context that they're Hethereau's equivalent of Pokemon and Linko was playing the local equivalent of Pokemon Go. Flora gave Linko a ride around the bay and Linko caught several Tamachi. 

It was an entertaining insight into the hidden life of the characters who live in this world we, as players,only get to visit. In fact, the entire Breezy Ride event was like that. I'm very happy I spotted it be.

Now Flora has her bike and she can invite any of those ten characters to ride on the back of it, whenever she likes. As soon as I bought it, I had her ride around Hethereau for half an hour with the UI off. It's the most fun I've had just riding around in a game since I stopped playing Once Human. Next time I might ask Chiz to come with her. Or Linko. Or Mint. Just not Hotori or Jiuyuan. 

And definitely not Fadia...

800k well-spent, I'd say. 

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

None. But I did look a few things up on Google and Gemini always gets its two cents in first, which almost caused an upset. I was googling to see if Tamachi is an actual game of some kind and it was pretty clear it wasn't but just to be absolutely sure I googled "tamachi neverness" and this is what Gemini told me:

In the supernatural urban open-world RPG Neverness to Everness (NTE), Tamachis are collectible virtual pets or digital creatures that players can hunt, collect, and raise throughout the city of Hethereau. Heavily inspired by real-world Tamagotchis, they function as a core slice-of-life minigame and collection system.

 The AI then went on to give me bullet points on how to play Tamachi in NTE.:

Key Features of Tamachis in NTE

The Tamachi Index: Players track their findings in an in-game Index. Finding every standard version and unlocking the elusive secret variants is required to fully complete it. 
Tamachi Hunting: These digital creatures emit signals across Hethereau. Players must explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants.  
Linko's Specialization: The playable S-class character Linko is deeply connected to this mechanic. Known as one of the top "Tamachi pros" in Hethereau, he features unique outfits and abilities that make tracking and picking up rare Tamachi signals much easier.

Let me make it clear right away, almost none of this is true. 

Oh, it's true that Linko plays Tamachi. So does Mint. But I can't and neither can you. There is no "in-game index" where players track their findings. Players do not "explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants" because there's no Tamachi game a player can play. I wish there was. Gemini makes it sound like it would be a lot of fun.

The sources that Gemini quotes to back up these claims are from in-character posts by Linko on Instagram, a beta video on YouTube and a reddit thread where a bunch of people talk about how cool it would be if the Tamachi game ever became playable. Which it would. So get on that, Hotta!

Honestly, it's a textbook example of why you should never trust an AI summary without carefully checking the sources it cites. I actually had half a paragraph written about how I must somehow have missed it when they added creature collecting to NTE, when I thought "hold on a minute..." 

I do find it very amusing that an AI, which is effectively a fictional entity, finds it difficult to tell the difference between the social media posts of real people and those of other fictional entities. I know it's fashionable to hate this sort of thing but it's getting to feel like the future I imagined living in, back when I was younger, and it's not that far from being the reality that's existed in my head all my life. 

Who can say what's really real, after all? 

Ask Not "For Whom The Verses Morn" Because I Have No Clue!

The next big content drop for Neverness To Everness is due in less than a week. It's called For Whom The Verses Morn because of course it is. I don't know which of the gacha games started this trend for incomprehensible, enigmatic chapter titles but hats off to whoever it was. To paraphrase Jeanette Winterson's mother, why be sensible when you can be weird?

The last update was called Rising From The Moonlit Fog and I did the preview post for that one on August 12. The pace is relentless. Is anyone playing an MMORPG that gets major content drops every six weeks? All year round? No, I didn't think so.

Perhaps a better question is would you want to be? And an even better question than that would be wouldn't it depend on what content it was?

I'm beginning to wonder if NTE might have an identity problem. The game's been out for five months now. This will be the fourth big update. They're running at around one every six weeks, which is par for the genre. So far we've had:

 

Dreamwalk Corridor (June) - The main storyline continues via the Corridor of Echoes episode, which expands on the Scarlet Letter plot and sees Nanally lose part of her soul. It also added a largely pointless and now forgotten resort island just off the coast of Hethereau. Has anyone been back there since? I know I haven't. Oh, and there was the Porsche collab, which was just weird.

999 Nights (July) - If you thought adding a resort island was a strange choice for the first update, the follow-up invites you to hold its beer. This one added a whole new game from a completely different genre. Not just some mini-game or holiday event, either - a complete fantasy RPG that could quite reasonably have been launched as a standalone title. It's now permanent content, so if you ever feel like playing a high-fantasy ARPG using NTE as the lobby for it, well now you can! As for the main plot, that had to wait until next time. Poor old Nanally.

Rising from the Moonlight Fog - (August): Back to the plot at last. In fact, not just back to it but through it and out the other side. The whole Scarlet Letter plotline concluded with what felt like unseemly haste, with the entire organization broken up and whatever threat it represented nullified. At this point it's unclear whether there even is a "main plotline" any more. We're left with some vague hints and sense of unease and that's about it. As for new territory, this one added a vast tract of largely empty countryside and... a resort beach. Are you sensing a theme here? If not, you should be.

For Whom The Verses Morn - (September) : And here we are again, anticipating what's coming next. According to the seven-minute promo video, we'll be starting a new storyline involving Blackbird, the witch from the Witch's House, who popped up at some point earlier as a consultant but now takes point for a tale involving a mysterious letter and a trip to a new location called St. Arbor. Does it have anything to do with anything else that's happened? I don't know but I very much doubt it. We're also getting a new district of Hethereau. Well, kind of. We're getting a theme park. And the bloody Porsche collab is back.

There's an hour-long "Preview Special" video that might make a bit more sense of all of that but I haven't watched it and I'm not about to. I have watched the seven-minute PV though and I'll watch again right now, to refresh my memory. Here, why don't you watch along with me? 

Yeah, well, that's seven minutes etc.

I didn't get the stopwatch out (I don't own a stopwatch, before you get any ideas...) but I'd estimate the story gets maybe thirty seconds of that seven minutes. About half the running time goes to showing off the new costumes. Pukaland, the unfortunately-named theme park, and the stupid racing cars get most of the rest.

It's becoming hard to ignore the priorities here. In four updates we've had three new open-world zones or areas, all of them focusing on leisure activities: two beach resorts and a theme park. Everything else is just open countryside. For a game originally predicated on life in the big city it seems like an odd choice.

Or should I say a series of odd choices. Two playgrounds might be counted a co-incidence but three makes a trend. 

And I'm not even mentioning the wealth of ancillary content that's been added since launch, the vast majority of which also revolves around mini-games, gambling and the kind of thing you might find yourself doing on vacation or at the weekend. As a working city, Hethereau sure takes its playtime seriously.

About this time in a post about an upcoming update to a game I'm playing, I'd normally start digging into the details to try and figure out where the story might be going. I'm not going to do that this time. It's increasingly obvious there's not much point in doing it for NTE. That's not how the game works.

It's taken me a while to figure it out. Coming from Wuthering Waves and before it Genshin Impact, I'd made an automatic, unconscious assumption that what would be driving player interest and retention would be the story. All the big gacha open-world games build a good deal of their reputation on the quality of the writing, which has frequently been exemplary. 

And the the writing in Neverness To Everness is excellent. There's no questioning the quality of the individual stories or the authenticity of the dialog. The voice actors bring the writers' words to life with flair and authority. All of that remains demonstrably superior to almost anything I've been used to seeing in a quarter of a century playing MMORPGs, where the standards are so much lower.

No, the thing that makes NTE quite different from all those other gacha games is the apparent lack of a through-line or even a structure designed to facilitate the telling of an epic tale. What, after all, is going on in Hethereau? Really, not all that much. 

In most games there's a crisis of some kind or at least we enter the world at some moment of decision. There's tension and threat. Not so in Hethereau. It's a peaceful city where everything seems to be trucking along nicely with no dark clouds looming on the horizon.

The crisis happened forty years ago. It's long over now. The Appraiser, who suffers from the inevitable amnesia trope, hasn't woken up to an ongoing conflict in which she plays a key part so much as she's been rounded up by social services. They've found her a place to live and given her a job to do. There are suggestions that there might be some government work to come later but so far, in nearly six months, all she's had to deal with is a series of minor family crises, most of which affect no-one much outside of Eibon Antiques.

I ought to make it clear I have no problem with a game having a central plot that never rises above the quotidian. On the contrary: it's very refreshing not to have to go out and save the world every goddam time. 

What I do find problematic is the randomness of it all. It's not as though there's even an episodic or picaresque storyline, where the pieces slowly start to fall into place and the bigger picture becomes clear.

Or not yet, at least. I did have the sense last time that there might be something brewing along those lines, with the Rules Anomalies starting to cause some existential issues for BAC and the rest of the authorities. I can only hope the Blackbird plotline ties in to that somehow but looking at the video I get the much stronger impression it's going to be something they've cooked up for Halloween. I mean, witches, bonfires, creepy, spooky, shadowy villages... in October?

 

And then the next update, six weeks after that, is going to be the Christmas one, isn't it? Are we going to go heavy on the storyline then, in the biggest of all holiday seasons? I doubt it. I'd put my money on some kind of winter sports resort opening up, somewhere off  in those snow-capped mountains we can see in the distance.

It seems so much more likely that way. NTE is all about the fun, not the drama. That's where it's pitched. Sure, there's a story for those that like that sort of thing but I don't get the sense that story is driving anything. If you look at the promo video, it's not even pushing the new characters' combat skills. It's far more interested in what they're wearing, most of which looks like it's meant for going clubbing or lounging around at home.

I didn't even mention the characters, did I? Obviously, as a gacha game, every update has to come with characters to roll on (And their weapons, but I'd have to say that weapons in NTE really are very much an afterthought. They barely get a mention in the promotional material.).

The two characters this time are Blackbird, of course, and Akane. I may be jumping the gun here because I have no foreknowledge of the plot for St. Arbor but I'd be very surprised if Akane plays much of a part in it. There's a major side-story in the update involving Nanally's band, The Whoots!!!. Akane will be in that and, I'd predict, only in that. 

If I'm right, it makes the whole team-building aspect of the game even more abstract than it already was. Last time I wondered how Zankou could be in the player's team when she's a) a baddie and b) in prison. Now we're adding Akane, a retired rock musician currently tending bar in a cellar club. What, exactly, does she know about combat?  Is she even an Esper?

It might sound like I'm complaining about all of this but I'm not. Not really. In a way, all of this chaos and confusion is a big part of what makes Neverness To Everness so appealing in the first place. You never know what's going to happen because none of it makes any sense. And I've always liked entertainments that don't make sense.

 

The entire set-up is fraught with inconsistencies, of course. Not only is all the action forty years in the past but there's the whole thing about how a government agency sends the player character to work for a drunk, who employs children to fight extra-dimensional entities, the logic of which remains as fuzzy as ever. I guess with that kind of background, having a guitar-playing bartender tag along for the fights isn't exactly going to break immersion.

In the end, perhaps the only problem is applying real-world logic and values to a fantasy world. We don't have any experience to go on so how can we judge? Who knows what it would be like if extra-dimensional entities popped up anywhere and everywhere and half the population mutated at puberty, grew tails and horns and started reading minds and throwing energy bolts. Who knows what might seem normal and logical after nearly half a century of that?

For all my apparent skepticism, I'm still very much looking forward to For Whom The Verses Morn. I'll be rolling for Akane, not that I'll have any idea what to do with her if I get her, other than that it would be cool if she could hang out with Flora. I'm also very much looking forward to seeing where The Whoots!!! go next, event though the music they make is really terrible and Flora can't play the drums to save her life. Which, I suppose, might be something she ends up having to do.

Blackbird isn't a character I've ever had much time for but maybe she'll show something more of her personality now she has the spotlight. And as for Pukaland, well, who doesn't love a trip to the fairground? 

I think as long as I can keep reminding myself the plot's almost certainly going nowhere, it'll all be fine. And then, if it actually turns out I'm wrong about that, it'll be a lovely surprise. 

[You See The Corner Of Something Under A Chest] - I Pick It Up...

I had an odd piece of luck yesterday. I was in the bedroom and I just happened to notice the corner of something, sticking out from under the blanket trunk I inherited from my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. It used to sit on the landing of the house I grew up in and when I was about eight or nine I could still hide inside it with the lid closed, so it's pretty big.

Anyway, what was poking out from under it turned out to be a Steam card. You may have read that they're not doing them any more, which is a total pain because it was only last year I realised you could buy them in our local supermarket. As soon as I realized that, I put "Steam Cards" on my wishlists, along with a note about where to get them, and I got about a hundred pounds-worth for Christmas. 

I added all of those to my account right after I got them and I've spent most of the money now. On games I haven't played, of course. I'm a traditionalist that way. 

I figured it was obviously one of the exhausted cards from back then, It must somehow have fallen on the floor and gotten kicked under the chest. That sort of thing happens all the time in our house. I picked it up but, as I was about to throw it in the bin, I happened to notice it the silvering on the back seemed to be intact.

I don't buy a lot of physical gift cards and I've never bought a scratch card in my life but lately I have been buying those virtual cards the cats sell at the Catzebo booths in Neverness To Everness. In fact, I've been buying some every day since they added them a few weeks back.  

At the time I wrote about those cards, I thought they were going to be a limited-time addition to the game that would go away when the next update dropped but that's not how it went. The booths are a permanent attraction on the streets of Hethereau now, which means I've had to become a lot more temperate with my purchases.

It was fine to go hard when they were only going to be there for short while. Even then, I only had the one crazy day, when I bought out the entire stock. Mostly I was pretty restrained. 

So anyone should be. The odds of winning, though, are very poor. I wrote in the post about how it looked very much to me as though the operation was designed to leech your wallet dry steadily and slowly and now, with a lot more data to go on, I'm still absolutely convinced that's true.

By far the most likely outcome, every time you play, is that you lose 10-20% of your stake. If you stick to the cheap cards (In the permanent version of the game there are only three types of card: 10k, 30k and 50k.) that doesn't matter much but if you buy all the cards every day, or even just all the 50k ones, you'll be broke in a week. 

Well, I would. Might take you longer but you'd get there.

 

Even with my relatively small spend, I wouldn't get ahead of my combined losses even if I won one of the big prizes. I must be well over a million in the hole by now. Most of that happened long ago, though, and I've written it off as part of the learning process. Also, it was fun. 

These days I mostly finish even or slightly ahead. As soon as I start losing, I stop. Well, soon after, anyway...

And it's not like you get nothing for your money, even if you lose. You get a bookmark.

For a long time I didn't really put much effort into bonding with the characters on my team but recently I've started to get into it. I have several at Affinity Level 5 and a couple at 6 and I'm working on getting all of those to ten, eventually. It'll be a long haul but I'm not in a hurry and the game's not going anywhere.

To that end, I'm doing stuff with them all as I run into them around town and I'm handing out all the gifts I'm allowed, every day. Every scratch card gives you a bookmark that's worth a hundred Bond points. That's what I'm mostly using.  

I do all the character side-quests as I come across them when I'm strolling down the wide avenues of Hethereau or whenever one of my imaginary friends sends me a message on Bagel, asking if I want to meet up. Those quests can be short and silly - I did one involving choosing hair-care products for Mint's tail the other day - or longer and weirder - like when Linko and the Appraiser went looking for aliens - but there are only so many of them and some are gated by specific affinity levels. 

Gifting has a daily restriction on how many gifts you can give but you can carry on giving gifts forever. No-one can have too many bookmarks, apparently. It's a guaranteed path to BFF status, if you have the patience for it. Which I do.

Getting back to the point, all these in-game scratch cards have attuned me to the process, so when I spotted that unblemished silver strip my fingers began to twitch. Could it be? 

Yes, it could. It seems that somehow, last Christmas, I'd managed to lose one of my precious Steam Cards under the blanket chest without even realizing it had gone missing. It's not that hard to imagine. There were a bunch of them, all separately wrapped. It's not like I was keeping a count of the number and value when I opened them. I'm not twelve years old!

I scratched the silver off and there was the code. I put the code into Steam and suddenly I was £20 richer. What to spend it on?

It was hardly a pressing decision. I hadn't spent all of what I added to the account last Christmas. I have a strong aversion to spending the last of anything. I always like to keep a little in reserve, just like Beryl always leaves that last piece of chicken for Mr. Manners.

But still. It's very rude to ignore such serendipitous good fortune. If you do, the universe starts to get the idea you don't want any favors and stops giving them to you. It's like anti-manifesting. And as it happened, I did have an idea of something I might want to play.

The same morning, yesterday morning, before I found the card, I'd had one of those emails from Steam, telling me something on my wishlist had gone on sale. I get a lot of those. I rarely pay them much attention. Half the games on my wishlist go on sale all the time.

As it happens, though, this wasn't just some old favorite having another 30% off moment. It was a game that only launched yesterday that had chosen, as many games do, to begin at 10% off for a brief period before going to full price. 

Usually I have no idea when any game on my wishlist is going to launch. Name any of them and I probably put it on years ago and forgot about it almost immediately. This one, though, is one of my picks for the Fantasy Critic League Wilhelm's running, so I'd been waiting for it. 

It's called Nighthawks and it's by Wadjet Eye, a developer many of whose previous games I've both played and reviewed here. I played the demo in a Next Fest last year and I said of it then

 "I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available."

I often say things like that. I rarely follow through. I believe it when I say it but once I've said it I forget it. I'm like that. It's annoying, isn't it?

This time, though, the astral forces were clearly coming together in a concerted effort to make me keep my word, for once. It would have been positively hubristic to have ignored the omens. So I bought it.

Obviously, I haven't played it. I've downloaded it, both to the desktop and the laptop, where I'm fairly confident it will run, since it's effectively a visual novel with mostly static images. Finding the time to play it is going to be the challenge. 

When I do, no doubt I'll review it here, but for now I'd very much like someone else to review it. Preferably someone the FCL considers a "Top Critic". It's become very clear in this, our second season, that picking a winner is only half the job. You also have to pick something that's not going to vanish into the great darkness cast by the shadow of the 20,000 or more games released every year.

I'm still waiting for a third Top Critic to review Beastro, a game I picked that came out back in June. It has six reviews so far, only two of which count. If it could get one more, it would almost certainly score me something. It has a "Very Positive" Steam rating from over 600 reviews but that counts for nothing where the League is concerned. Until one more Top Critic weighs in, it's worth a fat zero.

The same fate might befall Nighthawks although I'm hopeful it won't. Wadjet Eye is a reasonably well-known developer and much respected in the point&click adventure niche where it mostly operates. This is a slight departure for them but visual novels and P&Cs are almost interchangeable on many levels so I'm optimistic. Plus, the demo was excellent. [Edit: I've just seen it's got 89/100 from PC Gamer so if thay're interested, I'm sure others will be.]

Nighthawks also received some unexpected publicity just before launch, when Steam's algorithm mistakenly identified it as an "Adults Only" game. The team posted an amusing report on the store page explaining the panic that caused and what they had to do to get their game re-assessed and correctly labeled. 

As they say in that piece, they were lucky to have "the fanbase and the (relative) clout to make a bit of noise and get this handled quickly", which is why I also believe Nighthawks will eventually pick up enough reviews to register a score for my Fantasy Game Company, Pretty Blue Fox Games. Beastro, though, I suspect is a lost cause. 

Sidebar: Pretty Blue Fox, by the way, in case you don't recognize it, is the name of  the game-playing group in Philip K Dick's early-60s novel, The Game-Players of Titan. I've been using it in various contexts almost since I started gaming because heaven forfend I'd actually come up with an idea of my own. 

However well or badly the game does for me in the League, I'm certain it's going to be a lot of fun to play. In that respect, I'm equally confident about the other League pick I have, the  one that's due to launch in less than a week. That one's called Nivalis Nights and it's the sequel to the excellent Cloudpunk. 

Unlike Beastro and Nighthawks, Nivalis already has an Open Critic page set up even before it launches, which I'm taking as a good sign. There's every chance I'll also buy Nivalis Nights on release although if I'm going to be rational about it, I should probably wait until I actually have time to play it, by which time it will most likely be on sale.

But hey, where's the fun in being rational? 

Head In The Clouds

Gaming is weird, isn't it? At one and the same time it's too much and too little. Or maybe that's gamers.

In recent weeks, I've seen people complaining they have too many games to get through, that they're being offered too many games for free, that they've been tempted by deals on games that were too good to miss and now they have a backlog they'll never get through, that too many games are being released all at once, that too many games are being released, period, and that content drops for live service games come faster than they can keep up with them.

Over the same time-frame, I've seen people complaining there's nothing new worth playing, that all we ever get are retreads of old games, that nostalgia-driven retro-gaming is driving out creativity and innovation and that live-service games are stale and static thanks to content droughts.

Obviously, all of these things can be true at once but it's tiring to keep hearing about it. And feeling it. Because I'm suffering from the same mixed emotions about the hobby as everyone else. When the pipeline's flowing, I feel like I'm drowning; when it dries up I suffer from thirst.

All of it's self-imposed, of course. There's no excuse for any of it. Maybe Microsoft was simply acting out a duty of care when they announced XBox Live's new cloud gaming limits of 5, 10 and 15 hours a month. Perhaps they're trying to tell us we all play too many games already.

But, no. It won't be that. They'll be fine with us playing 'til our eyes bleed, provided we do it on our own machines and they don't have to pay for it. They don't care that we're addicted. They just don't want to be the ones running the crack house. 

The Ars Technica article article linked in the Aging Gamer post, which is weirdly the only place I've seen the news at all, it makes it quite clear that cloud gaming, like VR and AR before it, has signally failed to attract any kind of mass-market audience. As the piece points out, Google dropped their Stadia cloud gaming service a few years back and Amazon recently scaled down its Luna service significantly.

Luckily for me, NVidia's still in. My GeForce Now subscription that I took out a few months back has to be one of the best spending choices I've made. I use it every day and it works flawlessly. I hope NVidia don't decide it's too much trouble too because while it lasts, it's saving me a fortune and making my gaming life very much easier.

Backing out of the market for cloud gaming now might be a little premature, anyway. The concept could be on the cusp of fulfilling some of the promises made for it a few years ago, although the reasons why it could be beginning to take off are, ironically, the same as those making it less commercially attractive. 

Hardware costs aren't spiralling so much as sky-rocketing. The insatiable maws of the AI data centers scarf down every available chip, leaving nothing but scraps for everyone else. Running AAA games, at home or in the cloud, is getting expensive.

We could be there a while, too. I've seen estimates that it could take three years for enough new production facilities to come online to meet the unanticipated demand. Even that sounds... optimistic. Fanciful, even. Is there enough raw material available to feed the increased demand, always assuming the will to build these new factories was there?

Maybe it's the beginning of the end for gaming as we've grown up knowing it. Since the 1970s there's been an automatic assumption that kids want consoles in their homes to play their video games. Consoles became handhelds and PCs and all kinds of devices with odd and enigmatic names but no-one ever imagined the flow would end. All those kids grew up and had kids of their own and the family that plays together...

Sure, there've been times when commentators considered whether the latest console generation would be the last but only because they saw games migrating to different platforms and technologies, not because they thought the whole gaming carousel was going to grind to a halt. 

And of course it hasn't and it won't. Gaming's going nowhere. Or, rather, it's going somewhere. But where? And what's it going to look like, when it gets there?

Mobile gaming has been the big success of the last decade and more. It's still growing, too. But smartphones are just as vulnerable to the data center demand as consoles and PCs. It's nice to imagine that, when you can't afford a PC any more, you'll be able to hook your phone to your TV and carry on playing but chances are your phone won't be any cheaper to upgrade or replace than the rest of the tech you can no longer justify buying.

Of course, we all have to have a smartphone now, so if it comes to a choice, well it's no choice at all. But if the phones that can play the AAA games cost the same as the other devices that cost too much, will anyone outside of a self-elected elite be playing? And if AAA gaming becomes a luxury pastime, what kind of developers will that attract? Would you even want to play the games they made, if you could run them?

Oh, I do like a bit of wild, unsupported speculation, once in a while? Don't you? And since I don't do doom-scrolling, it's rare for me to get the opportunity.

I don't really imagine any of this is going to happen. Crappy old machines play most games pretty well and if there really comes a time when regular gamers are priced out of the new PC and Console market, there's going to be a huge boom in refurbished hardware. 

I mean, there's got to be a lot of it around, doesn't there? We're all hoarders when it comes to tech. 

From where I'm sitting I can see three no-longer-used PCs and an old laptop and there's another downstairs. That's after I took three more to the recycling center last year. And don't talk to me about graphics cards. I must have a dozen lying around, going all the way back to the early 2000s. 

I don't own any consoles but I just checked EBay and I could have a working PS4 for well under £100. Gemini tells me that would play Fortnite, Apex Legends and Minecraft as well as thousands of top-rated games from the twenty-teens. I could get by on that. If I had to.

So, yes, maybe a bit of belt-tightening might be in order for a while. And maybe game developers will have to scale down their ambitions and work inside some technical constraints if they want to keep hold of their mass-market appeal. But is that a bad thing? Aren't we always complaining about bloated budgets and broken deadlines and reach exceeding grasp?

Not that I want to go all misty-eyed about the good old days because god forbid but one thing that there was a lot of back in the 'eighties and nineties was innovation. Granted, it's always a lot easier to come up with something new when no-one's been there before you but even factoring that in, the things some people were able to do with a 48k memory, let alone half a gigabyte, were astonishing. 

We're not going back to measuring the footprints of our favorite games in kilobytes but does any game really need to take up hundreds of gigs on your SSD? Assuming you can still afford an SSD, of course. 

Let's take Valheim as an example. Kind of successful, Valheim. Okay, it had a great launch window, what with everyone being trapped at home back in 2021 but it's sold 12m-15m copies in five years, depending which source you believe. Not GTA6 numbers, sure, but solid.

Valheim is less than 5GB. Nearer 4GB in fact. It has low-quality graphics that somehow manage to look exactly right for what it needs. It's a good trick but quite a few games pull it off. Minecraft barely breaks 1GB in a standard installation and that one hasn't done too badly. Fortnite will run on a graphics card I could buy right now on EBay for under £25. 

Looks like we'll be able to carry on gaming after all, then. At least until all the old hardware dries up and breaks down. But that could take a while.

And maybe the games will get smarter and smaller and at least no worse than they are now. Might even be better. Who knows? 

Not to mention there might be fewer of them. Which could be a good thing. Over twenty thousand new games were released on Steam last year. We've almost passed that this year already. How many games can you play in a year? Maybe if there weren't so many, you wouldn't have that backlog...

All of the above is merely me, riffing on something I wasn't even planning to write about today. I was going to go over the latest video from Hotta about the upcoming content drop for Neverness to Everness and that got me started on how much content is too much and then the introduction turned into the post and here we are, or here I am, anyway, wondering if less really might not be more after all.

I'll get to that NTE video another time. It's... interesting. Interesting isn't always a compliment, is it? Meanwhile, I think I might play some video games. While I still can.