Congratulations To M. John Harrison On A Much Deserved And Long Overdue Win

The best-known literary prize in the United Kingdom is the Booker. I quite like literary prizes but I never had much time for this one, neither before I worked in a bookshop nor while I was there.  

I saw it as dry, predictable and insular, a kind of back-slapping celebration of a particular strand of authorship, the sort that appealed, professionally, to editors of literary magazines and the Book Section of heavyweight Sunday papers, along with the critics employed by them.

Before I worked in the trade I simply ignored the Booker. It had nothing to do with me. Once I was required, at least, to know who was on the shortlist every year, I shifted from indifference to condescending contempt, a take that served me well for many years. 

In recent times, though, the long-lists have often included a few books I quite liked. Some of them even made onto the short-list.

Even then, no author I ever considered a true favorite has gone on to win. There have been a few winners whose books I've read and enjoyed -  Kazuo Ishiguro, Margret Attwood, Kingsley Amis - but no-one I'd ever have considered for my personal top hundred, let alone the true pantheon.

Until now. Yesterday, to my complete astonishment, one of my favorite writers and quite possibly my favorite prose stylist, M. John Harrison, won the 2026 Booker prize with his latest novel, The End of Everything. 

Harrison is eighty-one years old, making him the oldest Booker winner ever. The BBC news item that gave me that little gem describes M. John (How are you supposed to address people who put an initial at the front of their name, anyway?) as a "titan of literary science fiction" and the Booker Prize Chief Executive, Gaby Wood, said he was ""the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world"."

He is not, of course, the first winner to have written quite a lot of literary science fiction. All three of the names I mentioned earlier have strong claims to be, at least in part, sci-fi writers and, in Amis's case, a sci-fi critic. 

Margaret Attwood's reputation rests to some degree on The Handmaid's Tale, a future dystopia (Also a broad description of this year's winner.) but she wrote a trilogy of less-celebrated novels known as the  MaddAddam trilogy, which are what most people would call science fiction, even though the author herself insists on the term "speculative".

Ishiguro, at least three of whose novels are clearly either Sci-Fi or Fantasy, is a lot less prickly but he's still been wary of his work being reviewed or marketed as genre fiction, reasoning quite logically that such labeling could eat into the number of readers willing to give them a try. As an ex-bookseller, I can affirm that's a very genuine concern. A lot of readers are very prejudiced about genre. Then again, he could always wave his Nobel prize in their general direction.

As for Amis, although he did produce several novels that could be called science fiction, he's the one of the three I least associate with the form, other than as a fairly vociferous advocate for it. He compiled and edited an influential collection of essays on the genre, New Maps of Hell, back at the start of the 'sixties and he was a regular reviewer of new science fiction for the Observer throughout that decade.

M. John Harrison, though, is the first Booker winner most science fiction fans would unhesitatingly acknowledge as one of their own, although the fact that the only major SF award he's won (So far...) is the Arthur C Clarke (For Nova Swing in 2007.) points up how undervalued he's always been, even among his own tribe. I hope winning the Booker will make up for that.

In the way the aforementioned mainstream authors all published some science fiction, M. John has written at least one undoubtedly mainstream novel, Climbers, which centers on his favored hobby, rock-climbing. He also co-wrote, with Jane Johnson, an anthropomorphic tetralogy about a gang of cats, published under the pseudonym Gabriel King.

I've read a lot of his work but not all of it. My favorites are The Centauri Device, published in 1975 and without whose influence it's hard to imagine either the space opera of Iain M. Banks or most of cyberpunk, and the so-called Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.). 

The first of his four talking cat books, The Wild Road, is also excellent but I found it such a tough read I haven't been able to attempt the rest of the series, even though I bought them all at the same time. They've been sitting in the "To Read" pile for a decade now. Children's literature it is not.

But the book that introduced him to me was 1985's Viriconium Nights. It, too, remains a favorite. 

At the time it was published, I was writing reviews of sci-fi books for a semi-pro comics zine with the unfortunate name Fantasy Advertiser, (A name inherited from its previous publisher, when a friend of mine took it over. He kept it for recognition value only.). 

My friend was also the GM of our tabletop gaming group and we used to meet at his place every Sunday, when he'd share out any review copies he'd received. I used to pick the ones that looked interesting and one week one of those happened to be a collection of linked short stories, set in a fantastic city called Viriconium. I'd not heard of the author, nor the series, of which this was the third, but I had a glance at the first page or two and the guy seemed to have an interesting prose style, so I took it.

There's a scan of the review I wrote, as published in FA 93, up above but to make it easier on the eyes, here's the full text:

"Viriconium Nights by M. John Harrison Gollancz, 158 pages, £8.95. 

M. John Harrison said "The best fantasy is a terra incognita. The reader is first lured into it and then abandoned." That gets my vote. I don't know what Viriconium is. I read every story in that goddamn book and Viriconium is a blur, it's a melange of impressions, it's lanterns and railed walkways, it's flagstone courtyards and swirling clouds of lazy twinkling motes buzzing slowly from a blade. Viriconium can't even keep its name straight. 

"Viriconium Nights" is a fabulation. It's not genre fantasy, genre science fiction, genre anything. You can swim in this book, it bears you up. Struggle for conventional narrative structure and you'll drown. This is a playful book, proud of the way it says things but not ashamed of what it has to say. It's a joy to read a fantasy novel packed with words that count, words picked for their weight, texture and sound as well as their simple meaning. It's a joy to read someone who can play with words without making a pun. Most of all it's a joy to read a book that doesn't cram everything down your throat, doesn't feel honour-bound to explain every reference, that isn't scared to be self-referential, to lift itself up by its own bootstraps.

Viriconium is a city that always has been. M. John Harrison doesn't create it before your very eyes, there's no cheap sf thrill as the mighty author warps the fabric of space and time to create...life! Viriconium is as real as Babylon or Alexandria or Belona. In "Viriconium Nights" there are six stories in and around Viriconium, and one other. They centre on ritual. Women chase the lamb to bear it to the ground in their teeth, the child locked in the glottokoma has a trade for life, the sin-eater takes the salt, the Mari horse bobs and weaves. In one of the more accessible stories there is a duel, street gangs hunt the victor across the city, the tension is almost conventional. In another a hero quests for a fateful meet with a family curse and, unthinkably, lays it. Harrison moves around fantasy cliches, ignoring them, spinning away into areas off to one side, leaving the light for the clarity of shadows. Nothing in this book is expected, nothing fails to make you think. 

The last story, "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", folds back in on itself as the writer wanders a northern town searching for Viriconium. He finds men who found the path, went and returned, remembering Viriconium as glory and ashes, and still, or because, he cannot find the way himself. Maybe Viriconium is a state of mind, it is a way of seeing. Read it and use it as a filter every day. 

Face it, at £8.95 hardback none of you are going to buy this book. Without a review copy I'd never have read it. Life is ruled by chance and circumstance but sometimes luck will split it wide. If you read sf and fantasy, give "Viriconium Nights" the chance to break your expectations. If you don't read sf and fantasy, why are you reading this, voyeur?"

Seems I quite liked it. 

Also, yes, £8.95 must really have seemed like a lot of money for a book in those days. According to Gemini, £8.95 in 1985's money would be £35.20 today. The End of Everything is only £16.99....

Photo from 

"Wikimedia"

Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - World, Combat, Mechanics

There were other things I could have posted about today but I guess I'd better carry on with my first impressions of Soulframe, before I forget what they were. To refresh my memory, this morning, before I started writing, I logged in for a quick reminder, so I'm now about four and a half hours into the game. 

A lot less far into the story, though. I don't seem to have made a lot of progress there...

This seems like a good moment to talk about the structure of the game, in terms of what you can do and what it seems the developers would prefer that you do. As far as I can tell, it's a true open world game, the kind where you can go anywhere you want, regardless of whether it's in your best interests to go there, but if you let it, the game will keep you running on rails. From the minute you arrive in the world (It has a name, by the way. It's called Alca.) you're given a list objectives, something I found very familiar from numerous recent survival and open-world titles I've played. 

It seems to be standard practice these days and it sometimes means I find it hard to be sure whether I've finished the Tutorial or not. The instructions just keep on coming, long after it feels like they're really needed. The most extreme example I can remember was Chimeraland, where I played for weeks without ever getting to the point where the game wasn't telling me what to do next, but they almost all do it to some degree. 

I have no way of knowing where to place Soulframe on that spectrum because almost as soon as I'd started, I gave up taking direction and wandered off to do my own thing instead.

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Before I broke ranks, I did do as I was told, for a while. After I got reacquainted with grandad, I got sent to a tower, where I found the ghost of a scholar. He was quite a disturbing apparition, having apparently nailed a baby to his shoulder. Well, glued, perhaps. Fixed in a wholly unnatural position, anyway. It made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying, that's for sure.

I ought to make it clear it wasn't that the designer couldn't draw babies, something not uncommon in video games, where it often seems the art department have very little experience (Or interest.) in drawing anyone other than teenage girls or bodybuilders. It was more that this baby pretty obviously wasn't an actual baby. I said "homunculus" to myself the moment I saw it. Out loud, too. Lucky I was on my own at the time.

 

Minnow (That's my character's name. Don't look at me that way. I didn't pick it.) talked to the ghost and he sent her to find his old quill pen, which she found on a tree stump, where it was lying for no reason I can tell you. I guess there might have been an explanation but I was a bit busy killing people at the time, so I just grabbed it and ran.

We need to talk about the killing. There is a lot of it. Really a lot. I know all fantasy MMORPGs revolve almost entirely around indiscriminate slaughter but in most, a great deal of the bloodshed involves animals or monsters, which somehow dulls the "demented mass murderer" tone to everything you do. There's no such get-out clause in Soulframe, not that I've seen. So far, I've encountered precisely two kinds of enemies: humans and dogs. 

The good news is that you don't actually have to kill the dogs. They're war-dogs in armor and when you reduce their hit points to zero they don't die, they just run away, howling. The seemingly endless horde of knights in armor and archers that accompany them isn't handled so sensitively. They just fall down dead.

And they are everywhere. Well, everywhere that isn't just bleak, barren, empty countryside. There's a lot of that. The world, as far as I've explored it, is a wasteland. (There's an exception, which I'll come to...) It looks like there was a war not too long ago, one of those wars of attrition, where everything gets churned into mud. Now everything's quiet again. Mostly because there's nothing left alive.

There are some villages, here and there, and they have villagers. Rarely more than one or two. You can't kill them. You can't talk to them, either. If you get close, they say something along the lines of "Please don't kill me" and then they either carry on working or run away. 

Often there are knights in armor and archers in the same villages and they definitely don't run away. They run straight out you, yelling. Then they do their damndest to kill you.

Apart from the battered countryside, there's the sea and a huge wall, something along the lines of the one in Attack On Titan. (Full disclosure: I have neither read nor watched Attack On Titan.) My working theory is that the knights are an occupying army and their home is beyond that wall. 

 

Except I've been beyond that wall (Had to kill a bunch of guards and use a lever to open the gate.) and it's pretty much more of the same. It's all pretty much more of the same and yet quite different enough to be interesting. Minnow wandered along the coast, through what's left of the forest, swam to an island and went down into the undercity, which is the exception I mentioned earlier. The undercity is where all the good weather, flowers and sunlight are.

Yes, underground. If you want to get out of the gloom and despair and you're looking for light and fresh air, go down a hole! Digital Extremes does like to be different. 

Beneath the land lies a maze of tunnels, lit by braziers, torches and shafts of sunlight. In numerous places there are gaping holes where the tunnels have been breached and exposed to the sky. The whole time I was down there, the sunlight just poured in. Sunlight, I should point out, which was nowhere in evidence when I was on the surface.

What's even stranger is that, wherever the sun comes in, the floor is covered with grass and flowers. It's like late spring in an alpine meadow down there. Why? How? Who knows! It's just a relief to have something nice to look at for a change.

Ah, that's unfair though. Soulframe is a very good-looking game. The world may be dour and filled with mud but it's beautifully appointed. There's scenery everywhere. The character models are great, too. In both look and feel,it  immediately brings to mind another game...

In the comments on the previous post, Tyler Edwards brought up the New World comparison. It's extremely valid. One of the first things I thought, as soon as I started exploring, was "This reminds me of New World."

As I've been saying, much of the landscape I've seen so far is a lot less attractive than Aeternum but it has a very similar aesthetic. Traveling through the landscape feels very similar, except that there's no climbing mechanic (Yet - it is pre-alpha...), which made for a jarring disconnect every time Minnow ran at a wall and didn't immediately haul herself up on top of it. On the other hand, she jumps like a jackrabbit.

 

The mechanics bear close comparison, too. I'm still figuring it out but the basics seem really close to New World's. You can use a variety of weapons and your skill increases with use. You can spend points to open more effects or abilities for each weapon and you can augment them with various materials. 

I'm vague on this for a couple of reasons. The game explains almost nothing, which is fine for the most part because it's all very intuitive, but which leaves any subtleties or nuances largely invisible at these early stages. And I've chosen not to look anything up because so far everything feels extremely organic and natural, again something I always found New World to be, so I haven't needed to.

I think that, in contrast to New World, it may be the actual weapons that improve, rather than your skill in using them. All of them are named and the skill increases that appear on screen every time you level up always have the name of the weapon. For example, Minnow started with a bow called Thistle and that bow is now Level 17. She's acquired several more bows since - weapons drop all the time - but they all have different names and they're all Level 1.

I could look all this up and if I was writing a guide, I would. But I'm giving my first impressions and those are that I don't really need to know yet and I quite like not knowing. I'll dig into it if I start having difficulty but so far, I have had very little trouble killing my way across the map. Very little trouble indeed.

As I said last time, picking a ranger or a scout in a new game doesn't generally go well for me. I often have to swap to a melee character just to get the hang of things. Or to stay alive. In Soulframe, it's been a pleasure. The bow is a joy to use and it's very effective. 

For one thing, there's no ammunition. You never run out of arrows. For another, the aiming is really excellent. If you have the target in sight and in range, the red health bar appears. If not, it doesn't. Hard to get that wrong. You can prepare a shot by holding down RMB, which makes it do more damage. It also zooms in on the target, making aiming even easier. Then you hit LMB while still holding RMB and off the arrow goes. It feels very tactile and satisfying.

Mostly, though, I've been proceeding by the inelegant practice of backpedaling while firing, something that's extremely easy to do on the mostly open, flattish surfaces. Each successful shot has a high chance of staggering the enemy, a chance that can be increased by spending points, so it's fairly simple to keep the target from getting to you before it dies. It felt really familiar from an ancient memory of bow-kiting in EverQuest, where I'd snare something so it couldn't catch up to me and the pump it full of arrows at little risk to myself. 

If the victim manages to catch up, Minnow can turn into a butterfly for a few seconds and fly away, which nearly always gives her enough space to start raining arrows again. Health is restored with potions, of which you can carry only five. I imagine at some point she'll be able to buy or craft them but so far she's been getting a plentiful supply from the downed bodies of her victims.

Drinking a potion is easily done, even in combat, by pressing X and clicking the potion that appears on screen with the mouse. I am generally very bad at using potions but I can use these just fine. 

Mobs drop loot - quite a lot of loot. Much of it seems to be either currency or crafting mats, none of which I yet have found a use for. I have yet to meet a single friendly NPC other than a couple of questgivers, neither of whom seemed to be actually alive. Most loot gets hoovered up automatically as you run over it but any weapons or other objects, you have to stop and click on, which seems like an excellent system to me.

All things considered, I've been finding Soulframe a very enjoyable game, mecanically. It feels very natural and once again the closest comparison I can come up with is New World. The combat has the same "I could just keep doing this for the fun of it" feeling, which is not something I say about a lot of games. 

Where the combat departs from New World's, though, might be in how far above my weight limit I seem to be able to punch. Like, about thirty levels...

In my second session, instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing, I went exploring. There are bizarre magitech constructs all over the place and it's far too tempting not to go look at them. In that regard, the other game it reminds me of is Nightingale. Which, now I come to think of it, always reminded me of New World...

 

As I worked my way along the coast, clearing hostiles out of villages and settlements as I went, I noticed the numbers next to the soldiers I was killing were getting higher and higher. I wasn't precisely sure of my own level, if the player-character indeed has a specific level, rather than just the level of the weapon they're holding, but I was pretty sure it was in the low teens at the most.

The mobs I was killing went into the teens, then the twenties and carried on rising. I kept going, mostly to see when I'd get out of my depth. It was when I'd just pulled and successfully kited and killed a group of four mobs in their low 40s that I started to wonder if that was ever going to happen. It did, eventually, when I finally got overconfident, taking on a team of guards in the high forties, but even then I could easily have backed off and whittled them down, one by one.

By then, I was actively looking for something to kill me. I had yet to die in almost three hours of play and I was curious to see what happened. 

It turned out to be as confusing as most things in the game. On her death, the viewpoint changed to one of the big, glowing tombstones that appear, here and there, and Minnow was given the choice of reviving there or sending Sparrow to her corpse.

Since then I've died a few times and I've tried both options. I'm still not clear on how the Sparrow one works. Getting up at the stone is straightforward but if I choose Sparrow and fly back, I never seem to go to exactly the same place I died and I don't see my body on the ground, either. That might be because I didn't really know where I was when I died, of course. Also, Sparrow's flight is likely to induce motion sickness in anyone who's sensitive to it so be warned of that.

 

As for a death penalty, other than the interruption, I'm not sure if there is one. I didn't get any messages about skill loss or debuffs and if I was missing anything, I didn't notice. 

And that's where I'm going to leave it for now, this post having taken me all day, on and off. Not to mention that, as usual, it's running long. Before I go, I'll just bring it back round to where it was supposed to be headed in the first place, namely the difference between what the game wanted me to do and what I did, to say that very little of what I've described has anything to do with the objectives the game was clearly intending me to concentrate on but that I had a whole load of fun just doing my own thing.

After something like three hours of fairly chaotic exploration, all of which was very enjoyable and quite satisfying, I did eventually decide it might be time to get back on the rails. I logged out this morning having just gotten Minnow back to where she first decided to run off into the countryside. That would seem to be a good place to pick things up next time, when I come to write the third in what is clearly going to be a series of First Impression posts.

The tl:dr so far is that Soulframe is a lot of fun. It looks good and it plays well. It's felt both familiar and new from the start and if I was going to play a fantasy MMORPG right now, I think I'd be as likely to play this one for a while as any. And if I was looking for a new game to try for when New World sunsets, I'd definitely check it out.

Worth the download, then. Now I just have to wait and see how long it holds my attention, I guess. I'll most likely be writing about it as long as it does. I'm not short of things to say about it, that's for sure.

Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - Set-Up, Cinematic, Character Creation And Tutorial

 I didn't have any particular intention of playing another MMORPG but here we are again... It was Saturday morning, Mrs Bhagpuss was at work, Beryl was asleep and there it was, served up to me in the feeds. So why not?

The Soulframe alpha seems to have been running a little under the radar in this part of the blogosphere, especially since several bloggers I read - or used to read, when they were active - were quite keen on Warframe. But the pre-alpha started in 2023 and the NDA dropped the year after, yet I've hardly heard a word about it. 

I guess that might change, now the doors to the alpha have been thrown open for everyone. I knew it was coming but I had so little interest in Soulframe I'd already forgotten until I saw that piece at MMOBomb this morning. But now it was there, I thought...why not? So I did.

My lack of enthusiasm stems from two sources. I didn't much like Warframe, for one. I mean, I didn't hate it... there are a few posts here from the brief time I had with the game, where I say things like "I had fun. Warframe is good, I think. Definitely not my kind of thing but not not my kind of thing either." 

Which is about as equivocal a recommendation as you can get, isn't it? I really didn't want to commit myself. I think the fact that I only posted about it two or three times, though, tells its own story.

Mostly, what I didn't like about Warframe was the aesthetic, which is kind of Sci-Fi meets body horror. Also the way your character is really nothing but a wardrobe full of mech-suits. Soulframe is Digital Extremes' version of basically the same game but with a fantasy skin and an actual character you can see, meaning it has both a setting and a look that ought, in theory, be more to my taste.

 

Only my tastes seem to be changing of late. The classic fantasy tropes that used to feel like sinking into a cosy, comfortable armchair in front of the fire are starting to seem more like perching on a hard wooden bench in a cold waiting room to me, these days. I don't know if I'm just all fantasied out after soaking the stuff up for the best part of fifty years or if the examples I've been seeing in recent times just haven't been up to code. Whatever it is, rough stone walls, thatched roofs, peasants with pitchforks and knights on horseback aren't really doing it for me any more.

Apparently, though, it takes more than a lack of enthusiasm to stop me downloading a free game. Not when it's something as arguably significant as this, anyway. 

Warframe itself may have slipped down the MMO news editors' agenda these days - I remember when it seemed like I was always reading about it - but for a while it was widely being hailed as the model for a whole new generation of MMORPGs, particularly in the F2P sector, where Digital Extremes were often quoted as having the best payment model.

When Soulframe was announced, I remember people talking about it not just as a breath of fresh air for the moribund fantasy MMO scene but very possibly for the future of the genre. And then, I guess, Light No Fire came along.

Except LNF is likely still years away but you can play Soulframe now. And I have.

What's more, I enjoyed it. Quite a lot. I played for a couple of hours, took a break for lunch, then played another hour and a half. By the end I was starting to feel a bit burned out but that's a long day's gaming for me now, especially in a single game. 

Starting at the start, set-up was very easy. The game will be on Steam eventually - it already has a Store page where you can wishlist it - but for now you have to go direct to the website and register with an email address to download the client, which is currently about 12GB, despite the specs suggesting you need four times that. 

That all went smoothly enough. I had the game installed in a just few minutes. And I started playing it immediately so I may have been a little keener to try it than I suggested. 

 

The game opens in a somewhat unusual fashion, with you playing your mother. What looks like a standard opening cinematic morphs into character creation, where you get to choose a few basics like the color of your skin, hair and eyes color along with a hairstyle. Your choices are applied to the woman on screen, who's been standing there the whole time, holding a baby.

That baby? That's you, that is!

Then the screen goes black and you wake up chained to a chair. In your underwear.

I'm going to call this, now. The whole trope of "waking up in your underwear" at the start of a game has had its day. It was fun for a while but it's more than getting old. It's bad enough your character is bound to a chair - at least let them wear some pants!

Your character inherits all the characteristics you chose for the mother and you also get to decide your gender, although, as has become almost traditional, that's not what the game calls it. In keeping with the IP, you get to pick a "Frame", which I guess made sense when what you were picking was a battlesuit but since this is your actual body, maybe not so much...

As if waking up in your skivvies, chained to a kitchen chair, wasn't bad enough, it gets worse. The big figure in armor, who's presumably the one who tied you up, hisses something about remembering you're family, then slaps you round the side of the head with a sword. The flat of the sword, so thanks for small mercies, I guess. And with a family like that, who's going to need enemies?

Next thing, my character, who I just now realize I was never given a chance to name, is lying face down in a shallow stream in the pouring rain, still in her underwear. Once again, I re-iterate, this is not how I want to start any game. How many games start with the player-character being dropped into the sea or washed up, sprawled, half-drowned, on a beach? Too many, that's how many.

 

What do you think would be more distressing than coming to with a blinding headache from being smacked with a lump of metal, lying face down in cold water, dressed in nothing but your wet underwear? Hands up who said "being rescued by a moose"?  That person, take a No-Prize! 

That's what happens. A huge moose, with all kinds of gewgaws and trinkets dangling off its antlers, moseys up, takes a look at you, grabs hold of your blue arm and drags you onto the shore. Oh, didn't I mention you have a blue arm?  Well you do. You had it as a baby, too, so I don't know if it's a tattoo sleeve or if you were born with it. I imagine it means something but no-one even mentioned it, the whole time I was there, so your guess is as good as mine. 

Also, you have metal armor on that arm. Just that one arm. And a metal mask covering your mouth. 

It might be a metal arm. The mask might be part of you. Maybe you're a cyborg... look, I don't know. 

It certainly isn't explained. Nothing is explained. It's the least explainy MMORPG I've played for a long while. I had to look two things up on Google before I even got out of the Tutorial...

So, getting back to the action, a window pops up, thanking you for playing the Prelude and a little hint appears at the top of the screen, suggesting you might want to press "G" to get your Sparrow to come help you. This turns out to be a clever, lore-appropriate way to give you a quest marker. Whatever quest you're currently tracking, pressing "G" will summon a tiny bird that flies off in the direction you need to go, leaving a glowing trail in the air behind it. It's basically the sparkle trail SOE added to EverQuest II in about 2005, only now there's a reason for it to be there.

 

The bird flies off to a small cottage close by. I could hear someone calling my name, too. Well, the name the Scottish voice in the cinematic called me, anyway: Minnow. The only name I had was the Display Name I had to choose when I set up the account. I hate games using your Account name to identify you in game. It's bad enough in a FPS - it should never happen in an RPG.

I followed my sparrow to the door, opened it, went inside and suddenly I was a child. This is so confusing! I'm an in media res, don't need no stinkin' explanations kind of guy but still and even...

It seems to be some kind of magical flashback. The Scotsman turns out to be Minnow's grandfather. I found that out only by wandering around his hobbitty home (He has a lot of pets...) and eventually finding the one thing you can interact with, which is some kind of ocarina. When you pick it up a tune plays. There's a score on screen and the keys you have to press are indicated and when you play the melody, such as it is, the Scottish fellow appears.

Or he does eventually. Not the first time. Not for me, anyway. 

It wasn't because I had any difficulty with the mini-game. I'm terrible at these sorts of things but its a four-note melody and three of the notes are the same. Even I can manage that. So I blew on the thing and nothing happened. 

Well, the Ocarina vanished, so I suppose that happened. But nothing lit up and no-one appeared. My Journal still told me I had to play the tune even though I'd just played it. I wandered around the house for a while, looking at everything for a a second and even a third time. I didn't have much else to do. The door wouldn't open so I was stuck there. Bah, I thought. Must be bugged.

 

But Bhagpuss! Didn't you say you didn't come across any bugs or glitches? 

Yes I did say that and it's true. After about five minutes of nothing happening, I closed the game to see if restarting would fix it. 

And that's when I found my internet had been down the whole time. Presumably from about when I blew on the ocarina. Maybe longer. That's quite a lot of offline persistence for an online game. I'd be happy with less.

I had to reboot the router to get back in but once that was done I was able to re-blow the ocarina and finally meet my grandfather. Or the ghost of my grandfather. Or a memory of my grandfather. I'm kinda vague on the whole grandfather timeline, not to mention his state of existence.

Soulframe seems to like shifting from one mode of being to another. There's the open world, which I guess is "real" and there are talking ghosts and then there's also the Nightfold, which is where I went after I met grandpa. 

The Nightfold is where you go to do all the practical stuff, like changing armor and weapons, assigning Virtue points and going to the cash shop. Oh yes, it's a pre-alpha but it's got a cash shop. The Nightfold is a very odd place with tents that come up out of the water and a camel and pillars of stone that you can walk into and who knows what else. It's also where you finish up Character creation because, in case you forgot about it, you haven't picked a class yet.

Or, I should say, a Pact. Can't just have a class, can you, not nowadays. Except the choice is very clearly between Fighter, Rogue and Healer. They all have fancy names but that's what they are. 

 

Much against my better judgment, I picked the Ranger archetype, aka the Pact of Grace. You can try all three out before deciding but I just wanted the bow. I know. Playing a ranger rarely works out for me but I still can't resist. Everyone knows you ought to pick a Fighter for a first run through a game but fighters are so bleh and I thought rangers were cool, when i was twenty. Hmm. Maybe that's the problem. I'm not twenty any more.

And so we come to the end of the beginning. The real game was just about to begin and somehow, my character, who I guess I'm going to have to call Minnow, had gotten hold of a full set of armor, so at least she wasn't going to be running around in her undies any more. 

I am going to double down and ask why she ever was? If the game is going to hand you armor before you even leave character creation, why have whole sections of the intro where you run around nearly naked?

Rhetorical question. I think we all know the answer to that one.

I imagine I've missed a few important points but Soulframe is open access now so you can make a character and see for yourself if you want. I recommend it. It's free and its fun, at least for a while. Or you could just watch this video on YouTube and see pretty much exactly what I did, except this guy has the sense to try out all three Pacts before choosing one.

I think everything I've described took maybe just the first forty-five minutes. Certainly no more than an hour. But this post is long enough. I'll get to the rest in Part Two. There's quite a bit more to tell.  

Going By The Book

I read quite a lot. Not as much as I'd like but I get through about a book a week, year in, year out, near as dammit. I'd like to think it was more but I did once keep a book journal for almost a whole year, back in the 'eighties, and that's about how it worked out. I don't imagine I've upped my count significantly since then.

It does vary according to what I'm reading, of course. And what I read has always been fairly random. Before I worked in a bookshop, I did most of my book-browsing in charity shops, market stalls and car boot sales. Other than working in one, which I liked a lot, I've never been keen on bookshops, neither new or second-hand. They're too performative for my taste and too well-curated. I like a bit more serendipity in my selection process. 

For the past quarter of a century, while I was working at the bookshop, I got used to getting most of my books for free but it meant I was mostly choosing from whatever publishers were trying to promote. I read a lot more Young Adult and Middle School fiction and Cosy Crime than I might have done otherwise and a lot more debut novels, too. 

I get through most those a lot faster than I would the massive fantasy epics or heavy mainstream novels I'd have been more likely to pay money for. Two or three of those a week, sometimes, so maybe my annual count might have been a little higher after the millennium than it was back in the twentieth century.

The irony is, the whole time I was working in a bookshop, I hardly bought any new books at all, except as presents for other people at Christmas and on birthdays, even though everything was half-price for me, thanks to the very generous employee discount (Which I retain for life, thanks to my quarter-century's service.) Fifty per cent off is a great deal but it can't compete with free. Actually, it can't even compete with used book prices on Amazon or in charity shops, which is where I'll mainly be shopping from now on, I imagine...

All the time I was employed to sell books (Or, more accurately, to move books from one place to another, which was at least 75% of my job, one way or another, the entire time I worked there.) I felt obligated not to discuss the process in public. I also felt uncomfortable about reviewing anything I read, here on the blog. 

I could have, if I'd chosen. There were no restrictions placed on me, other than those that would apply to any employee of any business. Certainly, there was nothing to stop me reviewing any of the books I read after they'd been published, other than my own discomfort. I felt, probably entirely unreasonably, that since I was getting the books for free because I worked there, I had a moral obligation to submit any review I wrote to the company's website, where such submissions were actively encouraged.

 

And that would have been fine. For certain, more people would have read my reviews there and made more use of them, too. I'm not averse to having a wider audience. But reviews on the company website would have had to include my full name and the city I worked in, which was a condition of submitting them, and I was leery of the exposure. 

There's another problem, too. Probably two-thirds of the books I've read since the turn of the millennium have been publishers' proofs. You can review proofs - it's one of the reasons publishers send them out - you just can't quote directly from them. They all have a notice printed somewhere on the cover or inside saying "Not for quotation". 

That's for a couple of reasons. One is that the text isn't final. There may be further changes before publication. I've occasionally checked the published version against a proof and spotted that something's been added or left out. 

The main reason, though, is that proofs haven't had their final pass through the legal checks. You might quote something that later turns out to be problematic and, theoretically, that could involve you in litigation. I don't know if that's ever actually happened but who wants to be the first?

While I'm on the subject of proofs, the way publishers produce them and send them out is just nuts. The entire time I worked in bookselling, every branch I visited had huge piles of unread proofs just taking up space. Bear in mind the shops don't ask for them. The publishers just ship them out to every bookshop in the country (Every high street bookshop, anyway. I don't know how they handle the independents.) without any encouragement. They're an absolute pain to dispose of, too, so I bet a lot of shops would prefer not to get them at all.

In the old days, when we used to see publishers' reps, they'd deliver cartons of the things by hand but even without that personalized service, which ended about a decade ago when the company changed hands yet again (Happened four times in my tenure alone. Twice before that, I believe...) they kept on arriving in the mail every day. Often it's just a single book in a padded envelope, sometimes it's a few in a cardboard wrap and not infrequently it's ten or a dozen in a box. 

Most are proofs, six months to a year prior to publication; some are just free copies of something that's just been published. Plus we always had a bunch of freebies for whatever we were promoting as "Book of the Month", except that ended up being about half a dozen books of the month - Crime, Sci-Fi, Non-Fiction - so we had multiples of all of them...

 

There was a brief moment in the early twenty-teens, when it looked as though most of this might stop. Ebooks were going to be the future and there was a move to distribute proofs electronically rather than physically. There was also an initiative to have booksellers request specific titles online instead of being deluged with stuff they hadn't asked for.

Some of that did happen and for a while, the numbers of physical copies seemed to decline but after a while it just built back up again without anyone really saying anything about it. By the time I left, things seemed to be pretty much back to where they'd been before. 

As for eBooks, they turned out to be an entirely separate business and revenue stream with a completely different distribution and marketing process. In the bookshops now, it's as though they never existed, even though once we had a big display of eReaders at the front of the shop and we all had to be trained how to use them and explain them to customers. That was another future that never happened.

It has always seemed to me indicative of the underlying problem with the publishing industry that, even in a bookshop filled with people who are damn nearly addicted to reading, the huge majority of all the proofs we ever got just sat there, unread by anyone. Even for free, not one of these voracious readers would take them. If you can't give most of your product away, even to addicts, what are your chances of selling it to anyone else?

All the time I worked in bookselling, it looked to me as though publishers basically had just two rules for success: 

 Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.

 Look at what everyone else is doing and if it looks like it's working, copy it. 

That's the model.There's a lot of talk about finding and nurturing new talent but what everyone's really looking for is something exactly like whatever the last thing was that made a shed-load of money. And I guess it works although it must be incredibly wasteful, what with all the books that get published that no-one wants to read.

Still, at least we stopped receiving popular titles by the pallet-load, storing them unopened for a few months, then returning them, still shrink-wrapped, to be pulped or used for landfill. Packing them up and sending them back was my job for a few years, back in the 'noughties. A lot of them used to go to a prison somewhere near Liverpool, where the inmates supposedly drilled holes in them so they'd absorb the water better when they went to be pulped. I know that's where they went because I was the one printing out the address labels...

As a result of my ethical uncertainties, I've reviewed very few books since I started working in a bookshop, either here or anywhere else. (I reviewed plenty before...) The few I have given more than a passing comment have usually been ones I paid for myself or got given as presents. I never felt any of the same obligations if money had changed hands. Now I'm fully retired, I feel free to say pretty much what I like about both the books I read and the job I used to have, always provided, naturally, that what I say is true to the best of my knowledge and belief. 

Don't worry. Inventory Full isn't going to turn into a book blog. I did consider starting one but apart from splitting my audience, which is small enough already, I can't imagine having the time to keep two blogs going. I can barely manage one. 

Instead, I was thinking I might review each book as I finish it. If I'm reading fifty a year, at most, that's only one a week. It would make for a neat feature. But I fear it could also turn into a bit of a treadmill after a while. I've long entertained a fantasy of having regular features here but I've never really done anything about it. It's probably a bit late to start now. 

What's more likely is that I'll review books the way I do TV shows, a few at a time on an irregular cadence, as and when I feel like I have enough for a post. That might work out at something like once a month. Or I could do it the way I do the music posts, which I try to get done once a fortnight. Something with a loose structure that doesn't feel like I have to get it done to a deadline. Although I'm actually good with deadlines...

But what are these books that I'm going to be reading? Where are they going to come from, now the firehose has been switched off? Never fear! I have a plan for that, too.

When I retired officially a couple of weeks ago, I did two things right away: I applied for my free bus pass and I re-joined the Library. I could have done either of those while I was still working - I've been eligible for the buss pass for a couple of years and I used to use the library a lot until I fell out of the habit - but they both seemed like the sort of actions that mark the transition into full-time leisure, so I saved them up for that purpose.

With the two cards in my wallet, I can get the bus into town to go to the Library to borrow physical books (I could drive but it's actually both cheaper and more convenient to go by bus.) plus I can borrow eBooks and audiobooks online. Or I could, if they had anything I wanted. I spent a couple of hours browsing the available stock last week and I was not impressed, especially bearing in mind I have two large city libraries to choose from. 

In a way, the problem is one of success. It seems the online reservation system, which didn't really exist in its current form back when I last used the Library, is so popular and well-used that pretty much anything anyone would want to read is booked up weeks - sometimes months - in advance. If you want to borrow Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Exit Party, as I did, you're going to have to wait until May 2027!

I don't read that way. I read by mood, whim and whimsy. I am not going to be able to predict today what I might want to read next week, let alone next month or next year. That just leaves me with the option of going into town and browsing the shelves, where I can be sure all the good books won't be because someone will have reserved them.

I was surprised to the point of being shocked, too, by just how poor the available range in the library system is now. I searched for several authors I'd consider to be standard back-catalog staples, people like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, and there was barely anything. One the plus side, if you're looking for Dr. Who novelizations, the Library has you covered - they've got dozens of the things and no-one's reserving any of them.

 

No doubt I will still make some use of my new library card but I'm going back to what was my original plan, which is to re-read some of the hundreds - probably thousands - of books I already own. I used to re-read a lot before I worked in a bookshop but that constant flood of new titles was always too tempting so I fell out of the habit. Now I have no such excuse. 

There are also quite a few books in the house that I've never read. I'd guess at least fifty, maybe a hundred. The problem with unread books, though, is that they're usually unread for a reason and that reason is often that I don't want to read them. I tend to read books I want to read very soon after I get them. If they linger, it's a bad sign.

Occasionally, though, something just gets overlooked. As part of my re-reading program and since her name was in my mind after my fruitless library search, I took Tama Janowitz's debut novel, American Dad, off the shelf yesterday and started reading it. I thought I'd read just about all her books - there aren't all that many - but it turns out I'd never read American Dad, even though I've had a copy for a long time. 

Although not this copy I'm reading. That one, I bought in a charity shop over the summer. Where my original copy is now, I have no idea. It's entirely possible I was fooling myself about ever having one. (See yesterday's musings on memory.) 

I'm reading it now, though, and a review - or at least a few opinionated paragraphs - may appear here at some point. I've no idea who wants to read biased reviews of decades-old novels but if I want to write them, who's going to stop me, at least now my conscience has retired, along with the rest of me?

The first of my re-reads, which I finished yesterday, was Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. When I sat down this morning to write a post,that's what I thought I was going to write about. It wasn't, though, and now I'm already more than two thousand words in and I've only just gotten around to mentioning it, so I guess the review have to wait for another time.

This feature's off to a great start, isn't it?

Remember, Remember...

 This is going to be another in that popular, long-running series "Just How Bad Is My Memory, Anyway?" It's not like I'm going to run out of material any time soon.

Of course, memory doesn't really exist. It's a construct. Whatever you think you remember, you most likely don't. One of the ironies of memory is that the better you think remember something, the more you go over it and polish it, the worse that memory becomes. The best way to keep a memory pristine is never to remember it at all.

And another irony is that, if you try to remember something for which you have no actual memory, your mind, like a too-helpful AI, will do its best to create one. Then you'll remember that hallucination and believe its real. It's almost as though what Philip K Dick, Timothy Leary and the Beatles tried to tell us back in the sixties, that nothing is real, is all that's really real.

Forget about age-related memory loss, then. I may be getting to the point when my memory might be expected to start to fail but if it was pretty much a failure to begin with, what's to worry? And I never did have a good memory, even when I was in my teens and twenties. I had more trouble than most of my peers learning verse or lines for the school plays and I was much better at A-Level history, where what was required was analytical thought, than I had been at O-Level, when all I had to do was remember dates.

All of this introspecting came about because I looked at my desktop and happened to notice the icon for Amazon's cloud-streaming service Luna. I thought I'd have a look at what was on there, these days. I mean, I used to post summaries of what was new and free on Prime Gaming every month. 

When was the last time I did one of those?

 

Yes, well, obviously I couldn't remember, so I looked it up. That's one advantage of having a blog. 

In July, I wrote a long piece about Amazon Luna and how it had taken over as the distribution platform for what used to be free games on Prime Gaming. Reading it back, I found I'd forgotten everything I said in that article except that I could play some games on Luna for free. That I remembered.

The last time I wrote anything specifically about Amazon Prime Gaming, though, was almost a year ago, in December 2025. I seemed to be very confused about what was going on then, complaining that "Amazon Games... still exists independently of Luna, apparently. Or maybe not. I can't tell any more."

I can confirm Amazon Games does indeed still exist at time of writing although, once again, I had to ask an AI to be sure. I didn't start with that, though. I began by opening Luna to see what was inside. 

Mostly confusion, as it turned out. The app opens to a carousel of animations for the games they're currently promoting. Below that comes "New Games", "Continue Playing", "Recently Added" and then everything else. I tried clicking on "My Stuff" at the top of the page but apart from the last game I played on Luna, Dispatch, it seemed I didn't have any stuff. 

I spent a fair old while, clicking on just about everything, trying to find either the games I used to own or any new ones I might be able to claim until, finally, right at the very bottom, on the fourth page of results, if you scroll down using the Page Down key, which no-one would but I did for science, I came to this:

 

Literally the very last thing on Luna. Someone very much hopes you'll give up before you get there. But now I'd found them, were there any games worth claiming? I clicked on the banner...

 

There are eight games to claim for free, three from Epic Games, three from GOG, one from Amazon Games itself and one from Legacy Games, who I could have sworn I'd read were closing down... and yep, they are! 

Legacy Games is indeed closing for good in February next year. There's a detailed FAQ explaining exactly what's going to happen to the games you already own, which they said you'd own "forever". Surprisingly, it turns out that you do. You can go on playing as long as you want, provided you've downloaded them and backed them up on your own hardware before the Legacy Games Launcher ceases to operate on February 28.

Most of the the games Legacy offer are Hidden Object titles so I hardly ever claimed any of them. I wouldn't bother to keep the few I did claim and never played but it's nice to know I could if I wanted. Seems like a pretty fair way to end the service although it's slightly odd that Prime is still giving them away.

Of the eight claimable games, none of which I'm going to summarize, so go look them up for yourself if you want to know more, there were only a couple that interested me: Trash Goblin and Caravan SandWitch. Trash Goblin isn't really my sort of thing but I thought Mrs Bhagpuss might find it amusing and since she's starting to express quite an interest in gaming again, it seemed worth grabbing this one, just in case.

 

As for Caravan SandWitch, It looked a bit like the unfortunate Outbound but with a science fiction setting and a storyline. I like driving around in vans in games, especially when there's attractive scenery to look at, so I took it. It was the one game on Amazon's own platform, which made me wonder where it would go.

My first thought was Luna. I mean, I was on Luna and Amazon own it... but I couldn't see it anywhere so I did what I'm starting to do a lot these days; I asked Gemini.

It's insidious, isn't it? The way these AIs have slyly inserted themselves into our daily routines no matter how hard we try to keep them out. It seems like every day I get a news report about some service or platform adding a toggle to filter out the product of generative AI, the latest being Nexus Mods, whatever that is. Meanwhile, the cybernetic tentacles creep into everything we already use and make themselves indispensable. If this is a bubble it's going to be a hell of a shock when it bursts and not just for the economy.

I didn't keep a record of the conversation because I just typed my query into Google Search and I've long since closed the tab so it's gone. If I'd bothered to log into Gemini, anything we said to each other would have been dutifully recorded. Everything I have ever asked Google's AI is set out in neat tabs, titled by topic, down the left of the screen. It's very handy if a little worrisome. But then, if you saw what I'd been asking, you'd know why I'm not worried. It's all very dull. 

  

I told Gemini what I'd done and asked it where my game was. Gemini reminded me that Amazon Games hadn't, in fact, gone anywhere so I ought to go look for it. It restrained itself from questioning my mental competence and didn't ask me why I was wasting its time on trivia, although I imagine you can train it to do that, if you enjoy being mocked. There are people who do, apparently.

My unreliable memory had been telling me with confidence that Amazon Games had been wholly replaced by Luna but it has not. It's still there, just like it always was. I downloaded the Amazon Games app, which must have vanished when I had to replace my C Drive in the summer, and there was Caravan SandWitch, along with all my other games.

I had an hour or so before we were due to take Beryl over to the playing fields, where Mrs Bhagpuss wanted to go so we could feed the crows. You know that thing about how crows can recognize faces? It's absolutely true, especially when the face belongs to someone that's going to feed them.

As we were walking around the cycle track in the drizzle, Mrs. Bhagpuss informed me that not only can crows remember faces, they can pass the information on to their offspring for up to three generations. So crows have better memories than I do and their crow-children will remember me after I'm dead. There's a cheering thought...

I started playing SandWitch and got stuck in the first room, which is never a great start. I had to watch someone else do it on YouTube to find there was an incredibly obvious solution to the "puzzle", which didn't even justify being called a puzzle, and which the game literally explains to you. So that was a good start.

 

Fortunately, the game looked very attractive and felt good to play so I accepted it was all my fault and carried on. I boarded the space train to the nearby planet, from where the lead character's sister, last seen alive six years ago, had just sent an emergency message. Nothing about any of this felt in any way familiar.

Planetside, I got into the van and weaved my way uncertainly to the nearby town. As soon as I arrived, I started to get the idea I'd been there before. It was almost like deja vu. After a couple of minutes it was  more than a feeling. It was a near-certainty. But... memory...

Human memory may be mostly notional and AIs may hallucinate but blogs never lie. Bloggers do but that's different. I tabbed out and did a search on the blog for "Caravan SandWitch" and guess what? 

I played the demo in the June Next Fest two years ago. I wrote a full post on it. Apparently I really liked it. Of the demo, my tl:dr was "It's great and I have nothing bad to say about it at all." I also said I'd wishlisted it and was looking forward to playing the full game, when it came out later that year.

As I said, bloggers lie. Not only did I not buy it, it's not even on my wishlist and I don't believe it ever has been. I did clear some deadwood there, earlier this year, but I don't remember culling that one. Although, again, memory...

Oh, memory... this is the downside of keeping a blog. One of the reasons I rarely go back and read my own posts is that they seem to record a different set of experiences altogether from anything I remember. It's a litany of claims I don't recall making and reactions I don't recall having. 

As I re-read, of course, those feelings and impressions return. Reading them makes them real. Without the recorded words they have no existence. 

Now I have yet another game to play. According to my notes, I ought to enjoy it. I'll post about it when I've played a little more.

If I remember... 

This Is Planet Azeroth

World of Warcraft Forever goes live today. I'm curious to see how that goes, even if I don't have any immediate plans to play it myself. 

I'm a little vague on the exact point of WoWF, anyway. (We are all agreeing to call it WoWF, aren't we? Like a big dog gruffly greeting someone it knows, but not well, with an implied question mark at the end.) What is it for, exactly? And who? Sorry, whom?

About an hour ago, I checked on how the reviews were going. Or I tried to. I know it's not quite out yet but it was in beta for weeks so I don't imagine reviewers are going to wait for the servers to open before getting their opinions out there. There was no NDA, after all.

I looked at the Fantasy Critic League, where Wilhelm has picked WoWF, but so far it doesn't even have an Open Critic page. There is a link there to "GG", whatever that is, but it leads to a blank page. 

Browsing through the links on a Google search, though, I see all the big names have had their say on the beta: IGN, Polygon, PCGamer, GamesRadar... and they all seem to have loved their time in pseudo-old Azeroth.

Forever has nailed it

Pure magic

WoW: Forever has struck such a chord

Quotes pulled from the linked reviews, there. It looks like Wilhelm's picked a winner. As far as the League goes, it doesn't matter what the customers think, so long as the reviewers are happy.

But what is WoW Forever? I'm still not clear, even after reading those reviews. Is it a new game? A remaster? A Special Rules Server that got ideas above its station?

Fantasy Critic League tags every game with a specific label to indicate exactly what you're getting into when you pick one.

Cancelled Currently in Early Access Director's Cut Expansion Pack Free to Play New Game New Gaming Franchise Partial Remake Planned for Early Access Port Reimagining Released Internationally Remake Remaster Unannounced Game Virtual Reality Will Release Internationally First Yearly Installment 

WoWF has been tagged "Partial Remake". So what does that mean?

"There are several "remake" tags, and they go in this order, from "most remade" to "least remade":

Reimagining > Remake > Partial Remake > Remaster

There is also Director's Cut , which is somewhere around Partial Remake and Remaster  but it's hard to say for sure what order it goes in. "

So WoWF is on the less-extensively remodeled end of the scale, or so they think. Definitely not a new game. Not even a new version of an old one. Just a refurbishment. Same old house, just a new coat of paint and maybe a loft extension or a conservatory round the back.

It figures. From what I've heard from people who were in the beta, it's kind of like Classic but with some more modern, user-friendly adjustments. And, of course, some actual new content. There are those "Sky Elves", for a start, because every fantasy game needs more elves. Everyone loves elves, right?

There are four new zones, too: Zephras Isle, Riverglades, Shen’Dralas, and Mount Hyjal. One of those is the elf starting zone, two are mid-level and one is endgame. All fitting neatly into the map we already know.

It's a familiar phenomenon. A lot of aging MMORPGs somehow manage to find a few zones the cartographers missed. Usually around about when the thought of coming across yet another undiscovered continent is beginning to stretch credulity a little too far.

All of which cartographic conversation brings us neatly to the reason I thought of writing this post in the first place. It wasn't so much to commemorate WoWF's launch day as it was to express some surprise over Bill Bailey's career choices.

I have no idea how well-known Bill Bailey is outside the UK but evidently his profile was high enough to bring him to the attention of Blizzard's marketing dept. because he's been hired to present a series of spoof documentaries, lightly parodying David Attenborough's Planet Earth under the name Planet Azeroth.

I would have remained happily ignorant of these were it not for a news item at NME.

I guess it's not the most unlikely of sources. Bill Bailey, as well as being a comedian, is also kind of a musician. He's put himself forward to represent the UK at Eurovision at least twice, with no success, and he's made a heavy metal album. Alright, a parody heavy metal album but he did still play all the songs on it. 

He's a gamer, too, although I can't confirm whether he plays WoW.  He played No Man's Sky, for whose promotional round he was also booked, so it's not that unlikely. Plus he looks like he comes from either Azeroth or Middle Earth...

I'm not really up to speed on Bill's talents, mostly because a friend of mine used to hate him so much it was unwise even to mention the name "Bill Bailey" in his presence. It made him so angry, in fact, I was never able to ask him what the problem was. I can take Bill Bailey or leave him, myself, although for a while I got put off him by osmosis. 

I took him this morning. In three smallish doses. I watched the first two Planet Azeroth videos on the Official World Of Warcraft YouTube channel, which until today I didn't know existed, although obviously there had to be one. The third I watched on  IGN's channel, the only place it seems to be showing. Maybe they have an exclusive.

As entertainment, I found them inconsistent. Some bits were so funny I laughed out loud. Others bordered on the cringe-worthy. A lot of Bill's commentary felt very in-jokey indeed, which leads me to believe Bill is either extremely professional (He is, in fact.) or a long-time player himself. (He might be.)

My favorite part comes early in the first video, where the wolf is walking next to a fence and Bill casts aspersions on both its ferociousness and its height. The best thing about the whole series might be the way it offers a lengthy and relaxed opportunity to study the mobs in detail. That's something I always mean to do in games but rarely do. The artists' work on most of the creatures we end up killing largely goes unseen because it's hard to take in the finer details when you're fighting for your life.

Anyway, in case you're going to be playing WoWF later today and you'd missed these little vignettes of what life there could be like, I thought I'd share. I'm looking forward to hearing all the stories. Maybe I'll join in a little later, when all the fuss has died down...

In The Palace Of The Odd

Too many games seems like such an entitled complaint but really, who can keep up? While everyone else is focused on World of Warcraft Forever or Grand Theft Auto VI or even the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, all launching this month, I thought I had a clear run through December and January, with just the EverQuest II expansion (No date yet but it'll be December.) and Ananta arriving on January 15 2027. 

Only now I learn there's another game I'm curious about that's launching in December. And another that doesn't, as yet, have release date but which looks like it will, when it comes, shoulder everything else aside.

The one that's definitely coming soon is Silver Palace. I was already vaguely aware of it - I wrote about it in September when, apparently, I also pre-registered. Much good that did me. I'd heard not a word from anyone about the game since then, not until I read about the launch date on MMOBomb yesterday

After that, I went to the official website and watched the rest of the videos. They seem a bit generic but I guess I'm going to be giving it a go all the same.

The game, which is releasing globally on December 14, is described on the Epic Store as an "open-world action adventure RPG centred around detective mysteries". I checked Epic because, annoyingly, the game isn't on Steam, or not as yet, anyway. 

MMOBomb has variously labeled it a "Victorian-themed anime action game" and a "Victorian noir-style action RPG." It is, of course, a gacha game, too, but then all the good ones are, these days.

From the videos, I'd call it a mash-up. It looks like they threw a bunch of genres into a blender, then stirred in a gaggle of tropes after that. They seem to have everything in there, from knights in the age of chivalry to fin de siecle grandeur to the roaring twenties, all mushed together with no consideration for reason or logic.

It looks great! I'd play it. I'm going to play it. At least for long enough to find out if it's really just a horrible mess or whether that blender has churned out something smooth and delicious.

I just hope the gameplay doesn't lean too heavily into playing the detective. As I was saying the other day, I always think I'm going to like detective games more than I actually do. I don't imagine there'll be too many of those super-annoying whiteboards covered with bits of string, anyway. That's more of a 'nineties/noughties trope. From the videos, it looks like it's further down towards the sword-sticks and brass knuckles end of the cliche. More Holmes and Raffles than CSI Fantasyland. (I bloody hate Raffles, as it happens...)

I like flamethrowers, though. Well, in games, that is. And I do like the look of some of the characters, particularly the way they seem to be quite chaotic and accident-prone. That looks like it might be a laugh. For once, I might even play the male character. The top-hat and tails look is very fetching.

That's Silver Palace, then. I could write more about it but since I don't know anything more, that wouldn't take long. I will just mention that the developer behind it, Elementa Games, is based in Singapore. Whether that's going to bring a different feel or aesthetic to the familiar mix will be interesting to see.

On to the next one. And it's a good one. 

It's called Ordinary Oddness, which is a pretty fine thing to be called. I don't know a lot about this one either but there's a twenty-two minute "Reveal Trailer" on YouTube. Watch that and you'll know as much about it as I do. 

And I do recommend watching it, too. Preferably in full screen. It'll be twenty minutes well-spent, trust me.

I just watched it all the way through again. It is, frankly, stunning. It seems to be a segment stripped straight out of the main storyline and even without knowing any of the characters or backstory, it's compulsive viewing. It makes the Silver Palace videos look trite by comparison and I thought those were pretty decent.

I'm willing to entertain the explanation that these kinds of games are playing directly to my personal preferences but even allowing for that, why is the quality so high now? Free-to-play games were never like this before Genshin Impact, were they? Now they all are. (This one, as usual, is coming from a division of TenCent called Cosmipup Studios. It's based in Hangzhou, like they often seem to be. Must be a fun place...)

As for what genre Ordinary Oddness is supposed to be, the Steam Store page (This one is on Steam, I'm happy to say.) calls it a "Nothing-Stays-Oddinary Open-World RPG." Yes, they do spell that "Oddinary" I can't tell if it's a typo or a pun. 

QuintLyn Bowers, writing for MMOBomb, unhelpfully, for me anyway, describes it as "Paprika if it were a game."  I'd never heard of Paprika because I'm an anime ignoramus. Alright, an anime ingenue. That's less hurtful. 

Fortunately, I know how to look stuff up.

Wikipedia tells me Paprika was "a 2006 Japanese animated surrealist science fiction psychological thriller" that might have been the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's Inception, another movie I've never seen and know next to nothing about. 

I don't need any of those reference points, though. I know exactly what Ordinary Oddness is referencing and I can date that influence back a decade or so before Paprika, too. Ordinary Madness is Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, if it was a game, not a comic.

I don't actually like Grant Morrison. Or not for a long time. I sat in an auditorium at a comic convention in the 'nineties and watched him instigate what looked disturbingly like a sixties love-in on stage. There were bean-bags, ffs! I walked out after a few minutes and went to the bar instead. I don't believe I've read anything he's written since. 

Before that, though, I read all his Doom Patrols and loved them. That was why I was waiting to hear him talk in the first place. Never meet your heroes. It's such great advice. 

At the time, Doom Patrol was nothing like I'd seen in comics before. I imagine it was like something someone had seen. Very little is ever original. But it certainly was the first dadaist/surrealist super-hero title from a mainstream American publisher I'd read. 

Not, obviously, the last. That influence is all over Ordinary Madness like fingerprints although Morrison's pernicious influence is so pervasive in the culture now, there's absolutely no reason to believe anyone involved with the game has ever even heard of the Doom Patrol. It's like fucking Tolkein now, the stuff Alan Moore and Grant Morrison piped into the air ducts back then.

If you've been waiting thirty years for a chance to walk abut in that world, well now's your chance. I can't wait, personally. Ordinary Madness is above Ananta on my want-to-play list now.

Of course, by the time it arrives, there'll probably be something better out there, coming down the production line. Apparently it is possible to have too much of a good thing after all.