Steam Spring Sale - Bargains And Skips

The first I knew about the Steam Spring Sale this year was when I saw a post about it yesterday from Kay Talks Games. I didn't even remember there was any such thing as a Spring sale on Steam. If you'd asked me, I'd have said there was one in the Winter and another in Summer and that was it. Shows what I know.

There is a Spring sale, though. It started yesterday, even if it's not quite Spring yet, the way a lot of people count it. But let's not get into that one, right?  

Valve's version of Spring only lasts a week, from now until March 26. I understand from bits and pieces I've picked up over the years that prices in the sale used to change as it went along, just like they do in a physical sale, with the real bargains coming right at the start or close to the end. 

From what I heard, that just led to everyone keeping their credit cards in their wallets in the hope of picking up a real bargain in the last day or two, so as far as I can tell they put a stop to it and the discounts stay the same all the way through. On that assumption, there didn't seem any point in waiting, so I jumped right in.

It seems to me like there are a few obvious ways to approach a Steam sale. You either go straight to your Wishlist and see what's been marked down or you hit that handy Deep Discount button on the front page. I guess you could also take a look at the high profile Recommends banner that runs right across the top, too. I did all of those, starting with my Wishlist. 

Wishlists are weird, aren't they? Kind of a misleading title. Developers want to see their games wishlisted because it boosts the profile and players often just want to keep an eye on games they have no intention of buying. It's more of a notepad or a promotional device than a shopping list, sometimes.

I have thirty-three games on mine, down from thirty-five as of last night. They split into three loose categories, grouped by how likely I am to buy them. There are the the ones that aren't out yet that I'm keeping an eye on, the ones I definitely want but only at the right price and then there's the rest. Those I probably will never buy at any price but they're on there just on the off-chance they might go to 90% off at some point and I won't be able to resist.

I guess I could cull that last group. I do sometimes drop a few things I'm sure I wouldn't play even if I got them for free. Mostly, though, it costs me nothing to leave them on there so that's what I do.

Here's an example to make it clearer. I've had Smalland on the Wishlist for more than three years now. It's been discounted many times and it's currently 70% off in the Spring Sale. I still haven't bought it. So why is that?

Two reasons, the first to do with the game itself, the second with the price. 

Smalland is a survival/crafting/exploration game, where the USP is that you're tiny. It looks like it would be fun and it has good reviews but I don't have either the time or the inclination to play a survival game right now. If I did it would probably be Enshrouded. 

At full price, Smalland costs £29.99. With a 70%  discount it's still £8.99. Seventy per cent may be a massive markdown but £8.99 is still more than I want to pay for a game I'm only mildly curious about. The thing you have to remember about bargains is it's not how much you save that matters - it's how much you spend.

So, I didn't buy Smallands or half a dozen more games on my Wishlist even though they were 50% off or more. It doesn't mean I don't want them. It just means I don't want them right now or at those prices. Maybe one day, though, so they stay.

There were a couple I might have gone for, had there been more money off:  Wildermyth and Dispatch. I would play either of those but I'm not so keen I'd take them at 35% off, let alone 20%. Get to half price and then we'll talk.

I did want to buy something, though. I have some credit left from the Steam cards I got for Christmas. Quite a bit, in fact. I like to keep something in the pot for impulse purchases but not fifty quid. 

Luckily for me, there were two stand-out candidates. Games I've wanted to play since I heard about them. Games I can be reasonably sure won't just sit in my library for years, unplayed. One was half-price but the other was only 35% off. Was that enough?

Yes. Yes it was. Apparently I wanted to play Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer that much. That's a good sign, isn't it?

It's significant that both the games I bought from my Wishlist last night are sequels. (The other is Chicken Police: Into The Hive.) That makes them a low-risk option; known quantities. I remember the originals very clearly. I had a great time playing both of them. The reviews suggest both sequels are more of the same, possibly better. 

Also, and perhaps more important, they're both point-and-click adventures and I haven't played one of those for a while. I really like having one of those on the go. I generally find them more satisfying than visual novels, although it depends on how they're put together. The genres can feel pretty similar, sometimes.

I very nearly bought a third point-and-click adventure: Old Skies. I really want to play it but it was only 20% off and since I already had two similar games in my basket it seemed like it could wait a little longer. It's moving up the list fast, though. I might crack before the sale ends and get it anyway.

When I said earlier that I started with my Wishlist I was misremembering. I had a quick look at the Deep Discounts first. It makes sense to start there. Two or three super-discounted titles might have been all I needed and all together they might have come to less than a single game at half-price. There's only time to play so many games, after all. Why spend more than you have to?

In the event, there was only one game on deep discount I could imagine playing immediately: Pathfinder Kingmaker. It's another Baldur's Gate style isometric RPG. I've looked at it a few times and left it alone but at £2.66 (85% off.) it seemed like its time had come.

So I bought it. And only now, as I write this, do I realize my mistake. Yes, it was a bargain but not so much of a bargain as the bundle that includes the game plus all the DLC for £3.38. 

So I've just submitted my first-ever request for a refund from Steam. If it's approved, I'll buy the bundle. Maybe I won't like the game enough to want to play the DLC but if it's only going to cost me less than a pound I might as well be optimistic about it.

There just remains the question of when I'm going to play any of these games. Even though I make a pretty good job of only buying things I'm likely to get to sooner rather than later, it can still take a while. In the screenshot at the top of the post you can see two other games I'm kind of playing right now: Penny Larceny and Road 96. I'd had for a while before I got to them. 

I've played two and half hours of Penny Larceny so far. I'm enjoying it but it's a bit preachy, which puts me off a little. I was expecting a knockabout caper with supervillains but it seems to be more of a social satire. So far, most of the characters don't even seem to have any real superpowers, just a lot of angst and drama. The narrative tone can get quite judgmental at times, too, even when it's clearly trying to be just the opposite. Not sure they have the balance quite right.

As for Road 96, I'm really not having a lot of luck with that one. My played time is just 16 minutes because that's how long it took me to get to the part where you have to kick a ball and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I googled it and still didn't get an answer, or not one that worked, so either I'm bugged or I can't follow simple directions. Could be either.

And that's the state of play re my Steam Sale so far. A few more days still to go. I might yet buy something else. 

I should probably resist the temptation. I clearly have more than enough to be going on with.

Winds Of Valen - First Impressions

I've only recently started paying attention to the recommendations that appear on my Steam home page or whatever the heck we're calling it. Landing page? Login screen? The first thing I see when I open Steam, anyway. You know what I mean.

It used to be filled with games I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever and I trained myself to ignore them but lately I've noticed a lot more turning up there that seem to have some vague relevance to the kind of thing I might usually play. I've gradually slipped into at least glancing at them, taking a closer look at any that stand out. I guess that's how they get you.

Yesterday, a title I hadn't heard of popped up - Winds of Valen. It looked pretty so I passed the mouse pointer across the image to see what sort of game it was. 

It's a F2P MMORPG. That is kind of in my wheelhouse. Not that I have a wheelhouse. Or would know what to do with one if I had. Keep my wheels in it, I suppose...

Here's the store description:

Winds of Valen is a free fantasy sandbox MMORPG. Experience old-school progression where every level, skill, and drop is earned through effort. Train your combat, mining, and smithing skills, and hunt for rare and unique items in a seamless open world filled with danger and discovery.

Well, that sounds alright, doesn't it? I wonder how much of it is true? (Spoiler: most of it, if you squint hard enough and don't set your expectations too high.) The footprint was fairly small, just over a gigabyte (The specs say 2gb required.) so I stuffed it into my Steam Library and left it there for the morning. 

Today I played for half an hour after breakfast and an hour and a half this afternoon. 

And it was fun. For a given value of fun, that is. Whether you think it would be fun too depends on your feelings about The Grind.

As many of the Steam reviews (More than six hundred of them, currently aggregating to Mostly Positive.) point out, often as though it's an attraction not a drawback, there's not much to do in the game other than kill mobs, raise skills and pick up loot. Grinding is the gameplay. The developers seem to agree:

"Winds of Valen is built for players who enjoy the open-ended, sandbox design of old-school MMOs." 

Yeah. That's what we called grinding, back in the day.

The other thing many of the reviews agree on is how similar Winds of Valen is to one particular, very specific old-school MMO. It's the one that literally has "old-school" in its name: Old School Runescape. 

I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of that impression. I've never played OSRS. I have played Runescape, though, albeit years back and not for long, and it didn't remind me all that much of what little I remember about it, but I think that might have more to do with what WoV looks like than anything. I sure don't remember Runescape looking this charming.

So, where did this thing thing pop up from, anyway? According to the description on Steam, WoV launched in November 2025. According to itch.io, where the game is also available, it came out slightly before that, at the end of October. Itch says the developer is HeadCoach. Steam says it's Fiery Dog Games. 

Not sure it really matters. What does is that, since then, it's been updated regularly. And that tells an interesting story in itself.

If Winds of Valen was a modern, forward-looking, cutting-edge MMORPG it wouldn't have launched at all. It'd have gone into Early Access and stayed there for a year or three. That would have given the devs a pass for any glitches, bugs or shortfalls in content. Or at least they'd have claimed it did.

WoV sure as heck plays like an Early Access game, not least because there's not a whole lot of content there yet, but if you can remember that far back, that's how many MMORPGs used to be at launch. They'd come out half-finished, if that, and then patch patch patch until they had something approximating a full game. Players expected it and if the game was any good they hung around for it.

WoV is like that. The update history on Steam shows a stream of patches, small and large. Eighteen since last November. That's old school, alright. 

As for the payment model, F2P, might not seem to fit the old school bill (Although the free to play model is older than you might imagine.) but if this was a regular 2026 F2P title, it'd have plenty of Supporter Packs you'd be able to buy to "show support". As far as I can see you can't give Fiery Dog or HeadCoach, whichever it is, any money, even if you wanted to. How they're funding this thing beats me because there's no in-game cash shop I could see, either.

So, that's the background. How about the game?

Well, there's not a lot there yet but what there is looks very promising. As you can see from the screenshots, it's very pretty. If anything the visuals are better in game.

Performance-wise, I'd say it was bug-free because I certainly didn't run into any problems when I was playing, except that I hit a pretty big one when I logged out. After each session my PC crashed and had to be hard-rebooted. Makes me a bit nervous to try again, although I might give it a go on the laptop to see if it'll run there.

When you hit Play for the first time, it's straight into Character Creation. There's absolutely no story, no narrative, no introductory movie or cut scene to sit through. There aren't even any passages of sub-Tolkeinian prose to set the scene. There's nothing at all. It's so refreshing!

Character creation itself is fairly basic but the models are cute and I had no problems getting someone I felt comfortable playing. The surprise comes when you have to pick a server. There are half a dozen, each in a different region. How a game like this manages servers in the USA, Europe and Australia beats me. When I was making my choice, there were people on all of them, mostly single figures. The game has a thirty-day average concurrency of just under a hundred with an all-time peak three times that, according to the Steam Charts.

I spawned in on the outskirts of a village with a huge castle behind me, the implication being, I guess, that that's where I'd come from. Nothing in the game said so, of course. Nothing in the game says anything, including the NPCs, mostly because there are none.

There are no questgivers because there are no quests. There are shops but they're automated. No-one's waiting behind the counter to serve you. You have a sword and a pickaxe and that's your lot. It's the sandiest of sandboxes. Who needs NPCs? Just get on with it!

So I did. I went out of the village to see what was there and what was there was goblins. And skeletons. And chickens. And cows. You can kill all of those. I did, except for the cows. I didn't kill any cows. It seemed... unnecessary.

I sliced them all up with my sword. It's not like I had a choice. There's only one weapon type I could find and that was the sword. There's a  whole sword shop. All it sells are swords. There's crafting and the only weapon you can craft is a sword. If you don't like swords you're in the wrong game.

There are shields, too. They have their own shop and crafting recipes. Ditto armor. Ditto potions, theoretically, although I couldn't find the crafting station for those.  There's jewelry, too, and a jewelry store but I didn't see any crafting option for rings or amulets. Probably waiting for a patch.

If you don't want to craft your gear you can rely on the mobs you kill to provide. Everything always drops something, even if its only coin. You can wait for the item you need to drop, which is how I got a shield, a helmet and a ring, or you can save up your coins and buy what you want in town. 

It's surprisingly satisfying. And very old-school, except in the really old days, everything in the shops would have been inferior quality, where here it's pretty good. The motivating factor to get you crafting or looting rather than going to the store is the price. I'd still be saving for a shield if one hadn't dropped.

One distinctly new-school innovation I liked was the information panel that pops up when you target a mob. It doesn't just tell you all the stats, it tells you what the mob drops and the percentage chance of it happening. Until you actually get the drop, there's a question mark to maintain the suspense about what it might be but the likelihood of getting something is clear right from the start.

Even better, the chance of a special item dropping increases the longer you fail to get one. I was killing skeleton miners to see what the drop was going to be and my chances went from 7% to 12% before I got lucky. 

The rare drop off a Skeleton Miner turned out to be a pair of boots with a bonus to mining. The common drop is either tin or copper ore. Drops are rational and realistic, which I'd have to say is very definitely not in keeping with the old school vibe, but much appreciated by me all the same.It used to bug the heck out of me when a wolf would drop a rusty sword in EverQuest.

The combat itself is about as basic as you could possibly imagine. No player input is required at all beyond targeting the mob and starting the fight. From then on, the two just exchange blows until one of them falls over. If it's the mob, you loot it and move on to the next. If it's you, you respawn in town at full health . There's no death penalty as far as I could tell.

There's not much in the way of healing, either. You can use potions but I didn't bother. It seemed pointless when I was so close to the spawn spot. Mobs either use potions to heal up after a fight or employ some similar mechanism. They heal themselves up in stages, anyway,with a visual effect to show they've done it. If you can run back fast enough, you can catch them still at low health and carry on the fight you just lost, only at an advantage. I did that a few times.

Despite the sparse nature of the gameplay, there are some more sophisticated systems in place already. There's a bank. You can add gems to jewelry to give bonuses. There's fishing. It's not like there's nothing to do.

The main attraction, though, is grinding. Kill mobs to make skills go up. Kill mobs to make your level go up. Kill mobs to get better gear. If that's the kind of simplicity you've been missing you're going to have a fine old time.

I did. I was surprised how much fun I had. That old gameplay loop, with its skinner box structure and all the dopamine hits, it still works. Especially when there's a really satisfying ding every time something significant happens. 

I enjoyed my two hours with Winds of Valen a lot. If I could be sure it wasn't going to break my PC every time I log out, I'd be playing some more right after I post this. That does put me off a bit, though. 

In any case, at the moment, there's not really enough there to hold the attention for more than a few sessions. But all the building blocks are in place. If the developers keep adding systems and content the way they have been up to now, this could turn out to be a very enjoyable MMORPG indeed. 

As first impressions go, I'd have to say Winds of Valen makes a good one. And for free, why wouldn't you give it a go?

A Heroic Effort

Hey! That 300% bonus xp thing in EverQuest? And the Heroic Level 115? How's all that working out for you, then?

Yeah, not so good, as it goes. 

So, I thought about it and I decided what I'd do first was take a lowish character and have some fun moloing them up a few levels. Moloing is soloing with a mercenary, in case you didn't know, and it's very quick and easy up to maybe 70 or so, even without a big bonus.

I took a look at the characters on my regular account and the likeliest prospect seemed to be Cassis, a mid-40s druid I sometimes get out to take screenshots for posts. It'd obviously be handy if she had more teleport spells to more places plus I like her, so it wouldn't seem like time wasted, probably.

I logged her in and... she wouldn't log in. I'd left her in North Ro and now the launcher was hanging halfway through Zone Loading. 

After a few minutes the game shut itself down. I tried again. Same thing.

Well, I've seen this before. Corrupted zone file, most likely. I opened the game folder and deleted everything with Nro at the start. Tried again. Same story. Did it a few times, finding more files to delete every time. Still nothing.

Might be Cassis that was corrupted? That's happened before, too. Very annoying because it needs a GM to fix it. Before I got to petitioning I thought I'd run a couple of checks myself.

I logged in someone else to see if they could get to North Ro. Of course, everyone was either in the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or the Bazaar, so I had to run them to the Freeport portal in PoK and then through the Commonlands into the tunnel. 

Halfway down the tunnel I hit the zoneline with the desert and guess what? Now I have two characters I can't log in!

Next step: google it. I found a few threads on similar issues. They're not that uncommon. Most of the suggestions I'd already tried but one possibility was an issue with ports to the server I was trying to access. Apparently some people had had zones become inaccessible for characters on one server but had no issues with the same zone on another.

I have a lot of characters on different servers so I thought I'd test it. Now I have characters I can't log in on two servers. 

Whatever the problem is, it seems to be specific to the North Ro zone. Best advice is to wait until the next patch, when the servers will all be taken offline, and see if that magically fixes things.

That was it for Cassis for now, anyway. I thought about shifting the plan to someone else but then I remembered the free 115 Heroic. Might as well grab that and maybe do something with it.

When I posted about the Anniversary, I hadn't seen the other Daybreak press release about the Heroic Characters in the store. That tells you all the things you get for your 4,500DBC and it's quite a lot:

 50,000 Platinum  

200 Bayle Marks  

Entrusted Midnight Steed's Saddle  

Two 40-Slot Bags  

Spells  

Thousands of auto-granted Alternate Advancement abilities (AAs)  

Full set of Equipment, including Weapons, Armor, Power Source, Charm, and Augments  

Food, Drink, and Ammo 

I'm not sure 50k in platinum will get you much in the Bazaar these days but two forty slot bags is a hell of a deal. I don't think any of my characters have any that big. A full set of all gear at 115 is very appealing, too, always assuming it's any good.

I had a good think about who I'd like to bump up to 115 from the existing roster and the answer was no-one. It has to be on the account I'm paying for and there's no-one on there that I want to play. That meant making a new character and with the same logic as before, it looked like that was going to be either a Druid or a Wizard. They're the ones that get the ports.

I've never had any luck with Wizards. Can't play them. Druids, though... I know druids. I should. I have several.  

At 115 a druid has a lot of travel options. Not only the ports to all the druid rings but at some point druids got their own version of the Wizard's Translocate line, which means they can point at someone else and teleport them to another zone without having to go themselves.

That could be handy. It'd be a lot quicker to log in two accounts and have my druid on one send my Magician on the other to wherever she wanted to go than it would for the Magician to make her own way there. So much of a session in EQ can be taken up with just getting from one place to another it's enough to put you off even starting, sometimes.

So, I made a wood elf druid and called her Floradelle. Then I selected the upgrade option to make her 115 and logged her in to Greater Faydark, as I'd selected on the drop-down and she appeared in Gloomingdeep, the tutorial zone.

Well, eventually. Some time since I was last there they added an introductory slide show. You can see it, too. I took screenshots. They're all in this post. 

What I did wrong, I don't know. Probably didn't press the mouse button hard enough or something. I logged out and went back to Character Select and did it again and this time it worked. Kinda.

Floradelle was 115 alright. She had all her spells. About a hundred and thirty pages of them. She had a mercenary standing next to her. She was in Plane of Knowledge, too, so that was all good. 

Problem was, she was still in her starting gear, wielding a wooden club that looked like she'd torn the leg off a table, back in the kobold mines. 

Where was all her high-level gear? In a bag, maybe? Nope. I opened inventory and apart from an eight-slot backpack with some basic food and a note for her guildmaster there was nothing. No 40-slot bags, either.

I tried Claim in case that was how it worked, It wasn't. I tabbed out and did some googling to see if maybe freeloaders don't get the full kit. They do. So I did what everyone always does when something's not working in EQ; I logged out and logged back in again. 

And that worked. Floradelle came back fully dressed in new armor and carrying two huge bags. In them, for some reason, were her weapons. I got her to put the table-leg away and swap it for something more appropriate but by then I'd had enough. 

The whole thing had taken me more than an hour and anyway I had no real idea what to do with a Level 115 Druid, other than use her as a taxi. All I wanted to do, still, was wreck around some low-level zones with a merc and have some fun.

Maybe I'll do it today.  

Been Teen - A Dolly Mixture Story

I was clearing the clutter around my desk yesterday, when I came across a book I'd meant to post about as soon as I'd read it. Since I finished it sometime in December you can imagine how much kipple had accumulated everywhere within arm's reach of where I sit. Not, of course, that I'm saying the book was kipple. Very far from it. It was just buried under several layers of the stuff, which is how I came to forget to write the post.

Well, we're here now. So what was the book? 

I'm glad you asked me that! It was Teenage Daydream by Debsey Wykes. Still is, in fact. (Tenses are slippery little buggers, aren't they?)

Debsey was the bassist and one of the singers and songwriters in my favorite band of all time, Dolly Mixture. Favorite bands is an interesting concept, isn't it? A lot different from best bands, although in this case I'd be willing to make an argument for them being the same thing.

I'm not much of a one for sticking with favorites just because they got to me first. I could make a fair go of listing all the bands and solo acts I'd have said were my "favorite" at various times over the more than half a century I've been listening to music and while I still like most of them, there aren't many I still listen to with any sort of regularity, let alone the same thrill. The new pushes out the old, which is how it should be.

Dolly Mixture, though, are always with me. Is always with me. Damn. Case agreements are slippery, too. I know it should always be a singular for a collective noun, which is what the name of a pop group is, but it never sounds right.

 

They've been with me for a long time, too, the three girls in the band. Debsey, Rachel and Hester. I first saw them when I was at University, although even after reading the book, full of detail about specific gigs and dates as it is, I still can't be sure exactly when that first time might have been. 

I think it was when they were third on the bill at the Cambridge Corn Exchange to the Fall, with the Users sandwiched in-between. There's no doubt that I was at that gig. I remember it about as well as I remember anything from that long ago. The only question is whether that was the first time I saw them play live.

It sure wasn't the last. We went to see them as often as we could. Everyone liked the Dollies. There was also one of those degrees of separation things going on, the kind that happens all the time, when you're young. A college friend of mine knew some people who knew some people who knew the Dollies, so we ended up at a couple of the same parties. 

I particularly remember going to one given by a guy called Lance Chainsaw, who had a fanzine called Chainsaw. (Probably not a co-incidence.). The Dollies were definitely at that one. I think they might even have played a few songs but I went to a lot of parties back then.Very, very few of them was I in a state to remember much about afterwards.

Anyway, old history. (Is there any other kind?) Not going over all that again or not right now. I came here to talk about the book.

For anyone who was in Cambridge as the seventies turned into the eighties, it's a time capsule. Reading the first half felt like stepping back in time. All the places, the bands, the way everyone thought and behaved. It's not always a good feeling, your past turning up like it wants to get back inside you, somehow. But it can be. This was.

As the narrative winds on it starts to fray and lose its cheer. Not the writing, which is fluent and friendly and lovely to read, all the way to the end. No, it's the way all those hopes and dreams begin to dessicate, drying out before they eventually turn to dust and blow away. It's heartbreaking, in a way, even though in another, just the life that was in them while they lasted ought to be enough to sustain anyone forever.

If you want a casebook example of how just being talented is never enough, read this book. More, being talented and having the breaks doesn't guarantee anything much of anything, either. Dolly Mixture had plenty of truly great songs. They had a unique look and sound. They had charisma and elan. They had people with influence pulling for them. 

They played a lot of gigs. Made a lot of demos. Released some singles and EPs. Got played on the radio. Made the covers of the music papers. Important, influential people loved them. Famous people. Stars.

They got chances many bands would kill for and they didn't waste them. They made it all the way to Top of the Pops. On a Number One record, even. It just wasn't theirs.

With all of that, they never convinced a record company to let them make an album. They had to do it themselves, by which time they were all but done. It's quite possibly the best album ever made by anyone but then I may be biased. It's certainly my favorite.  

So, all of that and much more is in the book. If you want the whole story, I suggest you buy it. You can get it in Hardback, as an Audiobook or for your Kindle. In September there'll be a paperback, which suggests it must have sold well enough. 

And so it should have because even if you've never heard of, let alone heard, Dolly Mixture, Teenage Daydream is a great coming-of-age tale. Anyone could read it and have a good time. The subtitle is "We are the girls who play in a band" and if you want to know how that goes, you can't do better. Unless, of course, you happen to have been in a band when you were a girl. In which case, where's your book about how that went?

Two odd things struck me as I was reading it. No, actually, one didn't strike me until later, when I was reading Amy Rigby's Girl To City. I wrote all about that in a post that turned out to be one of my least-viewed ever. Seems not many people care what I think about autobiographies of musicians they never heard of, which doesn't bode well for this post but what the hell...

Dolly Mixture, for reasons Debsey never really seems to understand, did not get on well with some of the other all-female bands of the time, one in particular. There seem to have been ideological issues at the heart of it. The Dollies always looked like they were having fun even when the songs were bleak when you thought about them. The post-punk years weren't generally a great time for that kind of nuance. You weren't just supposed to take yourselves seriously, you had to let everyone know about it.

The same bands turn up in Amy Rigby's story as incredibly helpful and supportive. Which goes to show... something. That people have shapes that fit together or don't, I guess. Anyway, it was weird, reading about two versions of the same people so close together.

Not nearly as weird as the other thing, though. Dotted here and there throughout Debsey's book are letters from fans. She must have kept all the fan mail. They give a charming and occasionally disturbing insight into what it means to be even a little bit famous. 

And one of them might have been written by me.

You'd think if it was I'd remember writing it. But then, as I said, there's plenty from back then I don't really remember. And I did sometimes write letters to people I didn't know. It was a thing you did.  Well, you had to. It's not like now. We didn't have social media. We had the mail.

When I first read it I thought bloody hell! That's me! It's not just that it reads exactly like something I'd have written. It's the details. The date is right for when I was back home after graduating from Cambridge. The city the letter was sent from is where I was living then.

I was in a band that I always wanted to cover the Dollies' "Side Street Walker" (We never did.). I used to go see The Blue Aeroplanes as often as I once went to see Dolly Mixture and Rodney Allen was often on the bill. (He eventually joined them.) Everything fits.

I don't entirely remember our bass player being in hospital or the drummer going back to Portsmouth, but all sorts of things like that happened all the time to make being in a band as awkward as possible. And come to think of it, I do remember the bass player hurting his hand and us having to cancel a gig because of it... 

The only thing that throws me is the bit about the singer not making rehearsals...  I thought I was the singer. But there was a short time when I wasn't...

Maybe I didn't write it. Only, Debsey has included the first names of all the people who wrote the letters in the book and this one was written by someone with the same name as me. (I've cut it from the picture above because we don't use our real names around here but you can find out what it is if you buy the book! Not that it'll do you much good. I have a very common first name.)

It does seem like an awful lot of co-incidences if it wasn't me. Maybe I have a twin I never knew about. I hope they're not evil.

Anyway, another little mystery to add to the pile. You think you know your own past but you never do, not really. What I do know is that I loved Dolly Mixture then and I love them still and this book brings all of it back, not that most of it ever went very far. 

It won't do that for you because you weren't there but maybe you'll find something that I didn't. Something you wanted or needed or would be glad to have, at least. 

Books can do that. Good Ones. 

This is a good one.

I'm With You - Three Hundred Per Cent!

   

 

  

Question:

What could make me download and install EverQuest on my new PC, given I haven't bothered until now?

Answer:

A 300% XP Bonus and a free Level 115 Character Boost.

I wasn't going to post today due to laziness but then I saw this news story at MassivelyOP and I thought I ought to share. EverQuest just turned 27 and in the tradition of MMORPGs that means it's the one giving out presents. 

They're good ones, too:

All players will receive the following for free:  

• Anniversary Kickoff Event 
  • 300% XP 
  • 300% Rare NPC spawn chance 
  • 245% loot 
  • 190% coin 
  • 200% alternate currency 
  • 175% Item evolution experience for all players! 
    • (The kickoff ends March 22 at 11:00 p.m. PT) 
• A Maestro's Baton Ornament for all your characters. (One per character; available until April 20, 2026, at 11:00 p.m. PT.) * 
• After the anniversary kickoff event, all players will receive 150% experience gains for all players! (Starting March 23 at 12:00 a.m. and ending on April 1, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. PT.) 

The celebrations come in two parts, it seems. There's a week with everything turned up to eleven, then a second week when everything calms the heck back down. Even then, 150% isn't chopped liver. (I'm assuming everyone hates liver...)

Of all of those bonuses, as an old school EQ Player it's the massive xp bonus that gets my attention. What we wouldn't have done for a bonus like that, back in the day, amirite? 

Of course, these days I very much doubt even a bonus as generous as that is going to be able to compete with the xp you can get just from standing around in the Guild Lobby, sending your agents out on Overseer missions every day. And since I haven't even bothered to do that for a few years now, it seems exceedingly unlikely I'll be going out hunting, no matter how big the bonus.

So why did I even bother patching up? Well, there's not much suspense to be wrung out of it, is there, seeing how I slammed the reason right up at the top there in the biggest point size available. It's the free Level 115 boost.

115's not the cap. It's ten levels shy. The cap, as of this 27th Anniversary, is 125 130. (Never trust an AI.) Tunare forfend they'd ever give out a boost to max level. If they did that, Luclin might explode!

Unlike the perks listed above, the boost is only for subscribers but that's fine. My highest character on the account I pay for is just 87. (Hmm. That means I must have done a couple of levels on him after I boosted him. I bet that was on Overseer...)

I have two Level 85s on that account, as well, both of them boosted. No-one on the account has ever really been played. All the characters I care about are on a different account, one for which I canceled the subscription long ago. Old story. Not going into all that again.

The F2P account doesn't need the boost, anyway. My Magician there already dinged 115, back when that was the cap, through a combination of going out and killing things and staying at home doing Overseer missions. She can't benefit from the boost and anyway, as I said earlier, if I really cared about leveling her up, I'd have been keeping up with those missions. There's no faster or easier way to level solo.

So, realistically, there was absolutely no point in bothering to re-install the game at all, was there? It's just... free stuff...

What would really be fun, now I come to think about it, would be to take one of my low-level characters and blitz through some zones with a merc and that 300% bonus, possibly topped up with an xp potion, if the bonuses stack and if I have any left. It'd be pointless, sure, but it would be fun and I haven't done it for a while.

I just might do that. And if you'll take my advice, if you have an old EverQuest account lying around gathering dust, now might be the time to brush it off and take it for a spin. After all, it's not going to cost you anything but time.

Evil Is As Evil Does

It seems very old-fashioned now, but when EverQuest launched back in 1999, good vs evil was a real thing. Among a number of really quite significant choices you had to make at character selection was whether you were going to be a goodie or a baddie. Yes, Virginia, back then that sort of thing actually mattered!

If you chose to be Evil with a capital E you'd pick an Officially Evil race, Troll being the most reviled until the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, when they had to cede that honor to the Iksar. Ogres came next followed by Dark Elves, who were more your suave, sinister evil masterminds. Or you could pick a good or neutral race and be Necromancer or a Shadowknight, which would mean your career would overwrite your racial heritage, a popular choice for anyone who wanted to be a Bad Gnome.

Most races had a city of their own and there were a lot of races. For maybe the first decade, most MMORPGs came with multiple races, alignments, classes and starting cities. Extensive choice was was one of the defining principles of the genre. If you picked an evil class that had to share space with goody-goodies, you'd get your own secret hideouts within the walls, often underground or in the sewers.

And you'd better have done your homework before you started. Character creation in the early days didn't mean tweaking sliders until you had something you could bear to look at. It meant getting a character you'd be able to play for more than a few sessions before you were forced to re-roll and start over. 

It was entirely possible to gimp your character, that being the awkward term in common use back then. If you picked the wrong race/class combo you might not even know anything was wrong until you started to look for groups and found no-one willing to take you on. 

The more immediate problem, though, came when you walked past some innocuous-looking guard standing next to a tower along the roadside out in the middle of nowhere, only to find yourself back at your spawn point, when it turned out you were the evil monster he was guarding that tower from.

In EQ, all of that was fixable over time. You might start out evil (Or good.) but you didn't have to stay that way. Every race had Faction and Faction was a Stat and one of the often-forgotten aspects of EverQuest's gameplay is that it includes a whole raft of stats that go up with use. Everyone talks about leveling up in that game but no-one talks about raising skills, even though EQ is as much skills-based as it relies on levels.

Another, mostly uncelebrated, fact about EverQuest is that at the start it was much more of a sandbox than a theme-park. There was no central storyline and questing, even though it was right there in the name, mostly seemed like an afterthought. There was a great deal of setting your own goals and working towards them and one goal a lot of players who'd picked Team Evil at the start liked to set for themselves was Getting Everyone To Like Me.

I did a bit of that. Not as much as some but enough for it to be the main thing I did for a few weeks on certain characters. My Ogre Shadowknight killed scores of corrupt guards until his faction was good enough to let him hand in their helmets for extra credit, then scores more until eventually he could stroll into the bank in North Freeport and get service like a regular citizen.

I did it partly to see if I could, partly because killing guards was great xp, and mostly because otherwise banking was a fucking nightmare. I'd have had to go all the way back to Oggok in the swamps, three or four zones away, or else to the dark elf city of Neriak, a trek to get there only to end up wandering the maze-like corridors for far too long before I figured out where I was going wrong. 

Before the second expansion, Scars of Velious, which added the icebound city of Thurgadin, filled with dwarves so cut-off from civilization they'd lost most of their prejudices and would trade with anyone, Evil characters were very restricted in things like where they could bank or shop or find services of any kind. Even traveling on the roads through what looked like open countryside could be fatal. The same thing applied to Good characters in reverse, of course, but somehow it never seemed to inconvenience them nearly as much.

The difficulty was compounded by race, meaning evil humans or gnomes would get a pass in places where Ogres and especially Trolls would be killed on sight. Dark Elves flitted somewhere in the middle, their options often hugely improved by the class choices available to them. There was a very good reason why so many DEs decided to become Enchanters, a class with a whole line of spells designed to let them impersonate other races or fool people into treating them nicely.

Thurgadin was all very well but it was even more inconvenient to get to than the racial starting cities. It wasn't until the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, opened travel gates that took us to the moon, where no-one knew or cared what your alignment was, that it became practical to stay all evil, all the time. 

From then on, alignment and faction gradually lost their power and influence. Well, I say "gradually"... It was more of a landslide.

The fourth expansion, Planes of Power, didn't just add a completely neutral city, it filled that city with every conceivable service and facility, making it by far the most appealing place to set your bind spot, particularly since the expansion also came with the game's first instant, on-demand travel service. Granted, you still had to get to a physical object in the game-world, a "Book", and click on it, but there were Books outside every starting city and in plenty of other places, too, so that wasn't much of a problem.

That was, to most intents and purposes, the end of Good and Evil as a limiting factor in the game. There was and still is a residual effect - try rolling up a High Elf and strolling into Oggok and see how far it gets you - but for almost all practical purposes, it makes no difference any more. We're all murder hobos together and every newly discovered continent or plane or dimension can't tell us apart.

Planes of Power came out in 2002, a couple of years before EverQuest II appeared. You might have thought the experience the dev team had garnered by then might have led them to the understanding that, while some players quite enjoyed the challenge of a faction grind, most preferred to be able to play the game without having to prep first.

Not a bit of it. EQII launched with a hard-coded Good/Evil split that made even Classic EQ look like Hello Kitty Online. Everyone had to be either GOOD or EVIL. The big difference from the elder game was that your alignment was no longer tied to your race. You could be a good troll or an evil high elf. Unlike before, though, you couldn't be a neutral anything.

That was because in EQII your alignment was decided not by anything so crass as what you looked like. What mattered was where you lived. When you reached the end of the introduction on the Isle of Refuge, you had to choose to take ship either to Freeport or Qeynos. Going to Freeport meant you were evil. If you went to Qeynos you were good.

And don't think it wasn't going to matter much in the long run, either. Years after EverQuest had made it seamless for all races and alignments to work together, EQII decided it would be great if it wasn't only the characters who couldn't mix. How about if the players couldn't, either?

You could be in the same guild together but to form the guild everyone had to be of the same alignment and the guild hall would be in that alignment's city so good luck to anyone from the other side who joined later, trying to use the facilities. There was no mailing items to the opposition and quest credit and guild status had some sort of blocks on them, too, as I recall. Shared guild missions were supposed to be a big content driver but apparently no-one in the dev team had thought about that.

That was on a PvE server, of course. On a PvP server you couldn't even group together, let alone share a guild. In fact, screw grouping - you couldn't even talk to the other side. The two cities spoke different languages. But hey, PvP, right? Suck it up!

You didn't have to do that. In both PvP and PvE there was a long and complicated process you could undertake to switch sides. If you were really bloody-minded abut it, you could pause in the middle and become de facto neutral, but that only meant everyone hated you.

Was it popular? Maybe for PvP. On the PvE side of the divide, hell, no, it was not! Everyone hated it, surprise, surprise. Faction restrictions were some of the earliest to be revised and eventually removed. Even before the whole game was revamped by Scott Hartsman a year or so after launch, most of the alignment restrictions for PvE players had already melted away.

A residue remains, all the same. The two cities still nominally retain their alignments although these days there are plenty of other starting cities to pick if you want to be free of the worst of it. Those tend to lean towards one side or the other, even so.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of those bad, old days are the two mighty starting zones, Antonica and Commonlands, the former stretching out from the gates of Qeynos to the Thundering Steppes, the latter from Freeport to Nektulos Forest. Together with the cluster of very low-level zones attached to each city, these vast stretches of land kept most adventurers both busy and apart for the first twenty levels or so.

Back in 2004, I found the whole thing confusing and counter-intuitive. By inclination, I prefer to play neutral or good-leaning characters but Qeynos lagged so badly at launch I couldn't stand to be there. As I remember it, which may not be strictly accurate, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I started off trying to play in Qeynos but had to re-roll because it was just untenable. Freeport had its problems but at least it was a lot easier to move around. 

That we'd also both preferred Freeport to Qeynos in EQ was probably a factor. In EQ, Freeport was more like a neutral city than an evil one. Trolls and Ogres weren't tolerated but Dark Elves and evil classes could move safely through the parts of the city not controlled by the religious factions. Qeynos was a lot less sanguine about that sort of thing and felt a lot more restrictive.

That was how we ended up playing multiple characters on both side of the ideological divide, especially once the lag got sorted out and I'd upgraded my PC. It meant I got to know both Antonica and Commonlands pretty well. 

Maybe next time I'll even get around to talking about one of them.

Thirteen Songs for Friday 13th Pt. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Bad Milk - Oh! Gunquit

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

Go Away - Junky58%

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

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

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

Eins, Zwei, Drei - LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

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

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

Time - Star Moles

Speaking of time...

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

Genuine Connection - Swell

Because sometimes you just wanna rock.

 if you wanna party come over to my house- Fcuckers

And othertimes you just wanna dance.

Arms Wide - sadie

Hey! We  had that one last time! 

Yeah, like you remember...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thisworldly - R. Missing

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

Bad Moons - American Football

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

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

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

American Girls - Harry Styles

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

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

 The Way It Goes - Aimée Fatale

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

And finally. A banger to finish.

HEELS BROKE = DIED - MGNA CRRRTA

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