Nivalis Nights - A Smattering Of Random First Impressions

Thanks to a suggestion by Nimgimli in the comments, I now know how to take screenshots in GeForce Now and have them save to my local drive rather than wherever NVIDIA keeps its data center. Also, I have only just this moment noticed NVIDIA styles itself in ALL CAPS. 

I have yet to figure out a good way to take screenshots in Nivalis Nights without the UI, though. If I have a pet peeve (Note to self: Name next vanity pet "Peeve".) it's the way most devs don't provide an easily-accessible option in the default settings for removing the UI and taking screenshots. It's like they don't want their games to look their best on social media.

No, that's can't be it. It's more likely the opposite. Social media's their main focus. Not archaic blogs like this. 

Most modern games include in-game cameras that have all kinds of filters and frames, specifically designed to produce images suitable for use on Instagram or Facebook. (I believe some people still use Facebook. Gemini keeps linking Facebook pages as authority for the misinformation it feeds me, anyway...)

I love those in-game cameras. They're ideal for posed shots. Nivalis Nights has a perfectly good one, too. The problem with them is that they're designed for photo shoots not journalism. They're impractically slow to access and set up if all you want to do is record what's there in front of you as you play. As for action shots - forget it!

What passes for an action shot in Nivalis Nights. By which I mean you can see my hands.

The old fashioned, basic screenshot-on-a-hotkey option is so much more convenient for reportage and in-combat captures. If you can bind Hide UI and Screenshot to the same key, so much the better. Where that's available, I like to hammer the key a few times mid-fight and pick out a good shot later. I don't want to be trying to set up a tripod while some baddie's ripping my arms off.

Playing on GeForce Now's remote servers adds another level of difficulty. Any in-game camera becomes functionally useless because every shot you take goes to someone else's hard drive. 

Sidebar: It's like in the old days before digital cameras, when I'd take scores of photos on holiday and then never get around to having the films developed. The images exist in a the same way that damn cat in the lead-lined box exists, neither one thing nor the other. 

When I was clearing out drawers this summer, not only did I throw away hundreds of hopeless holiday snaps, I also binned a couple of dozen undeveloped rolls of film. What was on them? We'll never know. Their liminal existence has been committed to landfill until entropy settles the matter once and for all.

As I begin to settle in to GeForce Now as my primary gaming platform, some of these issues are starting to resolve themselves. Workarounds are becoming habits. And that's fine. It's good not to have to think about how to take a shot before I take the shot. 

Cut scenes mean clean screens. 

I can take clean pictures of Neverness To Everness and Valheim and store them locally without much trouble but Nivalis Nights remains recalcitrant although it is very early days. NTE didn't get around to adding a simple option to hide the UI until it had been out for a few months. 

There's no such option in NN yet but there is a mod you can apply that will do the job because players are always much faster then developers when it comes to quality of life hacks. Unfortunately, you can't use mods on GeForce Now so it doesn't help me any. I'll have to keep using ugly shots that show the UI or crop them tightly to leave it out. Or I could get AI to remove the UI but that takes a while.

In my quest for cleaner screenshots, it was only late last night that I discovered how to hide the huge quest panel that dominates the right-hand side of the screen. While I'm playing, I like having it there. It's very helpful. For screenshots, though, it takes up a ridiculous amount of space and there's no obvious hotkey or command to close it.

That's because Nivalis Nights is one of the worst-documented games I've played in years. It's one thing to go all "in media res" and "learning by doing" - I'm fine with all of that - but you do need to tell people what the basic controls are. 

It's a reasonably popular game - just under 7,000 concurrent players on Steam at launch, although that's a bit of a poor return from the reported "one million wishlists". I imagine a lot of potential purchasers are waiting to hear the widely-reported performance issues have been fixed before committing. With that take-up, there's already a decent amount of information on the internet so a quick search finds answers to most of the questions that really should have been resolvable by a quick glance at the Settings.

It's fine. I didn't want to see anything on that side of the screen anyway...

Here's how you hide the Journal panel: Hold down the J key for about three-quarters of a second. Obviously that's something that was discovered by some fat-fingered, slow-handed player, who then probably spent a few frustrating minutes trying to find out where the hell their quest journal had gone. 

And even that option has its problems, it seems. There's a patch out already that purports to fix some of the performance issues and address a few of the more commonly reported bugs and at the end of the patch notes it warns 

"When hiding the quest log (holding the J Key), it can happen that the text becomes illegible after the quest log has been hidden for some time and then is unhidden again. This issue is already fixed, but we were not able to include it in this patch. Reloading your save will fix this issue if you do encounter it."

Speaking of saves, there is an auto-save but it's quite slow to trigger. My first session lasted nineteen minutes but when I logged in the next day, ready to carry on from where I left off, the Continue button was greyed out. I had to start over from scratch. Not too much of an imposition, given the short time it took me to catch up to where I'd finished, but it was still annoying.

I'm so used to playing online games that don't require manual saves it hadn't even occurred to me to save my game before logging out. I'm doing it now. I also now notice when the little "Saving Game..." icon pops up in the bottom-right. I haven't yet figured out if it's a time-based process or if it triggers when some specific type of event occurs. Either way, I won't be trusting it alone. Manual saves all the way from now on.

Can you handle my game saves for me please, AVA?

 And that's enough about the technical issues, important though they are to a first impression. If you really feel a game, though, you'll let all kinds of technical issues slide. Well, I will. 

So, am I feeling it for Nivalis Nights? Hmm. Mostly yes. A little bit no. It's complicated.

It's also extremely early to be making any criticisms or endorsements that I'll most likely end up having to take back later. I've played for just over three hours so far. If the game was better-documented I'd be able to tell you if that takes me past the tutorial. I'm inclined to think it doesn't but who knows for sure?

There's a great deal about the game I like very much indeed. I already mentioned in the Very First Impressions post how much I like the look of Nivalis and the more I see of the city, the better I like it. I tweaked the graphics up a little and now it looks better than ever. 

As it does in Neverness To Everness, the weather plays a huge role in defining and enhancing the mood. Unlike in NTE, you can't just set the weather to whatever you'd like it to be but you do get a very accurate weather forecast for the coming week. If it says there will be storms on Wednesday, there will be storms on Wednesday. Spectacular storms.

And if the sun comes out... oh, boy! Nivalis is a different city in the sunlight. All that moody noir? Stripped away. Everything that was dark now glows. It's an extraordinarily delightful transition.

It's a different world when the sun comes out.

 The city itself is an absolute masterpiece. Huge, rambling, chaotic and entirely convincing. This year has seen the two best cities I've ever visited in virtuality, Hethereau and Nivalis. With GTA6 to come, and Vice City doubling the size of Los Santos, this has to be the Year of the City in gaming.

I spend much of my time in NTE just wandering around Hethereau. I've been doing it for six months and I haven't had enough of it yet. I can easily imagine doing the same with Nivalis except for one thing: there's this slightly annoying game attached.

I did say "slightly annoying". From the little of it I've experienced so far, I'd say it's a pretty good game. It's just that at this stage I don't feel like any kind of game is really what I'm after. I'd like to spend a few hours just wandering around, getting my bearings, opening the fast transport points, seeing the sights and basically playing tourist.

The developers do not want me to do that. What they want me to do is run a noodle bar. It's literally the first thing. The introductory quest. You go meet this guy, talk to him and when you do, he gives you his noodle bar and says, it's yours, here you go, now you're in business. And then he leaves.

I have no interest whatsoever in running a noodle bar. Not a real one and not a fictional one. I for sure don't appreciate being lumbered with one before I've even figured out who and where I am. I like it even less when I find out that by taking ownership of the damn thing I've also lumbered myself with the previous owner's massive debt.

The depressing ending to each day's work.

Now, apparently, I have to work my ass off, setting up a stupid noodle bar, shopping for food, hiring staff, buying furniture, dealing with all the other restauranteurs in a half-kilometer radius, most of whom don't like the new competition, just to pay off this debt that isn't even mine!. All of this when all I want to do is goof off and see the city...

It's actually a very good set-up for a business sim, which is a significant part of what Nivalis Nights sets itself up to be. I knew that when I bought it so I can hardly complain of a bait and switch. What I thought was that I'd just pay lip service to the business part while I focused on all the other activities, things I'd find more to my taste.

And that's what I've been trying to do. I got the place started then left it running. I got my boat last night and went fishing instead, which was a lot of fun. I've also been speaking to all kinds of people all over the city, picking up quests left and right. I've even finished some of them. There are some great little stories in the interactions, some that pick things up from where we left them in Cloudpunk. Some of the same characters even make a re-appearance.

Nixxy liked my snappy comeback so much she might make me a regular!

 All of that I'm really enjoying. But now I'm nearly broke thanks to that damn noodle bar and AVA keeps giving me dire warnings about how my business is falling apart and the whole thing is becoming really stressful. I do not have any interest in playing games that deliberately try to trigger a stress response so that's not going down well with me at all.

As soon as I felt things starting to get on top of me, I went googling for a way to destress the situation. I was hoping maybe there was an opt-out for the noodle bar but there doesn't seem to be. There is, however, a very easy way to find yourself suddenly rich enough to hire a manager, add a bunch of tables and let the place run itself while you rake in the profits: just steal stuff. 

That's how you do it. Apparently all you have to do is ignore the nightly curfew warning and when all the other business owners have locked themselves safely away in their apartments, you go round to their establishments, help yourself to their tables and chairs and all the appliances in their kitchens. Then you put everything you can use in your noodle bar and sell the rest. 

And that's it. That's the meta. I read it on reddit and on the Steam Discussion thread and several professional game websites. It's not like I just believed some AI's hallucination. I haven't tried it myself but I'm sure it'll work.

Except for one thing: I don't like to steal in video games. Okay, I'm not saying I've never done it but I don't enjoy it. I avoid it as much as I can in any game that allows it. I especially avoid it in any game that encourages it. It just makes me uncomfortable to do it, so I don't.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do it in this game. I might have to. And I can rationalize doing it, to a degree.

Now that's a decent use-case for AI...

 I've seen Nivalis Nights described as an unusual entry in the cosy game genre, Stardew Valley with a quirky cyberpunk skin. It is not that. In Cloudpunk, Nivalis was conceived as a postcapitalist dystopia. It hasn't suddenly turned into a fluffy little My Little Hello Kitty liberal democracy in Nivalis Nights. If that's the kind of city you're looking for, let me direct you to Hethereau.

In those circumstances, I might be willing to start helping myself to anything that's not nailed down. Dog eat dog, every man for himself, survival of the fittest, insert Ayn Rand quote here. If I do, though, it sure as hell won't be because it makes sense. 

How can you just take furniture from the bar next door and set it up outside your own place without anyone noticing? I guess I haven't tried it yet so maybe there's a gloss that makes it seem reasonable but from what I've read everyone just carries on as if it hasn't happened. I have to say it sounds more like a bug than a feature to me but we'll see. If they don't patch it out, I guess they meant for us to do it that way.

Since this is a game where you can have multiple saves, what I think I'll probably do is give the old night-time thievery a try and see how it sits with me. If I can stomach it and if it works then I'll carry on with that as my main save. 

If it doesn't, or if I find it too weird, I'll start again and see what happens if I don't do that introductory quest. Never go see the guy. Don't talk to him. Ignore AVA when she keeps reminding me. Never own a noodle bar.

I know it's the start of the Main Story Quest but I'm curious to know: if you abandon the MSQ altogether and just focus on exploring the city and living in it, can you do all the other stuff that's not connected to the story? Or is a bunch of stuff gated behind how well your fast food outlet does?

Either way, it would be interesting to find out, so even if grand theft does turn out to be the fix for noodle bar stress, I might try it anyway. Just what I need. Two versions of the game running in parallel. Just when i already have too many games to play...

EverQuest And EverQuest II - To The Letter

For a while, I've been in the habit of putting a post together every time whoever happens to be holding down the Producer's chair at Darkpaw puts out a letter. That used to be Holly Longdale until she jumped ship to bring her deep knowledge of how best to milk an aging cash cow to Blizzard. Since then it's been Jenn Chan.

Jenn Chan is great. As a customer and a player, I've been very happy with her tenure. She's the epitome of a safe pair of hands. Just looking at her smiling face makes me feel the future of Norrath is secure. As a blogger, though, she doesn't give me much to work with.

It's been so long now since I last played EverQuest seriously, I can barely make sense of most of what she has to say in the letter for the elder game. There's something about making Hero's Journey quests more group-friendly. I don't know what Hero's Journey quests are. There's something else about improvements to the Resource Hunter system. I don't know what that is, either.

After that, there's a couple of paragraphs about bug fixes, class "tuning" and UI upgrades, all of which I can understand in theory but none of which have any meaning for me in practice. Then we get some notes about festivals, most of which I've never heard of (Fall Fun? Festival of Shadows?) and a brief mention of some changes to Account to Account transfers.

Account to Account transfers is a bit of a sore point with me. I would long ago have given SOE, and then Daybreak/Darkpaw, my money, if they'd been willing to let me transfer characters between the accounts Mrs Bhagpuss and I set up back in 2000. It would have been worth hundreds of dollars to us to get all of our characters on the right accounts, back in the days when we were both playing EQ.

Sadly, the Account to Account option exists solely and only for accounts registered to the same person. Both accounts have to  have the exact same name associated with them. There has never been any option to move characters between accounts owned by different people. 

It sounds very reasonable until you factor in the monthly subscription for those accounts. I always paid for both our accounts on my credit card, from the day they were created and ever afterwards. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that that the defining proof of ownership ought to be whose name is on the card that's being charged, especially when there's only ever been one source of payment, but that's not how they see it.

Not that I care any more. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played either game in a decade and a half and never will again. I have all the login details to all the accounts (I think there are at least eight of them...) and I can play any of the characters on any account whenever I like, which in most cases will be never. Even if they did change the rules, I wouldn't bother now.

 

Checking the official site, though, it appears that Account transfers are currently unavailable. I don't know how long that's been the case but I do know that for EverQuest II the process is automated whereas for EQ, you had to submit a petition to Customer Service for the transfer to be performed manually. I'm guessing EQ is going to get the same automatic option EQII enjoys.

With that little piece of technical tomfoolery out of the way, we're down to the only part anyone's really interested, namely the upcoming expansion. It's called Favors of Fortune and it involves some gods falling out about something. It would. It's an EverQuest expansion.

It also involves the return of someone or something called Scorn. I have never heard of Scorn but his/her/their/its return is emphasized in heavy, bold type: Scorn has returned. Like that. Whatever impact that's meant to have is lost on me but the effects of Scorn's return do sound intriguing:

"Across the lesser planes, chance itself twists unnaturally. Simple gambles collapse into disaster. Once‑reliable odds warp into impossibility. Victories slip away as though guided by an unseen hand. The very fabric of luck feels poisoned, bent toward failure by a force both deliberate and unseen."

I wouldn't mind an expansion that turned all the expected results into a crap shoot but I bet most people would hate it. So I don't suppose it's that. Not that I'm ever likely to find out from personal experience. Chance would have to twist a very long way out of true for me to find myself back playing EQ at all, let alone in current content.

There's a very much higher chance of me playing the upcoming expansion for EQII, though. I'd put it no lower than 90%. I've played every EQII expansion on release since 2014's Altar of Malice and I have no particular intention to stop. 

The ten per cent wiggle room I'm giving myself comes from two things: firstly the ever-increasing number of games I'm trying to play (There might be a post about that soon.) and secondly the tendency of my PC to crash when I log out of EQII. It's doing it much less than it used to but it still happens and it puts me off playing because otherwise the machine is working perfectly and I don't want to screw that up.

 

It's harder to wring anything worth talking about out of Jenn Chan's Producer's Letter for EQII  than the one for EverQuest. It starts with a whole lot of detail about all the things they've added to or fixed in the game so far this year: exciting things like "cleaner spellbooks after changing factions or possessing pets, more transparent messaging when Cleric and Guardian abilities are stifled by debuffs".

Don't believe me? Go read it for yourself. It's chock-full of minutiae like that,. The sort of detail that makes perfect sense in a set of patch notes but isn't exactly what you'd imagine would make the cut for a Producer's Letter. 

I'll spare you the excruciating specifics but I will just mention the list of upcoming holiday events. Again, we all know these are coming. They're long-established annual holidays, after all. Not to mention there's an in-game calendar that has them all listed. 

Browsing the list, though, I did notice there was no mention of the event formerly known as Days of Summer, later rebranded as  Panda Panda Panda. That would normally have started in mid-September. I might not be playing at the moment but I still get the PR emails and I hadn't heard anything about so I did a bit of googling.

Gemini, once again, seems to be operating in an alternate timeline. I asked specifically if Panda Panda Panda was going to be happening in 2026 and the AI told me "Yes, new "Panda, Panda, Panda!" content and tasks are scheduled to run in EverQuest II in September 2026". Once again, the links it gave as sources for this confident assertion not only didn't support the claim, they didn't have anything to do with pandas at all!

I had to go to the official forums for the correct answer, which is that "We are doing alternate things in place of the panda content. The Splendid Celebration Crate content has taken its place." Angeliana said that. She is not an AI. She knows what she's talking about.

I'm quite pleased they've pensioned the event off. It was a great addition to the game back in 2017, when it first appeared but it's been a while since it made much sense. What with the big summer update in August and the Expansion in December, not to mention Overseer, there are plenty of ways to get much better gear than the pandas hand out these days. 

 

And so to the only thing anyone really cares about: this year's expansion. It's called Descent to Val’Zyroth, which may be nowhere near as good a name as Favors of Fortune but does make up for in accuracy what it loses in style. Well, it might. That's assuming Val'Zyroth is somewhere in the Underfoot, which is where we're going.

The Underfoot is Brell's realm below the surface of Norrath so this is another spelunking expansion, the first since 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I have mixed feelings about underground expansions. One of my favorite EQ expansions at the time was Depths of Darkhollow. I had some good times down there. I also quite liked Terrors of Thalumbra. 

They do get quite claustrophobic, though. And this one is full of Dark Elves. I am not a big dark elf fan.

In DTV, which really is not a very memorable acronym, we're set to  

plunge through the treacherous tunnels of Subtunaria into the glowing, magic-soaked reaches of the Underfoot. Infiltrate the resplendent Teir'Dal city of Neriondalon, battle alongside unique subterranean allies like the resilient Tontu molemen, and breach Brell Serilis’ legendary planar workshops before dark magics swallow the realm.

The infamous ruler of Neriak, Queen Cristanos, has spotted the absence of Lucan from Freeport and fancies her chances. Having played EQII pretty consistently since launch, that does actually mean something to me and I'm mildly invested in putting a stop to her territorial ambitions. Most of my characters come from Freeport after all. The last thing any of them want is to end up living in a Tier'Dal police state. Stick with with the police state you're used to, that's my advice.

There is, as usual, a pre-expansion event. This one's called Paths of Sedition and it begins on October 6. Generally, pre-expansion events aren't all that exciting but there have been a couple of notable exceptions. The Letter doesn't give much away about how this one's likely to go.

And that's about it. I'm not convinced the whole Producer's Letter tradition shouldn't go the way of Panda Panda Panda. It seems like most of what's in both of these letters either didn't need to be repeated yet again after the numerous previous times we'd been told about it or could have simply been handled by a regular News item on the websites.

Still, it's always nice to hear from Jenn Chan. And if she enjoys writing letters, who are we to stop her?

Nivalis Nights - Very First Impressions

 If I'd had to pick my top three games from my Steam wishlist, the ones I was most excited to see and which I'd be most likely to buy and play on release... well, Number One would have been Ananta for sure. But Ananta's not out until next year. The games in slots 2 and 3 both came out this week.

When did that last happen, I wonder? Two games I really want to play, arriving within days of each other? Actually, it's not as uncommon as all that, I guess. There are only so many launch windows developers and publishers consider worth having and unless GTA6 happens to be squatting on one of them, everyone pushes and shoves to get their game out the door at the right moment, which often ends up meaning the same time.

The first of this particular pair to appear was Wadjet Eye's Nighthawks -The Vampire RPG. It's been a long wait. Eight years in the making, following a successful Kickstarter back in 2018, when it barely scraped past its $125k ask to finish with $136,125. Hard to imagine that kept the lights on for the best part of a decade.

I bought that one on release day just over a week ago but I haven't played it yet. Honestly, where does the time go? I'll get to it soon, I promise. 

Yesterday, the other game at the top of my Must-Have list came out - Nivalis Nights. Like Nighthawks, I'd picked it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League so I'd been following its progress very closely. So closely, in fact, I found myself ahead of the deadline when I went to Steam to see how it was doing and to ask them to take my money. I tried to buy it and got told I was six hours too early. How's that for commitment?

 

Because I'd picked it for the League, I was interested to know how the game was being received, not to mention reviewed. When I came back to check later in the day, after it had been officially released, I was disturbed to find it had a "Mixed" rating on Steam. Mixed might be good for a grill but it's not great for a Steam rating.

On closer examination, it became clear there was pretty much just one reason for the negative reviews - poor optimization. The game was running badly even on high-end rigs and nothing makes people angrier than seeing the expensive kit they painstakingly put together from carefully chosen components, chugging along like some casual gamer's off-the-shelf impulse purchase from Amazon

Everyone who was able to run the game, or who had the patience to realise the performance issues would be fixed soon enough, seemed more than happy with the game itself, something I thought boded well for my chances of a good score in the League. Professional reviewers rarely seem to struggle with performance issues in the games they review, to the extent that there are sometimes complaints that they can't have been plying the same build the public had to put up with.

More importantly, there was the issue of whether I'd be able to run it. Nighthawks, I bought with confidence because the demo ran perfectly well on my machine, as well it might. It's pretty much an illustrated text adventure, after all. 

 

Nivalis Nights, though, looked like it was more akin to Cyberpunk 2077, a game I could theoretically have run on this machine, back when I had the graphics card installed, although even then success wouldn't have been guaranteed. With the onboard graphics I'm using now, good as they are, I wouldn't even want to try it. Factor in those widely-reported optimization issues and there's obviously no chance I could run Nivalis Nights locally.

Luckily, I thought I might have another option. Nivalis Nights is a kind of sequel to Cloudpunk, the game I played and reviewed earlier this year.  Cloudpunk is on GeForce Now. Would Nivalis Nights be there as well?

Yes and no. As in yes, it would, but no, it wasn't there yet. I found that out after I ran a google search to see if there were plans to add it, saw there were, went and bought the game on the strength of that assurance and then couldn't find it on the platform. Back to Google again, where I learned it can take up to 24 hours from the launch of a game before NVidia adds it to the GeForce Now servers, checks it and authorizes it for customers to select.

Why can't we have everything NOWWWW!!!???

 

Ahem...

So, to go back a little, I bought the game. At full price it would be £21.99 but there's a 10% discount for the couple of weeks following launch, something I'm learning seems to be pretty standard for new releases. That ought to have brought it to £19.79, which seemed like a very fair price to me. 

I was about to buy it for that when i noticed there was an offer for both Cloudpunk and Nivalis Nights as a bundle with a slightly bizarre discount of 34% That should have been £23.16, a bargain, no doubt, but no use to me since I already own Cloudpunk. Except the price it was showing for the two games wasn't £23.16. It was £17.81. 

Eh?

That made buying the pack almost £2 cheaper than just buying the new game on its own. Does that make any sense? No, but who cares? I bought the pack. It was almost like I was getting extra credit just for owning the earlier game. 

How it was being calculated puzzled me. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it.

 

I'd cut and paste the explanation but it would make this post ridiculously long and anyway ChatGPT couldn't really figure it out either. The AI came up with a whole load of calculations and scenarios but it was mostly guessing. It did work out that £17.81 is exactly 10% off the price for Nivalis Nights after that, too, has been discounted by 10%, which has to be more than a co-incidence, but why Steam would apply the discount twice is anyone's guess. 

Maybe it's a glitch but whatever. I'll take it. I don't understand it but I'll take it.

It wasn't until this morning that I logged into GeForce Now again to see if Nivalis Nights had arrived. It had been about fifteen hours since launch. Was that long enough? 

There was no sign of the game in the GeForce Now version of my Steam library but Gemini had warned me that might happen. Apparently GeForce now sometimes needs a little push. I resynced the two of them and there it was. It's a lot just to get to play a game, isn't it? But that's modern life for you. The real question is - is the game any good?

I'll tell you when I've played it. What I can tell you so far is that it looks great. If you ever wanted to stroll around a slightly pixilated version of the city from the original Blade Runner, which seems to be the fantasy of about a gazillion people and has certainly been on my to-do list since I saw the original movie on release in 1982, then this might be your game. 

 

It's all there - the flying cars, the rain-filled streets, the clunky robot carts, the neon, the huge advertizing screens, the punks - every box ticked. The lack of any attempt at hyper-realism really sells it, too. The future looks so much better in this slightly shaky-cam version. 

Also, as a huge bonus for anyone who played Cloudpunk, it's really, obviously, unmistakably the same city. I was recognizing streets and locations as soon as I left the apartment. I couldn't tell you what they were called but they looked so familiar. 

That really sold it for me. but not everyone's as sold as I am. I love the look of the world but I've seen some complaints about NPCs looking like "plastic sex-dolls". I won't comment on the accuracy of that comparison but I have no problem with what they look like. Sure, they don't look realistic but then neither does anything else so why should the people?

I'm guessing my character looks like that too but theres' no way to know for sure. There's no character creation and no third-person option. You start the game looking out of the eyes of a pre-existing citizen of Nivalis and it goes from there. 

It's not an RPG so there's no paper-doll for gear that I saw and no associated little picture of yourself and what you're wearing. The game doesn't reveal your gender. It doesn't even tell you what your name is. It seems like a smart solution to some of the well-rehearsed problems but I wonder if such a degree of anonymity is going to wear thin over time? I do like to know who I am.

 

Just in case you hadn't gotten the message that you won't be admiring your looks, you can't even see your reflection in the mirror in the bathroom. I don't think the player-character's a vampire... then again, the game is called Nivalis Nights...

On a more practical level, I'm very pleased to say that, playing on GeForce Now, I saw no hint of any performance or optimization issues. Smooth as butter. I only played for twenty minutes, just to get a feel for the game, take some screenshots and make sure it worked, but in that time I checked out my apartment, wandered around the streets a little, spoke to a couple of NPCs, took a cab to the market and finished the first step of the tutorial quest, all without any hitches, glitches or issues.

And it felt great. I really liked Cloudpunk, which also used stylized, pixillated graphics to excellent effect and this feels like that but better. I'm slightly wary of the actual gameplay, which seems to lean a little too heavily towards the running-a-business end of the simulation spectrum for my tastes, but once you have your city and your engine, you can use it to tell all kinds of stories. I'm sure some of them will be more interesting than how many waffles did I sell this morning.

There's a hint towards better things to come in the very first scene, which has AVA, your digital personal assistant, telling you, with a disturbing degree of satisfaction, that the quadrant of the city where you live is on lockdown because a serial killer's on the loose. It wasn't the news itself that disturbed me, so much as the way AVA said she hoped the killer was safely trapped inside the locked down district. With us!

 

Following the Chekhov's Gun principle, I'd like to think the writers wouldn't mention a serial killer at the start of Act One if there wasn't going to be a series of killings by the end of the game. They wouldn't just be using it as an excuse to restrict players to the only district of Nivalis they've actually finished, would they? No, it couldn't be that...

As you can see, I took plenty of screen shots. As usual, one of the first things I looked for was a way to hide the HUD. I couldn't find one myself but Gemini gave me a convoluted explanation of how to do it. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know if it's a hallucination. I suspect it might be.

Sidebar: Have you ever said HUD out loud? I haven't. AVA says it and she sounds out each letter - H. U. D. Like that. I've always imagined it was pronounced Hud like the name of the Paul Newman movie. But then I always assumed FAQ was pronounced Fack.Why wouldn't it be? It was only years after I saw it written down that I first heard someone say Eff Ay Queue. Which I still think sounds wrong. But then, I also say Loll! for LOL, not Ell Oh Ell because I was saying Loll for Laugh Out Loud back in the '80s, long before social media claimed to have invented it. But don't get me started on how very much older all these abbreviations are than everyone seems to think...

There is a Photo option in the game that works very nicely but as usual the one real drawback of playing on GeForce Now is that any shots I "save" in game go to NVidia's servers, where they get deleted at the end of the session. I have to remember to use Windows to add any Photos I take to my Screenshots folder. It works but like all workarounds it's clunky.

And that's about as far as I've gotten so far. I'll just say that I've been rushing through this so I can get back and have another go. That's a pretty good recommendation right there but of course I haven't really done anything in the game yet. We'll see how I feel when I've had a chance to experience some of the actual gameplay.

As for my chances of a reasonable score for the League, I'm cautiously optimistic. The game had over a million wishlists on Steam so I'm confident it'll get reviewed by the right publications. Let's just hope the reviewers have as few technical issues with the game as I have...

Day Fifty And The Game Begins

 Of all the dozens of games I could be playing, it looks very much as though the one I am playing is Valheim. I don't know why. Maybe someone would like to explain it to me.

I already had about 390 hours played. It's my most-played game on Steam and almost certainly the non-MMORPG I've put the most time into, ever.  Now I have 405 hours played and it's not going to stop there. What is it about this game?

The really weird part, though, is what I've been doing there. I started the whole thing up again on a whim, when all the publicity about the game finally getting an official release re-ignited my interest. As I posted at the time, I set everything to the easiest difficulty with the intention of seeing what it would be like if I ignored Odin and his annoying bird buddy, shrugged off all his unreasonable demands and just settled down to a quiet, pastoral afterlife in the meadowlands.

That was the plan. But you know what they say about plans. 

Last time, we left Califlora the inauthentically-named viking "stuck on a cold, rainy island far out at sea" after what turned out to be the first of many ill-advised sea trips. Here's what happened next.

 

The first archipelago turned out to be very small with hardly anything going for it other than peace and quiet. It was mostly Black Forest with a smattering of Meadows, making it pretty much a microcosm of the place she'd just left. 

The whole point of getting on the raft in the first place had been to find some nice, warm, sunny Plains so Califlora could build a house and live out the eternity of her afterlife in relative comfort. She certainly wasn't going to hunker down for forever on a lump of rock in the middle of the ocean but traveling by raft isn't so much fun you want to get right back on the logs and do it again right away so she put up a shack, lit a fire and got a good night's sleep. Next day it was back on the raft. 

I really got to hate the raft after a while. It's slow and cumbersome and hard to control. I could never figure out exactly how to steer the thing. Mostly, progress went by a series of small zig-zags as I constantly over-corrected. That's when the wind let me go anywhere at all. 

When I'd worked out how to set the thing on auto I just let it go and went and did something else for a while before coming back to see if we'd run aground anywhere. With everything set to be non-aggressive about the only risk was falling off. Califlora was a lot safer if I had my hands nowhere near the keyboard.

 

The next landfall came at another small archipelago. Smaller, in fact , than the first one. This time, though, she could see land further to the west. It looked like it might be something more substantial. Obviously she got back on the raft and sailed over to see what it was. Right? 

Nope. That would have been the sensible move. What she actually did was set up home on the island. First she built a substantial house near the shoreline then, when she'd made it all nice and cosy, she started making repeated trips across the bay by raft to explore and exploit whatever she could find on the opposite shore before sailing back to the island with the spoils. I don't know if she was reliving her Viking raiding life or if she was worried about getting a bad sunburn.

It was indeed Plains that she could see, over there across the narrow strip of ocean. Lots of Plains and a few small strips of Swamp. There was even a patch of Mistlands that Califlora kept well clear of after stumbling into it one evening as the sun was going down. With no option to apply mods to the game on GeForce Now's servers, it's very unlikely I'll be paying much attention to any biome beyond the Plains.

 

I spent days on that island. Days and days and days. Real life days, not just in game. I took Califlora up and down the coast, exploring and raiding Fuling camps as she found them. It was a peculiar experience.

The whole game becomes quite strange with aggression switched off. The Fulings gibbered to themselves but never did anything to stop her as Califlora opened their chests and rummaged through the contents, helping herself to anything she fancied. They didn't even react when she started smashing up their tanning racks. 

That wasn't mindless vandalism. She needed a lot of flint to make various crafting stations but even though her hut was in a small patch of Meadows, after she picked up the first few shards, no more ever spawned. I looked it up and supposedly flint respawns every four hours, real time. Not on that island it didn't.

What did spawn there, unexpectedly and incongruously, were two Fulings. The island had no Plains anywhere on it at all and although the other shore was close enough to cross by raft in a few minutes, it didn't seem nearly close enough for the biomes to overlap. But there they were. 

 

It's unnerving to have two Fulings wittering away a few feet from your door. Even if you know they aren't going to do anything, there's still the worry that you might accidentally target one while chopping wood and then you'd know about it, alright. 

Califlora tried to push them into the sea. Valheim has full collision so with aggression off you can shunt mobs around. You have to if you want to explore the crypts. The skeletons block the tunnels and they don't move if you say "Excuse me." No ears, you see.

The Fulings went into the sea when pushed alright but then they came right back out again. If I'd had a pick I might have dug a hole and pushed them into that. But I didn't have a pick because, as I'd completely forgotten, you have to kill Eikthyr to get the antlers you need to make one.

I only realised that after I'd built a Smelter and a Kiln next to the house on the island. Doh! I could have left it there because I hadn't been planning to kill any of the bosses but Valheim being Valheim I'd gotten the bug by then and I couldn't let it go.

 

That was all my decision. Califlora would have been fine, living on her island, sitting by the fire, roasting boar meat, eating honey and berries for pudding and watching the gorgeous sunsets. She could take a trip over to the Plains on her raft any time for some sunbathing. Not a bad afterlife. 

But no, I had to take her back to where she started so we could kill bloody Eikthyr. That did not go well.

Oh, killing Eikthyr went well enough. Califlora made sixty fire arrows, kited him around for a while and he went down nicely. Took less than five minutes and she was never under half health. Of course, the difficulty was on Easy but Eikthyr never has been hard. 

 

No, the hard part was getting there. Geez, that raft trip. Talk about boring! And miserable. Most of it happened at night, in the rain. The wind was frequently against her. She retraced the same route, spent a night in her old hut, made it back to shore just before dusk and managed to find another of her old houses to sleep in pretty close by.

The fire was out, though, and she didn't have any wood so she went out in the dark to get some. And a tree fell on her. A classic Valheim death. It would have been funny if she hadn't still been bound on the sodding island!

Califlora has only died twice so far. The first time she foolishly attacked a bear just to see how tough it was. A lot tougher than her as it turned out. The second time a tree fell on her because she was out cutting down trees at dusk and sit was too dark to see which way it was leaning. Even when nothing's out to get you, something's going to get you all the same.

I was pissed off when I realised I had no option but to revive back on that damn island. I was even more pissed off when I realised that, even with the death penalty set to Easy, you still leave everything in your inventory on your corpse. I gave the game a rest for a day or so before I carried on after that. It was giving me EverQuest corpse recovery flashbacks.

Before she could go anywhere, since all she had left were the leathers she was standing up  in, Califlora had to grub around looking for stones just to make an axe to chop wood to make the raft. It's amazing how few stones there are when you're on a tiny island. She got it done eventually and a new raft got built but it was not a fun time for either of us.

This time, she took the raft a different way, landing in Black Forest to the west of her original site.  She then made her way back, once again, to where she'd started, making it a priority to find a hut along the way, refurbish it sufficiently to keep out the rain, light a fire and put down a bed. Then she set her spawn point and we could both finally relax.

By this point I'd been playing for around forty-five game days. In real time, about fifteen hours. And what had I achieved? It's tempting to say absolutely nothing but there are the skills. Califlora's Run skill is in the high twenties and her Woodcutting in the mid-thirties. Her Swimming is coming along, too. 

Other than that, though, the game has pretty much only just started, now Eikthyr is dead. I made the pick and mined some tin but all my means of production are an hour away on the raft and I'm sure as hell not going back to get them. Califlora is going to have to start over from scratch where she is, by which I mean where she started. 

All the things I stole from the Fulings are on the island, too, and quite a lot of stuff Califlora couldn't carry is stashed in chests in their camps. All of that was a complete waste of time although I suppose we might get back there eventually.

The real question isn't why did I waste so much time getting nowhere. It's why I'm not about to stop. Yes, I know it makes no sense but I am going to carry on. The bizarre thing is that, for all its purposelessness and pointlessness, and even though I've done it all before, more than once, and even though it's often tedious and frustrating... Valheim somehow always manages to be fun.

I am thinking I might want to try a different survival game soon, though. Isn't Enshrouded about to come out of Early Access? Maybe I'll give that a try next...  

Philosophy Of The Dungeon

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

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

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

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

Dungeon Crawler Carl 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes on AI used in this post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex - 2Hollis

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

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

 She Seems Kind Of Stupid - The Femcels

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

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

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

Stupid Song - Olivia Rodrigo

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

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

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

 Danceteria - Madonna & Charli xcx

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

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

Wannabe - CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso (Spice Girls cover)

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

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

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

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

 Hello - daine (Martin Solveig and Dragonette cover)

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

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

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

dreams - the booyah! kids (Fleetwood Mac cover)

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

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

 Spilled - swell foop

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

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

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

 easy rider - untitled (halo)

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

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

Stone Fruit - Blondshell

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

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

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

Woof - Esme Emerson

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

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

Chemicals - Always Bethany

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

Is Love Real - Aimée Fatale 

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

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

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

and then have the nerve to really do it.

Oh, and that ending:

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

She's a good time, that's for sure. 

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

Hello Again, Jim - Caroline Rose

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

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

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

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

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