Buy One, Get Six Free

So, finally, as if anyone cared, here are the five games I claimed from Amazon Prime gaming in June. Or was it July? And why are there six of them?

Do. Not. Ask. I am beyond trying to make sense of the Prime Gaming offer now. The information in the "blog" that Amazon sends out each month, usually late, doesn't match what I see when I go to the website. 

The blog itself, which is in fact a press release, so why they call it a blog beats me - it's not like blogs are fashionable any more - is laid out so chaotically it's actively off-putting, with huge lists of games in various formats that repeat themselves and overlap. I can't be bothered trying to unpick it any more.

There's this whole, rolling release schedule that makes no sense, particularly since the whole supposed thrill of the new they seemed to be trying to inculcate, whereby we'd all rush to get the next batch of games each week, is completely undermined by most of the games then sitting there for a month or more, waiting to be picked like a bunch of schoolkids hoping for a spot in the team.

Add to that a whole new bunch of games they're throwing in just now in anticipation of Prime Day (Which actually lasts about a week so clearly the entire company shares the same lack of interest in calling anything by its proper name or acknowledging any kind of conventional calendar.) and it just all becomes so much more trouble to decode than it could possibly be worth.

Much easier just to check the website every couple of weeks and claim whatever's new that looks good. Who cares what offer its in or when it arrived or when it's leaving? Snapshot and be done with it, I say!

The games I claimed at the end of June were:

Stray Gods  

Not Stray Gods: Orpheus as it says above but let's not get into all that again. Already covered in a previous post. Naturally, I haven't played it yet. I haven't played any of the games I claimed. Let's be realistic - I don't claim them to play them. I claim them so I'll have them should I ever want to play them, which I most likely won't. I'd love to blame it on late-stage capitalism but actually I think it's more likely just me.

The Last Show of Mr. Chardish

75% off in the Steam Summer Sale with a "Very Positive" review rating, although since that's only from 71 reviews and the game came out five years ago, I'm not sure it has much authority. More like no-one's really tried it. It's a puzzle mystery game about an actress who goes back to an abandoned theater to recall her past history with the eponymous director. Mostly I took this one because the screenshots looked pretty. 

Fate: Undiscovered Realms

20% off in the sale with a Very Positive rating. The sequel to FATE, which I may or may not own on some platform or other. Certainly never played it. It's a dungeon crawler and I occasionally get the fleeting urge to play one of those so I guess it's good to have one on hand for those few minutes every decade or so. The screenshots are incredibly blurry for something that's supposed to encourage people to want to buy it. I hope the game doesn't actually look like that...

Dark Envoy

64% off in the sale with a Mostly Positive rating. Even the highlighted pro reviews they've chosen to promote it on the store page are lukewarm at best so I don't have a lot of hope for this but then it's often better to go in expecting nothing much and be mildly surprised to find its not as bad as you thought it would be than to anticipate greatness and get something that's merely very good. It's a "cRPG", which is a term though we'd gotten rid of around the turn of the millennium, when we stopped putting the word "computer" in front of everything we needed a computer for. Baldur's Gate on a budget is what they mean, anyway. A very small budget...

Wild Country

20% off and Mixed. Mixed is not good. It's a "cozy-competitive" card game, whatever the heck that means. I don't play many deck-builders, mostly because I find building decks about as engaging as picking talents from a talent tree. I thought these were exactly the kind of tedious, faux-administrative tasks computers were designed to do for us but apparently in some quarters they're considered to be too enjoyable to hand off to a machine. I picked this one despite the genre and mechanics because it has amusing-looking funny animals, some of whom wear hats.

All of those are probably from June's offer, if anyone cares. July's offer looks poor so far but I don't remember most of  the games I've just been talking about coming up in the conversation when June's slate was announced so I'm hopeful something better will turn up, unnanounced. 

Of the July games available so far, I've only taken one:

TOEM

This one has a massive 80% off in the Steam sale right now and and Overwhelmingly Positive rating. It's a hand-drawn, black-and-white photography adventure in which you wander about, chatting to a bunch of people and solving their problems by taking photographs. You'd think, given the crazy amount of screenshots I take, I'd be all over photo games but I've only ever played one or two. Should make a nice change of pace when I'm in the mood. When that's going to be is another question.

And since I've been plugging the Steam Sale all through this post, it's nice to be able to end with something I actually bought there! Yes, I paid money for a game, something that seems hard to justify given how many games I get for free and how many of those I haven't even looked at yet, but it was sooo cheap...

Steins;Gate

A whopping 90% off and Overwhelmingly Positive. Also the only game I've ever seen to use a semi-colon in the title in quite such an aggressive manner. It looks right in my wheelhouse, being "a time-travel, science fiction interactive visual novel". Can't really walk away from something like that.

Obviously, I haven't played it yet. The description on the Steam page gleefully claims "30-50 hours of reading time", which is something I've never seen offered as a positive feature of a video game before. I could read several full-length novels in thirty hours, let alone fifty, so the writing damn well better be good! 

And that's my list of acquisitions for June and the very beginning of July. I'm still wavering on a couple of wishlist purchases in the dying days of the sale. As I just suggested, it's increasingly hard to justify buying anything even at huge discounts unless I absolutely, positively need to play it right now. For a time it made sense to build up a cushion of games to fall back on should the need arise but I think I'm fully furnished with those now. 

I'll take a bet with myself that, when I post about the Steam Winter Sale, as I inevitably will, I won't have played Steins;Gate or any other games I might buy in the Summer Sale. 

If I win that bet, will I also have lost it?

Trending Now...

For various unexpected reasons, I had to spend much of yesterday driving Mrs Bhagpuss around the Cotswolds (Not exactly a hardship on a beautiful summer's day but time-consuming all the same.) and much of today putting together a self-assembly chest of drawers (Chest finished, drawers still a work in progress.) Consequently, I no longer have time to write the post I was planning for today.

Luckily, I have a couple of game-related musical items that shouldn't take too long to stitch together into some kind of a patchwork. Plus I expect I might find something else to bulk things out a bit.

First up, Death Stranding 2, sequel to a critical darling I have never played. I could, though. The Director's Cut of the original game is currently available for free to Prime subscribers on Amazon's cloud gaming platform, Luna. I probably ought to try it. Everyone says it's a must-play.

That's not why I'm writing about it, although one of the two posts I was thinking about doing today was going to be about the Prime Gaming games I picked up earlier in the week. No, this is about the London leg of Kojima Productions "World Strand Tour",  a twelve-stop affair in which Hideo Kojima trucks around the globe promoting the new game with live events featuring various special guests.

For the London event the guests were Caroline Polachek and Chvrches, which is some double-bill alright. Caroline performed her song "On The Beach" from the new game and Chvrches did the title track to the first game, which they wrote. There is some shaky phone footage of both, which you can see at this link if you really want to, but I think we'd better have something a bit tidier, one of which is from a different event entirely...

I ought to say, I don't really much like either of those. The Chvrches one is a decent song but not really my kind of thing and other has very little in it of what I usually enjoy in Caroline Polachek's work, namely dance rhythms and beats. This is my problem with most game music in a nutshell, really. It exists for a very specific purpose and without that context it rarely makes much sense. Or not to me, anyway.

That problem doesn't really affect this next one because what Pickle Darling has done is take the music they've made and turned it into game music for a game they've also made. The result is good music, a good game and some game music that frankly I didn't really pay much attention to, although it was fine in the background while I was playing. I'm not a big 8-bit fan though.

Here's one of the songs in its original context.

Massive Everything - Pickle Darling

And here's a screenshot from the game, which you can play at itch.io here. No download required.

It's a pretty good game, too. It only takes about fifteen minutes to play and I laughed several times so that's a good ratio. Also the controls are comfortable, even though J seems like a really odd choice for Interact.

Let's have one more from Pickle before we go.

Human Bean Instruction Manual 

And finally, just because it seems to be badly-filmed, hard-to-listen-to video day, here's an absolute dream of a guest artist/cover that you can barely hear. Lana del Rey is on a stadium tour just now, which sounds like a fan-fic fantasy until you realise it's actually happening.

Last night she played Wembley Stadium and she brought out Addison Rae for couple of songs. They dueted on Lana's as-yet unreleased 57.5 and on Addison's brealthrough hit from last year, Diet Pepsi. 

There's really so much to say about that. As many of them have gone on to acknowledge, Lana changed the rules for female singers in pop music and her influence is absolutely everywhere now. When I fell in love with her songwriting, pretty much no-one sounded like her; now almost everyone does. 

Addison Rae certainly owes her a debt, which may have something to do with both the way her debut album Addison is stirring up a chorus of "Well, I wasn't expecting much but... it's really kinda good...?" reviews and with how big-sisterly Lana is with her. Not to mention why Lana rates Diet Pepsi so highly.

My favorite version of the song is still Blondshell's by a mile but I'd love to hear a studio take from Lana. Or a properly recorded and sound-balanced live version. Do people even do live albums any more?

Of course, bringing out your idols and/or accolytes to duet with you seems to be a big trend just now. It has to be a very special combination to get much attention any more.

Just Like Heaven 

 Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith

That'd do it. 

I'd just like to point out that Robert Smith is barely six months younger than me...

Heralding The Heralds

Jenn Chan, Darkpaw's "Head of Studio" dropped another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II yesterday. I imagine she posted one for the elder game, too, but I can't even pretend to be playing EverQuest any more so maybe I'll just skip that one. I wouldn't really understand what any of it was about, anyway.

Before I get started on the content, I have something to say about the nomenclature. Is Head of Studio" a new title? It's snappy. I like it. Although it kind of makes a nonsense of the whole "Producer's Letter" thing, doesn't it? Aren't they called that because the person writing them is the game's "Producer"? Shouldn't it be called the "Head's Letter" now? 

Except that sounds ridiculous. Like something your twelve year-old brings home from school to tell you the dates of the next school play and that the science block needs a new roof and would you like to help run a stall at the school fair to raise funds for repairs? 

Whatever she's calling it, Jenn Chan writes a good letter. She's affable, friendly, informative and she has a great line in what I think we're going to have to accept, much though we may not want to, are now generally known as "Dad Jokes". I'm minded to say she's the best Producer (Head of Studio.) the game's ever had although I'm not claiming I can remember all of them. She's certainly the least pretentious and most agreeable.

Her Producer's Letters are also very predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. She's established a form and a structure and she's clearly happy to just keep going with it indefinitely. At least half of every letter is a recap of the previous one, detailing what she said was going to happen and confirming that it did or, if it didn't, which is rarely the case, why.

At this point I do have to wonder what the substantive difference is between a Producer's Letter and a Roadmap, other than that a Roadmap looks much flashier. In terms of content, they seem very similar. I don't in the least mind getting both but there does seem to be a deal of overlap.

According to the July letter, everything that was promised did indeed come to pass. There's an overview and a month-by-month breakdown of events since April, all with hyperlinks to the relevant press release or explanatory article on the official website. It really is about as well-documented a piece of reportage as you could hope to see. I would guess either Jenn is an excellent administrator herself or else she has one in her employ.

Following the studio's uninterrupted support for Pride Month this year, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise to see the second paragraph of the letter celebrating Darkpaw's latest donation - $5,000 to the San Diego LGBT Community Center - but in the light of certain less admirable decisions made by other gaming companies (*cough* Jagex *cough*) it's more than usually heartening. 

I did manage to remember to pick up red pandas for all my characters on my main account although I'm not sure now if I got them on any of the others. Too late to worry about it now! Speaking of things you can have for (a given value of) nothing on every character, there's an odd promotion going on right now that gives you a Fabled Mount: Zhufeng, Harbinger of Mirth for every Krono you buy. 

Why they're specifically promoting the purchase of the "in-game objects that can be redeemed for 30 days of membership time" and also traded for Platinum within the game I'm not sure. They do cost $3 more than a regular monthly sub though, so I guess that would explain it. Presumably no-one actually uses Krono to pay for their subscription, only as a way to get the vast amounts of in-game currency needed to buy anything much on the broker in the age of hyper-inflation caused by people trading Krono...

You get one of those mounts for every Krono you buy, too, and twenty-five of them if you buy a twenty-five pack of Krono, which I did not even know was a thing you could do until I read the press release. Why anyone would want to buy 25 Krono at once is beyond me but apparently you can if you want. As to what you'd then do with 25 ugly flying fire-dragons... invade Freeport, maybe?

After recapping everything that's happened since the last time she wrote and reminding us of the current cash shop campaign, Jenn Chann goes on to tell us what to expect over the summer, which pretty much means recapping the roadmap and re-iterating what we can see in the handy in-game Events Calendar. I doubt anyone playing the game needs to told that after Tinker Fest comes Scorched Sky and Oceansfull any more than they need to know that after Thanksgiving comes Christmas and then New Year.

After all of that, we eventually come to something we didn't already know. Or that I didn't know, at least. 

Firstly, there's going to be "a Content Creator program" established later this year. What exactly that means we'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out but I'm assuming it means streamers. Not that I'd bother applying even if old-school blogs counted. I'm technically a "Content Creator" for Stars Reach and all that's done is make me feel uncomfortable posting about the game at all so I'd rather remain independent.

Next, we get to the really interesting part - some information about the upcoming expansion. Well, actually about the pre-expansion event, which has a name of its own - Heralds of Oblivion. We don't know what the expansion itself is called but that at least sets the tone.

In my experience, pre-expansion events, or "Preludes" as Jen calls this one, for any MMORPG fall into one of two categories - low-key and trivial or hyperactive and essential. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Either you're doing some busy work for a bunch of tedious NPCs who hand out rewards barely worth the bag space or the entire server is howling around in a huge gang, descending on every event like a swarm of locusts, desperate to hoover up the insane XP and/or huge upgrades.

As Jenn halfway acknowledges in the letter, we haven't had one of the good ones since 2018, when I described the rewards as "fantastic". Here's hoping this one at least matches it. It certainly seems to have some depth with "5 tradeskill quests, 5 adventure quests, 2 public quests, 2 collections". Pre-expansion PQs tend to be very popular and profitable in the first couple of weeks, until everyone has what they want, so I'm going to try and make sure I get in on the action early this year instead of leaving it to the end with all the other lazy bums.

As for what the expansion itself migh be about or where it might take us... no clue, really.  Jenn often ends with a pun that's supposed to offer a clue but this time there's just a picture of her standing in some kind of crater or hole and the tagline "No Bones about it, this is going to be good!", which I'm not even sure refers to the expansion.

It might just as easily refer to Game Update 129, also discussed in the letter and due to arrive in August. That one's called Fear of Eternity and includes Solo and Heroic versions of some of the dungeons or instances from the Chains of Eternity expansion from 2012.

I would have said I wouldn't be doing any of that, since I can't do very much of the instance that came with GU128 yet. That, however, should be fixed with the new one because it comes with a "Gear Catch-up Crate" designed to "get you straight into the GU action".

I'm probably going to do a separate post on this, for which I'll wait until I've been able to see the gear and the stats, but welcome though all this free stuff is, I can't help thinking the whole gear-ladder-catch-up thing in EQII is getting out of hand. It looks like we're going to get three complete new sets of upgrades to all our gear given to us for free in just four months - the GU Catch-Up crate in August, the Panda gear in September and then the Tishan's Box with the expansion in November. Is that overkill? Certainly starting to look like it.

The Herald's of Oblivion Catch-Up Crate is, however, only available to All Access members and the Tishan's only for those who buy the expansion, while anyone at all can get the panda gear just for the trouble of doing some very quick and easy quests, so there is an argument for all three, I guess. Best not to be inspecting the dental records of any gift horses too closely.

And that's about it. Another letter sent, received, read and discussed. Let's all meet back here in three months and we'll do it all over again.

Thinking And Drinking

Sometimes I wonder if I even like MMOs any more. MMORPGs. Whatever.

Certainly, the "MM" part no longer has any real relevance for me. I rarely even bother with the big, hot-join events these days and the idea of linking up with other players in a formal group to do small-group content seems both slightly dangerous and faintly ludicrous, like it would be if I tried to go back and do some other things I enjoyed doing when I was much younger, climbing trees or vaulting over fences, say.

The Online part, once so thrilling, feels like more of a necessity than an attraction now. Everything is online these days. It's not something anyone gets excited about any more. I rarely bother to think about it. The whole concept sits at about the same level in my consciousness as electricity - I'm vaguely aware it has to be there in the background, making stuff happen, but I don't consider it to be material to whatever pleasure I'm deriving from whatever it is I'm doing. 

As for the RPG, if we're going to go all the way to the bottom of the niche we've dug for ourselves, I doubt there's any meaningful definition we could all agree on any more. Those three letters clearly no longer have much of a connection to the words they used to represent and I'm not even convinced they relate to the same kinds of progression mechanics they once implied, either. 

Whether I still like or don't like MMO(RPG)s is unclear but either way I don't seem to be playing many and when I stop to think about it, I haven't for several years. About the only true MMORPG I still put any significant amount of time into is EverQuest II, where I do at least play through each year's expansion storyline and do the minimum required outside of that to ensure I have a character capable of handling the newer content.

Eyes left, buster!

Even there, though, I play the game entirely like a solo RPG, something the developers have openly supported for a long, long time. Just about every kind of content in EQII is available in parallel for either soloists or groups, including one hundred per cent of the narrative and story, marking a recognition on the part of the team of the audience they're serving. 

That's increasingly common in older MMORPGs, many of which have done more than lip service to enabling solo play. We hear an awful lot from the other side of the fence, the smaller developers seeking to bring back the glory days of grouping from fifteen or twenty years ago but all the traffic in the established titles has been going the other way for years. 

There is, of course, room for all denominations under the very broad MMO church and some of these retro games will be successful and popular within their sphere of influence. It's just not likely to be a very big sphere.

Despite my decreasing interest in playing any of them, there do still seem to be quite a lot of fairly successful new games that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call MMOs or even MMORPGs. New ones pop up all the time, some of them making quite splash. The latest, Dune: Awakening, the Funcom MMO/Survival hybrid that just launched, has been both a critical and commercial success. 

A while back I'd have felt honor-bound at least to try it but now I have no desire to play it even for free, something if precedent tells us anything, may one day be an option. As has been observed , and often, many, maybe most, of the MMOs that launch to huge acclaim and great commercial success lose most of their population in a matter of months, after which there's a slow drift down until, if they're lucky, they reach some kind of equilibrium at around ten per cent of their initial population, by which point they're willing to let anyone in for nothing. 

Play one I know!

I suspect D:A will avoid any such embarassment, though. My sense is that games that promote survival mechanics, even when they employ those mechanisms in the service of a broadly MMORPG agenda, tend to do better than those that wear their MMORPG colors proudly. 

I'm less than sure whether the evidence bears that out and I'm not really prepared to do the research necessary to prove or disporove it. It's just a theory based on casual observation and that nebulous aura that sometimes surrounds games that are doing quite well rather than quite badly, which admittedly may have more to do with the skill of their PR departments than the sustained success of the games themselves.

Successful or otherwise, one thing that's less likely to be disputed is the degree to which both survival games and sandboxes have moved in on the territory that used to belong to theme-park MMORPGs. I can remember when both were considered somewhat niche, while theme-park MMORPGs were thought of as about as mainstream as the genre got. I'm not sure that's the case any more, even if almost every list of the most popular MMORPGs in 20205 is still dominated by theme-parks such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online.

I have, as I so often seem to do these days, wandered off whatever point it was I started out trying to make. I'm not really all that interested in re-hashing yet again all the old arguments about which games are succeeding or failing, something for which we never have the data needed to come to any solid conclusions anyway. 

What I was hoping to talk about were the reasons why I might have drifted away from the one true path I'd followed so fervently and monomaniacally for the more than two decades. Why am I playing so many games now that aren't MMORPGs?

I'm gonna feel it in the morning but right now I don't care.

Partly it's just the inevitable attrition caused by spending so much time doing the same thing, although I'd be fooling myself if I tried to pretend most of those same things don't still feel pretty satisfying and entertaining. It's not as though I've switched to playing completely different kinds of games, anyway. Much of what I've played these last five years has felt quite similar to what I played in the twenty before. I'm still mostly fighting monsters, leveling up, improving my gear and stats, decorating houses and gathering materials for crafting. The loops have scarcely changed at all.

When it comes to the newer games, the difference isn't really in the mechanics so much as the settings. It's a surprise to me but I think I might finally have found the limits of my tolerance for traditional high-fantasy. I can't summon up the motivation to care about all the Tolkein-inspired races any more and I really don't care to invest my limited intellectual capital in another imaginary pantheon or dynasty.

With the glaring exception of Valheim, which is still by a long way my most-played game on Steam, most of the games I've found, played, enjoyed and written about in the last few years don't really fall into the European Medieval trope so long dominant in the genre. To be fair, an awful lot of them still draw from it one way or another but they hide it beneath layers of rather more interesting local color, which these days suits me a lot better than listening to a bunch of elves and dwarves banging on endlessly about how everything's gone downhill since the Golden Age, when they were in charge.

Ever since The Secret World I've been hoping for something with either a more contemporary or futuristic setting that also has a touch of the supernatural. It's taken me a while to realise that my wishes have largely been granted, just not by traditional MMORPGs.

Can I just get a beer?

Once Human is probably the closest game in feel to TSW I've tried but Nightingale isn't far off, either and the reason I'm looking forward so much to Neverness To Everness is that it looks as if it might tick almost all those boxes even harder. It has the look and the theme. What it isn't is an MMORPG. Or it is. One or the other.

But who cares? It's becoming very hard to tell just what boxes these things will fit most comfortably into, by which I don't just mean the definitions have stretched and blurred, even though they have. I frequently find myself playing games these days without actually knowing whether I'm playing them with other people or not.

That seems unlikely but it's true. I said at the top of the post that, when I play MMORPGs now, I play them almost entirely solo. It affects my understanding and awareness of what I'm doing to such an extent that more than once, when I've been working on a post about a game here, I have quite literally had to go look up whether it was single-player or or multi-player because even though I'd played it, from context and experience I couldn't tell.

That was the case for Genshin Impact, which always felt like a multiplayer game even though it isn't. It has a co-op option but unless you invoke it it's 100% single-player and yet when I was there it always seemed like I was playing an MMO. 

I dunno. Is there any way I can stop you?

The runaway success of that game led to a flood of somewhat similar titles, several of which I've played, a couple of which I'm still playing, and I couldn't immediately tell you if all of those are single or multi-player, either. I'd have to stop and try to remember if I've seen other players in the cities to be sure and even then I have to think twice, in case those "other players" were actually NPCs. 

When you can't even remember if you're playing an MMO or not, does it really matter any more?  It did used to matter to me quite a lot. There are posts on this blog where I make policy statements about the importance of being in a shared space with others, even when you don't directly engage with them. I make reference to immersion and authenticity and all sorts of similarly ill-defined concepts.

And now it seems none of that matters as much as it used to, if it even matters at all. All that matters is whether I'm having a good time. And I am. These new games are fun, which it alos seems like the older ones should have been, and yet were they? I'm not sure I can tell any more.

I wonder if what's really holding my interest is the unexpected and largely unecessary level of detail. I spent twenty minutes in a bar in Crystal of Atlan a couple of days ago, having the kind of experience I always wanted to have in bars in games since I first played EverQuest. I could talk to the staff and the customers, I could sit at a table and order a drink and see someone bring it to the table and see myself pick it up and drink it. The drink gave a buff and there was a board on the wall you could interact with that showed you where you stood in relation to other customers in terms of your ability to get a bunch of drinks down you. 

I told you I could ride a horse!

Best of all, I could go up to the stage and chat to the woman providing the evening's entertainment and then sit back down and listen to her play two actual songs, all the way through. And they were strange songs, too.

And yes, you can do some of that in Lord of the Rings Online and they do it very well there, and I was very impressed by that the first time I saw it, too. And of course in LotRO you might very well get a real band that plays songs you recognize. And there are plenty of other MMORPGs that have musical instruments and bars and sitting and drinking animations and why am I even talking about this one as if it's any different?

I don't know and that's the point. I don't know. What I do know is that the pared-down, accessible nature of the gameplay in certain modern online games that use many of the mechanics familiar from older MMOs feels a lot more engaging to me right now than it does in the source material, as do the somewhat more contemporary-feeling storylines and settings. 

Or maybe I've just had to listen to one too many dwarf sit down and sing about gold. 

It's All just A Game To You, Isn't It?

Not that I want to act as unpaid hype man for Neverness To Everness but damn! Have you seen the latest trailer? 

No? 

Well, here it is. 

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Not actually a trailer. 

It's better than that. It's the opening sequence of the game itself, apparently. More annoyed than ever about the lack of beta invite now. Grrr.

The only problem is, I want to watch that anime quite a lot more than I want to play that game. It feels like the game is the consolation prize because there is no anime. Maybe that'll swap round when I do get to play it. I hope so but I kinda doubt it. 

Raises a question, though, does it not? All these very-to-extremely successful anime-inspired games... wouldn't it make sense for them all to spin off into actual animes? Movies or shows, either way. Is there really not a Genshin Impact movie in the works? Surely there must be...

Wait...

I'll check...

Well that was more confusing than helpful. Maybe all that guff about the death of the web does have some validity after all because it certainly is full of nonsense these days. And I don't mean AI halucinations or deep fakes or any of that trendy buzzword clamor, either.

Has anyone actually tried to use IMDB for anything meaningful in the last, oh, five years, for example? Nothing there has made much sense since at least the pandemic. I used to be able to go there and get solid, straightforward details on movies, just like looking them up in a book. Now look at it! 

Case in point: do a simple google search for "Genshin Impact movie" and the top result is IMDB - Genshin Impact (TV Series 2019...) Hmm, interesting, you think... how did I miss that? And did Genshin Impact really come out that long ago? 

No, it did not. It launched at the end of September 2020. So, what then? The game is an adaptation of an existing IP? How did I miss that?

No, it isn't. There was no "TV series", not in 2019 or any other time. The entry lists 250 episodes but it looks as if what IMDB has chosen to do is list every cut scene and trailer for the game as if it was an episode in TV show. 

That's not nearly confusing enough, though. We can do much better than that. It seems HoYoVerse has been hyping a TV show based on the game for years. Or a movie. Or both. There are plenty of links to times they've said one in the works, complete with a few details on which studio might be producing it. No actual show has yet appeared or even been scheduled.

Well, except for that one that one that ran from September 2020 to August 2031, of course. I mean, we all know about that one, don't we? It was "one of Netflix's most streamed Asian programmes" and it won "Anime of the Year Award in 2022 at the International Anime Awards". 

Don't say you didn't hear about it? It's right there on the web in black and white (Actually white on black because in some parts of the internet it will be forever 1998.)

Someone put a lot of work into that Fandom Wiki entry. That is not AI. I mean, I'm not saying whoever did it didn't get an AI assist but I'm pretty sure that's all one person's fantasy there. And if they'd not chosen to project it all the way through to 2031 as though we were past then already, it would have been very convincing indeed.

So, no, as it happens I don't think AI is going to render the world-wide web unusable for any practical purposes when it comes to research. Humans got there first and are already making a pretty good job of that.

None of which was really what I was going to write about but now I've started, I might as well throw in something else I've been meaning to say about AI. Has anyone noticed how some of the AI applications that started out as services or resources are slowly turning into games?

It took me a while but once you have your eye attuned to it, you start seeing it everywhere. NightCafe, the AI image generator portal I've been using by preference for a long time, has slowly morphed from a sort of curation point for multiple models to a social media platform for enthusiasts and now it's made the full jump to becoming a game by adding... quests.

They've been using pop-ups to suggest ideas I might want to make pictures from for a long time, as though I'm going there to kill a few minutes, not to make specific images for a defined purpose, but now they're amping the casual gaming approach up to offer two-week-long challenges they've chosen to label "quests". 

Suno hasn't gone that far yet but it's well into its social media stage, with its own star creators and featured performers. It has rankings of a kind, too. I'd guess it's maybe one more iteration away from going full game.

This is the beginning of how it's going to be. AI is still bloody awful at the things the big tech companies are demanding everyone uses it for but it's tailor-made for casual time-filling. Forget the supposed danger that AI could replace the creative work of actual artists and musicians and writers in true video games. It's nowhere near ready to do that and even if it was the pushback from a very vocal segment of the audience is going to delay the (Still inevitable.) drafting of the technology into mainstream entertainment production for quite a while longer. As something for idle hands to do when there's nothing better, though? For that, it's perfect already.

The threshold for game-like entertainment at that end of the market is orders of magnitude lower than  in games aimed at console or PC gamers. It's not as though the standards of human-made games there are stellar and the expectations of the audience are infamously relaxed. If it kills thirty seconds at a bus-stop it's likely good enough.

Or  maybe that's just the view of someone who doesn't understand the market or the players. Easy trap to fall into. Still, I have heard enough about the way the Suno mobile app's being used already to understand that for many of its users, typing in a few words and having it make a song you can laugh about is considered a decent enough way to pass a lunch hour. Especially now it will happily use rude words.

Luckily, for now anyway, these apps do still retain the backend that lets them be applied to the purpose for which they were originally created, namely as creative tools. How long that will last is another matter, which is one reason I'm getting as much done now as I can before I log in one day to find the whole thing has been turned into a game. I suspect the window of opportunity for doing much other than the AI equivalent of quizzes, word-searches or sudoko may not stay open that much longer.

And once again, that won't be because of anything AI has done. It'll be because some people actively enjoy making things worse. 

Let's hope that's overly pessimistic. I'm certain there will still be professional tools using AI tech. You'll just have to pay professional rates to access them. The free stuff will be aiming at an entirely different demographic.

One thing I will commit to: it'll be a long, long time before we see anything from an AI to match the Nevernesss To Everness cut scene at the top of the post. Humans may use AI as the tool to create something like that but the AI will have about as much say in the finished product as your pen has in the words you write.

I'm not even saying I'm happy about it, either. Who wouldn't want to be able to type "Urban post-apoc magitech anime TV show with animorphs - sassy dialog, lots of explosions" into an AI app and get ten twenty-five minute episodes as good as that trailer in thirty seconds? Geez! The phrase "I'd never leave the house" would really come into play then, wouldn't it?

It's the 2020s equivalent of the 1960s jetpacks and flying cars though. Always going to happen, never does happen. 

Speaking of which, where is my jetpack? I've had it on order since at least the nineteen-seventies...

Just Because It's Costing You Nothing Doesn't mean You Can't Complain

I may not be playing many games at the moment but that's not going to stop me collecting more. 

Ooh! Sidebar! Is that a legitimate way to look at all those gaming backlogs everyone keeps complaining about? I've been in the habit of referring to mine as a Gaming Library, in an attempt to add some gravitas and alleviate some guilt (Guilt, I should clarify, that I personally do not feel but which I understand to be some kind of a general problem among the community.) by suggesting a large stack of unplayed games represents a resource rather than an obligation but how would it be if instead we re-framed our backlogs as Collections? 

Collections are cool. Everyone loves them. Every item they contain exists to be owned, treasured, curated and occasionally looked at but no-one expects you to use any of them. Collections are always growing, too. It's part of their charm and appeal. Adding to them is a hobby in itself and it gives other people something to give you as a present when they're stuck for ideas of their own.

And you can forget about the sunk cost. Sure, some collections hold their value and even increase but many don't and no-one cares. In fact, it's often considered crass to know, or certainly to talk about, how much your collection cost or how much it might make at auction if you sold it - which of course you never would.. The true value of collections lies in the pure, innocent pleasure that comes from owning and appreciating them.

There! Now don't you feel better about that backlog?

Also, congratulations to me for yet again de-railing one of my own posts. One sentence I got out before it happened! That has to be a record.

Getting back to the point, as Wilhelm thoughtfully reminded us all yesterday, the Steam Summer Sale has just started. I thought I probably at least ought to take a look at how that affected my wishlist, on the basis that if I'm still not willing to commit at two-thirds off, there's probably not much point that game staying on the list.

Definitely Maybe

As it turns out, only five games out of thirty-eight meet that criterion and I have no inclination to buy any of them. Added to that, two games on the list are currently on offer for less than a pound and I still don't feel like paying for them, which strongly  suggests I might not even take them if they were free. 

And yet I haven't de-listed any of them. The counter-argument is why bother? It's not like a Steam wishlist takes up any space. I'm not going to trip over it or have to get the ladder out to shove half of it in the attic so I can make space for more.

It's not even as though having a bunch of games on there you're never going to buy makes it any harder to see the ones you might. The list's sortable eight different ways, including by how big a discount you can get and how long a game's been on there, which seem to me to be about the only two pieces of information I'd be likely to want to know before deciding whether or what to buy.

No, I think I'm more minded to leave everything alone, just on the off-chance that something might eventually catch my eye. It seems a bit ridiculous to try and second-guess future me by taking games off now that I might feel differently about in the future.

And yet, with all that taken fully under consideration, I did take one game off the list. What's more, it was one of the games I almost certainly would have bought at some point, when the discount felt right. I had a good reason. The best.

There are quite a few games on the list I'm always quite close to buying and a lot more I'm not. I could fairly reliably sort them into four  categories:

1. Definitely going to buy on Day One at full price. Just waiting for it to release.
2. Almost certainly will buy one day. Just a question of when and for how much.
3. Probably will buy one day but only when it's a real bargain.
4. Unlikely to buy, no matter how cheap it gets.

The first three categories seem completely legit but the last is iffy. Why even put a game on the list if you're almost certain not to buy it at any price? 

Well, a couple of reasons at least. For one, it supposedly helps the developers to have as many wishlist votes as possible in the run-up to launch. I play a lot of demos in Next Fests for games I think are quite good but aren't for me and I often wishlist those just to be supportive. Costs me nothing and they seem to appreciate it.

The other reason is so I can keep an eye on certain titles I might want to blog about. Having them on the wishlist helps remind me they exist and also occasionally gets me an email from Steam if something changes.

Of course, both of those arguments cease to have much validity once the games launch. At that point, I probably should remove them. I tend not to for one very good reason: I'm too lazy. Doing nothing is always the easier option.

Not at any price.

On my current wishlist there are two games in Category 1: Nighthawks and Nivalis. Nivalis has a 2025 release date but Nighthawks, which I added to the list in 2021, still just says TBA and I suspect it may never arrive.

Category 2 has ten games, Category 3 has seven and everything else is in the last one. That means exactly half of the games on my wishlist are games I am most likely never going to buy. Worse, I'd take them on a free offer but even then I'd be highly unlikely ever to play them.

And I don't care. That's fine. They're not in my way. They can just stay there unless they for some reason start to annoy me. That happens occasionally. I can have moods.

But even with your wishlist split up into categories, you have to be so careful! Can you imagine anything more infuriating than buying a game in Cat 2 for, oh, let's say, 30% off in the Summer Sale, meaning it's actually costing you £17.99, still in my opinion a not-inconsiderable sum for a video game you aren't desperate to play Right Now, only to find - literally five minutes later! - you could have had it FOR FREE on another gaming platform?

Boy, that would suck, wouldn't it? Lucky that never happened!

Relax! It didn't. It was close, though. 

Last night, after I read Wilhelm's post, I went straight to Steam and checked the discounts on my wishlist. The best ones were all on games in Cat 4 but there were a few 50% or even 60% offers in Cat 3 that I was highly tempted by and still am. 

Nothing in Cat 2 had more than 30% off and it wasn't quite enough to get me to pull the trigger, which turned out to be just as well when, on a whim, I also decided to check Prime Gaming this morning. 

Prime Says...

In theory, there shouldn't have been any reason for me to do that. Although the Prime offers roll over, there's supposed to be an announcement at the start of each calendar month telling you what's new. There's a blog about it and they send out an email. I even wrote about the June offer back at the beginning of the month, so I ought to know what's on it, right?

Yeah, like hell I do! Either I can't read or Prime can't keep the record straight. Maybe both.

When I opened the web page today, I saw a bunch of new games had been added that I cannot remember seeing on the blog post. And I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered if something from my fricken' Steam wishlist was on there. Which it was.

Or was it...?

There seems to be some confusion over that. Pay attention, now, because this gets complicated and I'm not going to make it any plainer with my explanation.

Claim says...

The Prime Gaming website very clearly shows Stray Gods: Orpheus Edition, the most expensive version, a compilation of the base game and the DLC but with a label underneath that says "Stray Gods: Orpheus", which is just the DLC on its own. When you click through to claim it, the display changes to the page you see at the head of this post, which only mentions the DLC. 

When you do claim it, though, the confirmation plainly says you just got the twofer. And then you go to Good Old Games to install it and what do you find? 

Yep, you guessed it! Neither! Instead, you appear to have received the original, base game - Stray Gods.

It's clear I'm not going to find out what I've actually got until I install it so talk amongst yourselves while I do just that. I'll go make myself a coffee while it's downloading...

GOG Says...

Well, that's made everything clear as mud. The game I've just acquired is definitely the original Stray Gods, not the DLC or the two-pack... but it apparently comes with a saved game in which Act 1 has already been completed. 

Wasn't me! My "Played" time on GOG shows just one minute, the time it took me to log in just now.

I guess a save might make sense if I'd just acquired Stray Gods on Steam, which is where I played the demo almost exactly two years ago. I think the demo was Act 1 so I can see how progress there might have been saved towards a future purchase of the full game on the same platform.

But I just got this version from Amazon Prime Gaming and they delivered it to me on GOG, and yet somehow it looks like it knows I already played through Act 1 on a Steam demo, so how does that work? I don't even use the same email address for Steam and Prime. Or the same user name.

As they say in the movies, something's not right...

And this post has not gone at all how I expected, either. I'm live-blogging again and it's all falling apart. The plan when I started was to write about the new games that appeared on Prime and the five that I claimed today but I think I'm just going to cut my losses and save that for a separate post. In fact, I'll probably wait until they announce the games for July, because I bet these are some of them.

Just a couple of extra details and thoughts to finish. 

To re-enforce my message about being careful not to buy stuff on one platform that you already own on another, while I was checking GoG for this post I spotted I already own Kerbal Space Program there. That's on deep discount in the Steam Sale right now and I was looking at it last night and thinking about getting it. Good thing I didn't.

Also, does any of this suggest maybe someone at Prime Gaming is using an AI assistant? In my experience they have real trouble picking up fine details like the difference between a game and its expansions or DLC. Or maybe no-one at Amazon really cares about Prime Gaming any more. that tracks.

And finally, what's up with GOG, anyway? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not wrong.) but doesn't it stand for Good Old Games? With the emphasis on Old, I always thought. Stray Gods came out in 2023. That's two years ago. 

Is that what we're calling "old" now?  I have food in my cupboards older than that and it's still in date.

Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan.