Day Eight - Nice

 

Noël Christmas

Sugar & Tiger

Day Eight - Naughty

Santa Rock'n'Roll

Faichecleres

It's Grab Bag But It's Completely Different But Also Still Grab Bag!

Listmas Is Coming!

So, I just read (Skimmed, honestly.) Stereogum's Best Albums of 2024 list, which came out, a tad prematurely I'd say, on the second of December. I mean, do they have a time machine or a crystal ball or something? How do they know the best album of the year isn't coming out next week?

Anyway, as it happens, I was ripping the #1 album(s) on that list at the exact same time I was reading Abby Jones' emotional endorsement of it. (Them.). Yes, I still rip CDs. I bought myself a new MP3 player (Yes , I still use an MP3 player.) because my ten-year old  iPod Touch is all-but full and I don't want to go through the harrowing process of choosing what to cull so I figured I'd just start afresh somewhere else, which is why the world is in the mess it's in, I guess.

Brat & Brat And It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat topped this year's poll as a double bill, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure. It's been Charli XCX's year. I got the pair of them for my birthday but I haven't listened to either all the way through yet. I need them on the iPod for that. Obviously, most of the tracks I'm already familiar with from life online but once I get this thing up and running I can hear them in the wild.

Looking down the list, there's only one other album I own and that's Romance by Fontaines DC at #28. Well, I say I own it. I don't yet. It's on my Christmas list and I'm sure it's somewhere in the house. I just don't know where. 

There's also a copy of #29 in the house or more accurately in the car but it isn't mine. That's The Cure's Songs of a Lost World. I like The Cure but Mrs Bhagpuss loves them. I was going to give the CD to her for Christmas but she counldn't wait so she bought it herself. I thought the two singles off the album were excellent so I imagine the whole thing is pretty much on par.

I do also kind of own #8, Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. For most of the year it only existed as a two hour block of sound on YouTube. I listened to it that way and downloaded a copy for posterity. It is now available on Bandcamp in various formats so I might get the CD one day, although postage is a killer. I guess I could cut out the middleman and just buy the digital download. I do like to have a hard copy, though.

Of the rest, there are eight more albums I bookmarked at least one track from to use on the blog although in most cases I never did because I used other stuff that was around at the time that I liked more. Then there's another eight where I listened to something from the album online but didn't like it enough even to bookmark it. There's a lot of mmm... okay, I guess on that list for my tastes.

Of the rest, I at least know who everyone is, except for a dozen names new to me. You'd think, considering they're in Stereogum's best-of-year list and I read the damn site every day, I'd at least have heard of them but apparently not. Must pay more attention in class.

Still, it's a huge improvement on where I was a few years ago. It's hard work, keeping up, but it needs to be done. I really hate the way I let myself lose touch for a decade or so. Not letting that happen again.

As for the repeated assertions in the comments that 2024 has been "the best year since 2020" I'd have to go look at what came out four years ago to figure out why that might be true or if it even is, what was so great about 2020. Every year is great for music as far as I can see. And probably always will be, even if we're reduced to banging rocks together in a cave again.  

My #1 album of 2024 actually came out in 2023 so obviously it's not there. It'll be on my Inventory Full Best of 2024 list though. My blog, my rules.

The Clock Ticks For Tik-Tok.

I mentioned in passing in Thursday's post that I'd heard if I installed NetEase's MuMu emulator it might steal my data. This morning I saw the latest on the proposed U.S. ban on TikTok, an app that, it's claimed, "could allow the Chinese government to gain access to the data of its millions of American users". It's tempting to ask "So, what's new?"

According to the article in NME, the EU, along with Canada and more than thirty US states, have already banned the use of TikTok on "government-owned devices", which kind of makes sense in terms of the data that might be at risk there but also makes you wonder what government officials were doing, using TikTok in the workplace to begin with.

If the ban goes through in January, it's going to be very interesting to see how it affects popular culture, particularly in the U.S.A. TikTok-driven trends dominate the media these days and drive both production and sales in multiple businesses. Will a ban lead to a resurgence of American Soft Power or will American teens and twenty-somethings find their grip on the zeitgesit slipping even further as the rest of the world continues to accelerate away from the 20th Century? Or will they just find ways around the ban that let them lope along behind the rest of the world, just slightly out of step with the fads of the moment?

Also, why pick on TikTok? Doesn't every app steal our data now? Is it even feasible to avoid it any more? 

I sat up and took notice when I saw that Tencent had acquired a majority stake in Kuro Games. That's the company behind Wuthering Waves so I guess whatever data they were gathering now goes to Tencent, often described as an unofficial arm of the Chinese government, although not by me because I have more sense.

Of course, if it's true, Tencent already have all my data from any number of other games I've played that they own or part-own or publish because Tencent has a piece of pretty much everything. There's really no point worrying about it any more than it's worth worrying about low-level air pollution or water contamination. It's not like you can stop drinking and breathing and it's not like you can go without games and social media either. It's not physically possible. We all know that.

Make Room! Make Room!

I was rifling through someone else's grab bag yesterday, Scopique's in fact, when I came across a mention of a game called Infinity Nikki. The name sounded awfully familiar. I could have sworn I posted something about it myself, once.

I took a look but I couldn't find a tag for it. A search on the blog found nothing either but when I went to the game's website to see if I saw anything that looked familiar, I absolutely did. 

I have a not-all-that vague memory not only of reading about the game itself but also doing some digging through the history of the franchise, which seems to have been around for a while. There's a very good article about it on the Epic Games site, of all places.

When, where and why I read about it before remains a mystery. About all I can think of is that it might have come up when I was researching that similarly-named but wholly unrelated NIKKE game I foolishly downloaded from an advertisement on MassivelyOP.

Infinity Nikki looks like it might be fun. I mean, open world dress-up? What's not to like? I was ready to find out by downloading it and giving it a go only it seems that even with four hard drives and a usb stick all connected to my PC at once, I'm still running out of storage space.

I really hate deleting things (See above.) especially when I just know I'm going end up downloading them again, which is why I keep all these dozens of MMORPGs hanging around even though I'm not planning on playing any of them right now. They take up a ton of space but so do all my video files that I keep multiple copies of on multiple drives for safety-blanket reasons. It seems four and a half terabytes of storage isn't enough. I guess I'd better buy some more.

Or I could just uninstall World of Warcraft. That's a hundred gigabytes on its own. I'll think about it and when I've decided, I'll give Infinity Nikki a whirl.

Make It Stop! No! Wait! Don't! I Like It!

Nikki's in pole but there's a line forming right behind her. I was only checking on Neverness to Everness just the other day. I thought I'd pre-registered already but I haven't been getting any updates so I guess I never got around to it. Well, I have now. 

The game went into closed beta recently so with luck it should be available relatively soon. Early reviews are solid and things are looking good.

Further back in development is Ananta, a somewhat similar but somehow entirely different title from NetEase. (Them again!) The name is bleh, especially by current naming conventions, but the trailer is full-on fantastic. I've seen it described as "Anime GTA6" but since I've never played a GTA I have no idea if that makes any kind of sense.

What I'm thinking is that if the most fun I've had in a game this year was driving around in Once Human, listening to the radio and occasionally jumping out to shoot bizarre monsters, I'm probably in the target market for games where you drive around, listening to the radio, occasionally jumping out to shoot bizarre monsters. 

I should look for more games like that, especially ones where you can wear bunny ears and look cute while you're doing it. The days when I dreamed of pretending to be a short, ugly gnome or a dwarf with a huge beard seem a long way behind me now.  I really ought to update that thumbnail on my profile.

Is This A Glock 9mm I See Before Me?

Okay, so that's Macbeth. It's all fricken' Shakespeare, right? I thought we might have had enough music for the moment so instead of ending with a song, since we were just talking about Grand Theft Auto, let's end with this instead.

One of the very first things I remember doing in EverQuest back around the turn of the millennium was spending Sunday evening in the theater in Freeport, watching the equivalent of open mic night for about an hour or so. And now here we are.

If you'd have told me then...

Day Seven - Nice

Rocking With The Reindeer

John Otway

Day Seven - Naughty

 

Christmas Reindeer 

The Knife

Secret Level Bonus

I didn't make a point of it, when I posted about December's Prime Gaming offer a few days ago, but at the time I did think the list felt a bit light, at least compared to the richness that was November. Turns out there's a reason for that.

Yesterday, a second Prime Gaming blog post popped up in my feeds. Two in one month? In one week?? What was going on?

The Amazon Prime series Secret Level, that's what. Announced earlier this year, the fifteen episode first season is "a new adult-animated anthology series featuring original stories set within the worlds of some of the world’s most beloved video games", the games in question being

• Armored Core
• Concord
• Crossfire
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Exodus
• Honor of Kings
• Mega Man
• New World: Aeternum
• PAC-MAN
• PlayStation (Not a video game...)
• Sifu
• Spelunky
• The Outer Worlds
• Unreal Tournament
• Warhammer 40,000

This news seemed to pick up remarkably little traction with any of the gaming sites I follow, possibly because they tend to be MMO-oriented and the only MMORPG on this list is New World, which Amazon would like everyone to stop calling an MMO anyway.

I know I sometimes try to make out I'm not a gamer but I do usually at least recognize the names of most well-known or popular games, even if I couldn't tell you what they're about or even what genre they fit into. It doesn't in the least surprise me that there are only two games on the list I've played but it does that there are half a dozen I've literally never heard of, not to mention that two of the entries aren't video games at all. They're either franchises or platforms.

The show, which debuts in just a few days, was put together by Blur Studio, known for making "epic" trailers for video games and also as the  people behind Love, Death + Robots, a series I seem to remember being praised by a couple of people in this part of the blogosphere. 

I'm not a fan, myself. I watched a couple of episodes and didn't feel any desire to watch more. The connection actually put me off paying much attention to Secret level. 

Nothing I'm seeing so far is making me feel any more enthsiastic about jumping in when the series starts on Tuesday. Reviews so far have not been encouraging. Radio Times, with only the first four episodes to go on, highlighted the extreme and unsatisfying brevity of what they'd been allowed to see. The longest was "just shy of 18 minutes long", leading the reviewer to observe that "every episode still feels like you’re watching a trailer for something bigger."

Still, they did at least find a few positive things to say, unlike The Verge, whose reviewer saw all fifteen episodes and didn't enjoy any of them:"The 15 shorts are almost universally dull and manage to neither make their source material seem compelling nor provide new insights for existing fans."

I had no plans to watch the show and I still don't. The only reason I'm writing about it now is that it's the reason we got that second Prime Gaming post and also quite possibly why the December slate seemed a little lackluster compared to last month.

In recognition of the arrival of Secret Level on our screens next week, Prime subscribers are getting nine bonus free games, all somehow related to titles covered in the show. Not to that many of them, though. I make it just four: Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40,000.

For the first two, we get the actual games, which is great since I've had The Outer Worlds in mind as something I'd like to play for a while now. I claimed it right away. When I'll get to play it is another matter but it's on the longlist.

Spelunky is a platformer so I passed. The D&D titles are "Enhanced" editions of Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, which sounds great but I already have multiple editions of both. I can't be bothered to work out what's been enhanced so I'm just going to claim them anyway.

The Warhammer titles I'll need to look at more carefully (There are five of them.) before I decide if there's anything there I want. I doubt it but you can never be sure. I like Warhammer well enough as a setting and as a franchise but the games that come out under the banner are rarely in genres that interest me.

Luna users also get Mega Man 11 although for how long isn't clear. December, presumably. As for New World Aeternum, unsurprisingly Amazon have chosen not to give their "new" game away for nothing but Prime members who play will get "a surprise" and "some free in-game items" when the show starts on 10 December. Or more likely a surprise that is some free in-game items.

As I type it all out it occurs to me that it's not such a great celebration as all that. Most of the games aren't represented at all and some of those that are come in the form of variants of titles that have appeared in previous Prime Gaming giveaways. Still, I suppose we can't complain. They're not just freebies - they're bonus freebies.

I'm just happy to get an extra game I wanted.

Day Six - Nice

 Cold Snow In The Winter 

 Holly and Richard Bailey