Local Games For Local People?

Following on from yesterday's post, it's now been brought home to me just how unnecessary my self-inflicted sabbatical from Neverness To Everness really was. Not only could I have been playing the game perfectly well on my machine's own integrated graphics, I could have been playing it on someone else's machine altogether. Specifically, I could have been playing it on GeForce Now.

Given there are posts here about playing other games on Nvidia's streaming service, you might have imagined I'd have thought of it before but it was only when I read Nimgimli's post at Dragonchasers this morning, where he talks about what he'd been playing over the long holiday weekend and mentions using GeForce Now to avoid dumping even more heat into the house from a local PC, that I remembered it existed. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. By complete co-incidence, I was fiddling around with some old drives yesterday and I happened to notice an installation of GeForce Now on one of them, so that was when I remembered it existed. Only then, what I thought was "Didn't GeForce Now close down ages ago? I wonder if I should uninstall it?"

Luckily, I didn't carry through with that plan. Far from closing down, GeForce Now seems to have expanded enormously. There are now a couple of thousand games to choose from - twice as many if you opt for the Install To Play feature. I'm not sure now why I thought the whole thing had fallen over. Must have been thinking of some other cloud gaming platform, I guess.

I found all that out when I went to look at the website. That's the link to the UK version. I don't know what anyone in the rest of the world will see or how localized the service is. 

And I don't much care, not from a personal perspective. After reading Nimgimli's post, all I wanted to know was whether I could use GeForce Now to play Neverness To Everness. Sure, I'd worked out how to play it on the machine next to me but I was looking ahead a little. What if this machine crapped out on me again before I'd replaced it? The big new update drops tomorrow. It would be annoying to be shut out again, even for a little while.

I thought I should at least give it a try but there were a few questions to answer first: Did I have my old login details? Was NTE on the service? If so, was it available at the free level or would I need to subscribe? And most importantly, would I be able to link the GeForce Now version with my existing account? I sure as heck wasn't going to start all over again.

A fall at any of those fences would probably have meant the end of my interest, at least for now, but GFN soared over them all with room to spare. Yes, I had my old details and yes they still worked. Yes, NTE is on the cloud platform and yes it's in the list of games you can play without a subscription. 

Most importantly of all, I was able to link GeForce Now with my Perfect World account with no trouble at all. Some of that surprised me a little but what surprised me most was how easy it all was. It only took me about ten minutes to get the whole thing installed, set up and linked. And then there I was, back in the game, with my character standing just where I left her yesterday.

I ran her around for a bit before it occurred to me I ought to check the graphic settings. I hadn't forgotten that part of the point of trying the service was to see if it would let me play at a higher visual quality. Except it looked to me as though I already was. The straight lines looked sharper, the trees looked leafier, the colors looked richer, the whole game looked like it had been washed and polished.

That would appear to have been all in my imagination or at least some sort of subjective bias. When I checked the settings, they were still on "Smooth", just as I'd left them. To see what would happen, I bumped them right to the highest grade - "Cinematic". That's higher than I used to play the game on my good GPU.

And everything seemed fine. The game ran well. It felt like there was occasionally some very slight lag but it was barely noticeable. Certainly no worse than how playing on my own machine had felt the day before and I'd had no problems there.

I roamed around the north of Hethereau for a while, exploring and chatting to the locals. Then I thought I'd try driving the long road that flirts with the edge of the map so I called my car. 

OMG, am I bad at driving in this game! I'd say I was bad at driving in every game but actually I was fine in Once Human. Quite good, even. Here, though, I'm an absolute menace. I shouldn't be allowed on the road. When drivers yell "Do you even know how to drive?!" at me out of their windows after I've rear-ended them or crashed into them from a side-road I want to yell back "No! I have no idea what I'm doing!" And I had the Comfort Mode on, too...

Having googled it, I see it's not just me. Apparently the driving controls are considered somewhat touchy. There are things you can do to alleviate the problem and I might try a few but more likely I'll just go back to my bike. I find it a lot easier to control.

My driving skill or lack of it aside, the game seemed fine at speed. No more lag, no hitching or glitching, everything looking great. There was one moment when I got a "low frame rate" warning but I hadn't noticed anything different. I did nothing about it and it went away.

When I'd had enough cruising around the back roads I thought I might carry on with an interesting side-quest I picked up yesterday, one involving a bookseller. It interested me for professional reasons. I ported back and did some more of that one until Mrs Bhagpuss informed me it was time to get Beryl ready for a trip into town. 

By then, I still hadn't had any warnings from GFN about how long I'd been playing. From memory, I seem to remember one popping up after half an hour, then another at fifteen minutes, after which there was an on-screen timer ticking down the minutes. It felt like I must have been playing for at least the half hour and I can see now from the report you get when you log out that it was in fact 34 minutes, so either I'm misremembering it or it's changed. 

As a free player, you're limited to a maximum session time of one hour although you can just log back in immediately to repeat that as often as you want, always depending how many other people are in front of you in the queue. When I logged in at about nine in the morning on a Tuesday, there were nine people ahead of me and it took maybe thirty seconds before I got my turn. More than acceptable.

So far so great, then. If that was a test, GFN definitely passed. There were a couple of trivial issues, foremost among them the annoying discovery I made after I logged out that any screenshots you take using the in-game camera or selfie function are saved on GeForce Now's servers, not on your own PC, and they're immediately deleted at the end of your session. That's why there's only one screenshot in this post from my session this morning. It's the only one I took with the Windows screenshot instead.

The one screenshot from today's session that survived. It tells us absolutely nothing.

That's easily fixed by using the GFN screenshot facility, though. That does store locally. I believe it's what I used to do when I played New World this way. Long time ago now. I wonder if they've allowed New World to stay on the service pending its final execution next year?

At the end of the session GFN gives you some stats about its performance. Everything was aces except for the game itself, which scored just 15%, putting it deep in the red warning zone. Apparently the servers free players get to play on aren't up to the task of running NTE at top graphic fidelity. If I want to play on Cinematic I'd need to subscribe to get the better machines.

Except, as I think I've made clear, I didn't notice the game was performing badly. It ran fine, looked great and I had no problems doing anything I wanted to do. I had no complaints. So much comes down to expectation. 

And taste. Because here's the strange thing: having played for weeks on my PC on High or Extreme and now having glimpsed Cinematic, I think I might actually prefer Smooth. Not for the increased frame rate or improved performance but because in some contexts it just looks better.

When I was playing on Smooth yesterday, I took a lot of screenshots of wet streets and buildings in the rain. The rain in Hethereau always looks picturesque and a lot more appealing than real rain ever could but on Smooth it looks positively painterly. It gives the whole city an impressionistic sheen that's just lovely to see. At the very least. I'd say the game looks no worse in Smooth than on the higher settings and when it rains, I'd say it looks considerably better.

All of this has given me something to think about.

Most of the visually-taxing games I'm likely to want to play are available on GeForce Now. Baldurs Gate 3 is. All the well-known gacha games are. You can bet any new hot title will be. 

The free service does have some limitations that make it less appealing as a long-term option but the mid-level, "Performance" subscription removes them all. The Performance subscription includes sessions that can last up to six hours and there's a queue time averaging less than a minute to get in again. You get access to the more powerful machines, able to run the games at high settings and you're eligible for the Install To Play option so you can add games you own that aren't part of the core offer. You can also link GFN to Steam to make it even easier.

Perhaps even more temptingly, I'd never even have to think about updates or patches while I was playing on NVidia's servers because they'd handle all that for me. I'd also be able to free up a whole lot of drive space on my own machine because I wouldn't need to keep the games installed locally. 

And best of all, I could play all my games on any device I own. Not just on this desktop but on my laptop, my Android tablet or even my phone. Not that I'd want to play on my phone...

And it's so cheap! An annual subscription costs just £65 in the summer sale (The offer ends tomorrow although who's to say there won't be another soon after?)  but it's only £99 at full price. Which means I could pay less than a hundred pounds and be able to play all my games as much as I realistically would ever want to with just the hardware I already own...

... or I could spend more then £2,500 on a new PC and a laptop that could do basically the same thing. And maybe throw in a good tablet to make it a round three thousand. Which would get me what, exactly?

Hmmm....

Yeebo has a great post up about media and ownership that I need to reply to with one of my own. I left a comment in his thread indicating how conflicted I am, not just about the necessity for owning entertainment but the desirability, too. Conflicts of interest like this really don't help me come down on one side or the other.

All my logic tells me I should just buy a subscription to GeForce Now and forget about buying new hardware altogether. If GeForce Now lets me down at some point, I can deal with it then. If it doesn't, I've saved a ton of money and I have all the access to games I need.

Logic tells me that but emotion still tells me I want my games running on my machines in my house. Which will win out isn't clear but I really can't see any good reason not to give Nvidia their £5 a month anyway. If nothing else, it's going to be a handy back-up. 

And who quibbles over a £5 monthly sub these days?  

An Unexpected Return To Hethereau

Since my PC decided to go on the fritz a week or so ago, I've barely played any games at all. Other than when I've been on holiday, away from home, or too ill to play, it has to be the longest I've gone without gaming for nearly thirty years. 

At first I barely noticed. It's summer, the weather's been lovely and I've got more than enough practical things to do - gardening, my ongoing project to sort and clear all the cruft and kipple from the house, taking Beryl for interesting walks - without needing to sit in front of a screen. If I do want to sit down and do something less physical, there's blogging and song-making to keep me busy. 

Anyway, I've been drifting away from gaming of late. I've mentioned it a few times. I play fewer sessions and they tend to be shorter than they would have been even three or four years ago, let alone back in noughties, when I devoted most of my leisure hours to MMORPGs. Chances are I wouldn't have been playing all that much anyway. 

Or so I thought, so it was quite a surprise to find out how much - and how quickly - I missed my games. Even though I was getting a lot done around the house and garden, which was very satisfying, and I was getting lots of time in the sunshine, walking in the countryside with Beryl, which was fun, I still found I had more time than I quite knew what to do with, some days.

There were hours, here and there, where I felt a little adrift. Those were the times I'd usually have been logged into something or other, doing a bit of leveling or a quest or two or fiddling around with the decorations in one of my many imaginary homes. Not being able to do any of that gave me some useful perspective on what value even a modest amount of gaming adds to my day. 

It's more than just habit. It's a core part of the way I've lived my life for so long now that to cut it out completely feels wrong, just like it would feel wrong to stop reading or listening to music. That was actually a bit of a surprise to learn.

My intention was - and still is - to buy a new gaming PC and a gaming laptop as well. Thanks to the money I will eventually receive from my mother's estate (Eventually - it'll come some time but it's hard to say when.) I am for once in a position to spend a reasonable amount of money on myself and decent gaming hardware doesn't seem like too much of an indulgence for once. 

I'm a notorious prevaricator when it comes to choosing anything that's going to cost a significant amount, though, and I'm not looking at off-the-shelf models this time, so once you allow for a few days for fitting and testing and shipping, even if I made up my mind and placed an order today, it could be the best part of a week before I could sit down at a new PC and log into a game.

A game I want to play, that is. I have plenty of games I could play right now, on the hardware I have. But being able to play any old game isn't the issue. I want to play the games I want to play and the game I most want to play at the moment is Neverness To Everness. That's the one I'm missing. 

That was a surprise, too. I knew I liked it but I wasn't expecting its absence to feel like when your favorite MMORPG goes offline for extensive maintenance. That sense of an irritating itch you just can't quite reach to scratch.

Plus there's DCUO. I know! I know! I don't even play DCUO. Not really. But it's the Summer of Supergirl (Damp squib of a summer for some but not for me.) and Digital Ink keeps giving new Supergirl stuff away. Like the duster coat she wears in the movie.

Having seen the movie, which I loved, as you'll know if you've been keeping up with the blog, I realized I really wanted that duster coat. I've always loved duster coats. Who doesn't? I'd buy one for myself if I wasn't worried I'd look a complete twat in it. But I can just imagine my DCUO character wearing one. She'd look so cool!

It's not time-critical. If you miss the window to earn these things for free through normal play, you can just buy them later for Daybreak Cash, of which I have plenty. Or I think you can... I hope you can... Maybe you can't.. Maybe you have to buy them while the event is still running... 

That was how my logic went on Saturday. I guess that's FOMO? I don't experience it often enough to be sure. It could just be sensible forward-planning. Whatever you want to call it, it was a spur. And what it spurred me on to do was see if this PC could at least let me log into DCUO for long enough to buy a coat, even if it crashed right afterwards.

This PC has what are supposed be decent integrated graphics, so far as integrated graphics can ever be described as decent. They're supposed to be good for what's euphemistically and optimistically called "light gaming". Exactly what that might mean in this context I couldn't tell you. When I bought it, I already had a pretty good graphics card so I didn't pay too much attention to what the in-house alternative might or might not be able to handle. 

I probably never would have considered using the integrated graphics to play games until I started having all these conflicts with the card. Then, the first time I tried it with EverQuest II a little while ago, it didn't go well. I thought I'd given up on the idea but I wanted that duster coat so  why not? What's the worst that could happen, right? I've already broken this machine twice and look at it now - working just fine.

This is the point where you're probably expect a story about how I nearly bricked the whole thing just for the sake of an imaginary overcoat. Luckily, that's not what happened. 

What did happen was that DCUO ran flawlessly. I started off very cautiously, collecting my login rewards and checking to see what I needed to do for the coat. It turned out I could either just buy it (And all the other items that came with the event package, a few of which were pretty nice too.) for 2000DBC or I could do some dailies and reduce the total cost by 200DBC a day.

If I'd had ten days, maybe I'd have done that and gotten my coat for free. But I didn't have ten days. The event had less than half of that still to run. Even so, I thought I'd get started. Neither the game nor the PC had crashed so I was getting curious. I wondered if I'd be able to do something simple like a few dailies?

Yes, I would. I did. And I couldn't really tell much, if any, difference from how the game played through the GTX 4050. I hadn't even changed any of the graphic settings but it all seemed to zip along just fine. I did all the dailies that counted for the event and a few more besides. I wasn't timing it but I think I'd probably played for about an hour when I decided I'd had enough.

I thought about whether I'd want to do the same again for another few days just to save maybe a thousand DBC and I was pretty sure I wouldn't  so I bought the coat. It cost me 1800DBC minus the 10% discount for being a member, so 1620DBC altogether. 

Since DBC has a nominal exchange rate of 100DBC to the dollar, that's just over $16. Would you pay $16 for an imaginary duster coat? I wouldn't. Then I did anyway. And I still had more than 30k DBC left. I'm DBC rich, still. 

Once I'd gotten my coat, I spent another half-hour or so redoing Nini Mo's whole outfit. They've certainly improved how that works over the years. I remember it being very fiddly and unintuitive but it seemed very comfortable this time. I have quite a lot of options, including not just in all the costume slots but cosmetics, auras, colors and effects. And for possibly the first time, I could find them and apply them all without much trouble.

I put together a look I was pretty happy with. I'd love to show it to you but one thing that didn't seem to work with the integrated graphics was the screenshot key. I tried the in-game version and the good old reliable Windows+Prt Scr method, all without success. I'm sure I could figure out how to make it work but DCUO screenshots tend to look like crap anyway so it doesn't seem likely it'd be worth the effort. You'll just have to imagine it. 

Nini Mo also has the Super-S-Symbol on her chest now, if that helps. I got that in the package, too. And Supergirl will come hang out at my base now. An imaginary $16 well spent, if you ask me.

So that was DCUO and Supergirl done. I logged out and waited for the PC to crash and it didn't. Then it went on not crashing for the rest of the day. Hmmm.

Sunday, I had to work so I wouldn't have been playing much anyway but this morning I started to wonder. If the onboard graphics could play DCUO, could they maybe handle NTE? 

First, I had to find the installation. It wasn't on any of the three disks in the case. I found it on an SDD I had in an external caddy. I plugged that into a USB slot and patched up the game. It didn't take long. The big new update doesn't get here until Wednesday.  

Then it was time to log in and the launcher wasn't happy. I got a big warning, telling me my device didn't meet minimum spec and politely suggesting I might like to try another device instead. That might have put me off but I'd already worked out, through a combination of Can You Run It? and Reddit threads, that although my integrated graphics show up as having less than a gigabyte of VRAM, they can actually draw as much as they need from system RAM, as much as 4GB if you tweak the bios, something I haven't yet tried, not wanting to invite trouble.

I ignored the warning and carried on. Loading was a little slow, thanks to playing through an external drive, but once I was in the game everything seemed fine. I didn't notice any stuttering or hitching with the graphics on "Balanced" but just to be on the safe side I dropped them to "Smooth", Hotta's interesting choice of name for the second-to-lowest setting.

Two hours later I logged out after a thoroughly enjoyable session. I did all the usual things, restocked my cafes (For which I always do my own shopping, meaning a lot of traveling through  Hethereau.), stopped a bunch of random street crimes (Combat seemed completely normal.), bumped into Lacrimosa in a couple of places (There's an event where you have to meet her numerous times, allegedly by chance, although there's a list of where she'll be...) and finally a long and very enjoyable quest I just happened to pick up as I was running around.

When I logged out... nothing happened. Apparently I can play NTE just fine on integrated graphics. Then again, I was playing it just fine on the graphics card until I wasn't, so who knows? 

All of which somewhat changes my plans. I'm still going to get a gaming laptop for certain. That'll give me portability for gaming such as I've never had, something I will certainly enjoy and  use. I think I'll still get a new gaming laptop, as well. It will give me redundancy for the next time something breaks. This his machine can move into the back-up slot and its predecessor can go to the recycling center, which will save me trying to figure out how to fix it. 

In the meantime, though, it looks like I'm back to playing Neverness To Everness, until and unless that breaks something else. I'm very much looking forward to the new update on Wednesday and just two hours in the game today gave me more than enough ideas for several posts, not counting this one, so expect to hear more about it.

If you're going to blog about gaming, I guess it really does help to play some games now and then... 

Persona Non Grata - The Latest EQ2 Producer's Letter

(Written on Friday, hence the present tense.)

I didn't really have anything in mind to write about today. I was thinking of skipping but then I thought maybe I could say something about the EverQuest II Producer's Letter. Or I could if I'd read it. I'll just go do that now...

Hmm. It's not very interesting, is it? Even by Jenn Chan's wonderfully low-key standards. After some of the hyperactive attention-seekers we've had shilling for the game over the years, I do genuinely appreciate her calm, reasonable approach but combined with not really having much of note to announce it can get a little "so what?" at times.

The first half is all "Here's what we've done so far. Aren't we good to you?" which is fair enough. No harm reminding people what the Romans have done for them. Then there's the usual trumpeting of special offers and things we can buy, with the crass commercialism of all that offset by the Good Works for Charity report. Again, expected and justified but really not very interesting.

There are a couple of mildly intriguing items. This Persona thing for a start. I can't remember when they first mentioned it but I feel like it was a while ago. I didn't pay much attention and I couldn't honestly say I knew exactly what it was but I think I do now. It's EQII's attempt to turn itself into FFXIV I think. 

"... this new feature will allow you to level and play alternate class 'personas' on the same character. This enables leveling from level 1 to max on each class while still playing the same character, having access to the same equipment, and credit for completing the same quests and achievements. "

The "all jobs on one character" thing was one of the aspects of Final Fantasy XIV I enjoyed the least. It was a strong factor in our decision to go back to Guild Wars 2, when there was a real possibility Mrs Bhagpuss and I might have moved to FFXIV full time because GW2 was overrun with bots to the point of unplayability (Something no-one seems to remember any more.).

It also put me off playing FFXIV much even as a side game later. I actively dislike being able to play all the classes on the same character. I like making alts.

The ability to play multiple characters, have them do different things, dress them in different gear and have different experiences with all of them is one of the things that kept me playing MMORPGs for so many years. The way that, over the last decade, many MMORPGs have moved towards an account-based rather than a character-based structure, with the more extreme examples making it illogical and counter-productive to do anything on more than one character, has been a significant influence on my declining interest in the genre as a whole. 

Rolling multiple characters used to keep me in a game a lot longer. Years longer in some cases. These days, while you can still do it, most of the practical reasons have been removed and it just doesn't feel fun any more. In fact, it feels like a waste of time and the last thing any MMORPG needs to do is remind you of how much time you're wasting, playing it. 

I suspect it may even have something to do with my growing preference for open world gacha RPGs, In those, you're actively encouraged to play lots of characters.And rewarded for it.

To me, then, adding Personas to EQII seems like a retrograde step. It's another sop to the Toon Brigade, those players who see all their characters as nothing more than interchangeable functionaries. From their perspective, being able to do everything on the same character must look like a huge benefit. 

Also, I suspect, it may have something to do with the ever-declining population of EQII. It's going to be a lot easier to get a group going if everyone can swap Personas to fill the missing roles. Then again, Rift used to work that way and it never did Trion much good...

The letter mentions the summer update, which has a name now: Revelations of Malice. It doesn't really say anything about it, though. In fact, I'm a bit unclear on whether the technical and quality of life improvements listed are part of that update or separate from it. Or maybe they are the update?

UI scaling is one of the proposed improvements although it's only going to be in testing, presumably on the Beta server, not on Live. I wonder how many people play EQII in 4K? Seems like it'd be a niche group at best. I guess when I get my gaming laptop (I was pricing them this morning.) I could hook it up to the big TV we have now and play EQII in the lounge in 4K. Not sure why I'd want to but I might try it, just out of curiosity.

More useful and attractive to me are the proposed upgrades to the number of mount slots and house item caps and especially the option to train mounts that you don't currently have equipped. I have a lot of mount xp potions stashed I'd like to get some use out of and that should help.

And that's about all there is. Not much, is it? Hardly worth sending out a letter.

Oh, there's a whole paragraph about the expansion. Ought to mention that, I guess. Only problem is it doesn't actually tell us anything. 

Here. have a read. See if you can make anything out of it. I can't.

"Cthurath, reeling from his recent defeat within Gerion, has been suppressed back into the Void. While the majority of Norrath remain unaware of the cataclysmic threat posed by the Consumer, the Overlord’s absence in Freeport has not escaped the notice of the power hungry. Encrypted messages continue flowing, and the feeling of dread seems to suffocate you as you think too hard not only on what you’ve deciphered, but other clues and gut feelings. Something big is about to happen, and you have thus far been unable to home in on what that could be. Words are power, mysticism and darkness go hand in hand, a found missive and a very vague map of islands... what could it all mean? A fair warning Adventurer: pursuing this course can only serve to open a yawning gulf of madness and machinations which will not easily be traversed. Heed the warnings, Norrathians. Beware the Descent into the darkness."

The only thing in that lot that caught my eye was the "very vague map of islands". I hope that means the expansion's set in an archipelago. I like island-hopping adventures. But then there's the ominous "Beware the Descent into the darkness" part, too. I do hope we're not going underground again. I had more than enough of that in Terrors of Thalumbra. 

Oh well. I guess we'll find out soon enough.  

Farewell Bel

A couple of hours ago, I had a post almost finished. I stopped so we could take Beryl for a walk. When I came back, I checked my feeds before finishing the post and saw on MassivelyOP that Belghast had died.

I'm sure I don't need to clarify to anyone reading this who Belghast was. I probably don't need to explain how he'd been undergoing a difficult course of chemotherapy following a cancer diagnosis. Reportedly, it was complications with that course of treatment that led to his extremely untimely death.

Everyone who's likely to be reading this most likely followed Bel's blog, just like I do. We all learned about everything in his life, good and bad, through his conversational, very open posts. We all know he'd had the worst of years, with his wife dying suddenly and unexpectedly and then his own illness appearing.

But I imagine most of us were confident he'd get through all these very bad times and come out the other side, still Bel. Still himself. Still positive, forward-looking, optimistic, ready to give life the benefit even if it didn't seem to want to cut him much slack.

I knew from his posts that he was struggling with his chemo routine. I know from experience how difficult chemo can be like although my own experience was a lot milder than his. But I also know how unpredictable it can be, filling yourself with poisons week after week. Sometimes very bad things happen.

I had my own brush with death thanks to complications with chemo, as documented here on this blog. It's such a terrible shame Bel didn't survive his own to tell us all about the experience on his blog, too.

He would have, of course. He was a fearless examiner of his own life. He talked about all kinds of issues, practical, medical, emotional and personal on what was supposed to be a gaming blog. He was a core influence on my own move to make this blog about more than just games, although his willingness to share far exceeded my own.

But then Bel was ever the sharer. He tried to help wherever he could and he led always by example. His influence has been both deep and wide.

I knew Bel from his blog and also from Blaugust, of course, but he was very active in all kinds of social media and in gaming communities. He was always willing to talk to new people and turn them into friends, even though he didn't always find socializing easy, something he often mentioned on his blog. 

A lot of people knew Bel. A lot of people are going to miss him. No-one's going to forget him easily, not least because his legacy will live on.

According to Roger, Blaugust is going ahead. I'm absolutely certain that's how Bel would have wanted it. I'm sure everyone will have plenty to say about the inspirational figure who started the whole thing when it rolls around again next month. 

For now, though, I'll leave it at that. There's only so much you can say when something like this happens. I just hope someone's looking after Bel's cats. He really loved those cats. 

A Girl And Her Dog

I did it! I went to the cinema to see the Supergirl movie. The first time I've been to the cinema since before the pandemic and even back then it wasn't like I was going often. Maybe once a year, if that.

It wasn't always that way. I used to see a lot of movies on the big screen. Well, on a screen bigger than a TV at least. Screens in the '70s could be tiny. There might actually be TVs bigger than that now.

When I was at university it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say I went several times a week. That was because I was at Cambridge, a collegiate university, and every one of the 30+ colleges had its own Film Society, most of which showed a film pretty much every week during term. I saw a lot of classic films and subtitled foreign movies that way and I saw some of the big, new releases (Like The Empire Strikes Back and Superman.) at the actual cinema in town, too.

After I graduated and moved back home, all through the 'eighties I lived in the middle of a big city with at least three arthouse cinemas and a couple of commercial cinemas all in easy walking distance. I saw a lot of films all through that decade. 

By the '90s I'd moved. I didn't have a cinema I could easily walk to any more. My cinema-going was slowing down but I still used to get to the pictures maybe six or eight times a year. By the turn of the century that was down to two or three and by the time Covid shut the cinemas I was already going a whole year between visits.

So, yes, it certainly takes something special to get me to make the effort, these days. Why Supergirl? And was it worth it? 

First question: I guess Supergirl because I've always liked her and also because I didn't make the effort for Superman last year. I felt I owed it her. Plus the trailers made it look hella fun.

As for the second, Hell, yes! I loved it! No, I fucking loved it! It was everything I hoped it would be and more. The movie, that is. The cinema experience itself? Ehh... that was okay.

But then, what can you expect when you see a movie at half-past nine in the morning? I was literally the only person in the screening. It was in an out-of-town multiplex with a dozen or more screens and my showing was in one of the smaller rooms. Still big enough for about 130 people though. Or it would have, if anyone other than me had wanted to see Supergirl right after breakfast on a Thursday. 

I'm quite a proponent of the value of seeing a movie as part of an audience. I know it has its downsides but you don't need an evolutionary biologist to point out the synergies of a shared experience. There's also the Big Screen Effect, where the more of your field of view the image occupies, the harder your brain finds it to separate the image from reality, which is great for immersion. 

Whether it's worth leaving your house to watch a movie alone, on a screen that's not really all that big, well that's another question. I just didn't want to have to wait six months for the DVD to come out. Although I will be buying that DVD. This is a movie I'll be watching more than once.

So much for the experience. What about the movie? So I liked it. Big deal. Why did I like it? (Might be some mild spoilers in this part but nothing very specific. Probably safe to carry on.)

For a start it's a good movie as a movie, which is very definitely not something you can say about all superhero films. Probably not about most of them. Supergirl has a coherent, linear plot. It starts at the beginning and goes through to the end with precious few diversions. 

There are some well-judged flashbacks that add depth and nuance to the narrative and illuminate certain things about the central character and that's it. None of the usual darting about from place to place and time to time you usually get in comic-book movies. Also it's quite a small cast which helps to keep things focused.

The movie's an adaptation of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, a strong story in itself, but the movie script cuts a lot of the sometimes over-complicated to-and-fro of the comic. It condenses the action from a few weeks to just three days. The ending, which we'll get to, is very different. I think Woman of Tomorrow may be a better story but sticking closely to it would make for a much worse film. 

That's one of the big, BIG problems with superhero movies in general. Comics have so much more time to tell their stories and so much more freedom to be completely confusing about it and get away with it. Comics fans are nothing if not tolerant of cruft. They relish it, for the most part. The kind of excruciating detail that has comic fans arguing deep into the night just about kills any movie stupid enough to include even a small fraction of it. 

Supergirl keeps things tight. The plot is a revenge arc yoked to two coming of age stories and the writers and director wisely recognize that's plenty. Even so, they still manage to throw in an origin story and make it feel like a natural progression. Origin stories wreck far too many superhero movies. If you're going to do it, this is how. Really, really good work.

Continuity is another bane of superhero franchises. James Gunn has been tasked with rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe so of course this film has to dovetail with the recent Superman movie, something it does perfectly. David Corenswet, an excellent Superman, appears just as often as he needs to and there's just enough cross-fertilization to bang home the message of his own recent movie, that Superman needs to be a force not just for good but for restraint and tolerance.

Supergirl is a force for good and also a bit of a wild card. There's an argument to be made that she's tolerant and restrained, alright: just of the wrong things.

As her mother, Lara, tells her just before she dies and Supergirl leaves doomed Argo City in a pod with her puppy, she needs to be good but she doesn't need to be nice. And she's not nice. But she's more than just good. As Ruthye tells her late on, she's kind. Kind and good does it for me. Screw nice.

I know some Supergirl fans won't like it. Supergirl's been nice all her life. Too bloody nice if you ask me. 

Well, some Supergirls have. This is the other big, BIG problem with superhero movies. Any superhero a mainstream audience recognizes will already have been a dozen different people in the comics before they even get to the screen. And like Swifties, comic fans always have their favorite eras. 

I've known Supergirl since I was about five years old. I have a couple of favorite eras myself but I think this is my favorite now. Milly Alcock is a superb Kara. She looks the part but that's easy. Any blonde can wear the suit. But as she says to Ruthye "It's just a suit". 

Except it's the suit. Not anyone can wear the suit. She can. Magnificently, she spends almost the whole movie not wearing it. She strides about looking seriously cool as fuck in a duster coat. Then, when she puts on the suit, it's like the sun coming up. And you know what happens when the sun comes up. Well, you will if you watch this movie.

Many, many things about the writing and the acting worked for me. I love Kara's pub crawling bad girl act. I love that it isn't an act and yet it so obviously is. Also isn't it interesting she calls it a pub crawl not a bar crawl?

I think the way the movie goes through a whole sequence of adventures with Supergirl winning fights without her powers is genius. She isn't just a badass because the yellow sun made her one. She was born badass is my guess. And if she wasn't, hardship and trauma made her one. I bet on both.

Her relationship with Krypto is just wonderful but so is the relationship she builds with Ruthye, the thirteen year-old orphan who just watched her whole family getting slaughtered and plans on doing something about it. Of course, that relationship also relies on Ruthye and Eve Ridley is stone solid in the part. They're mirror images, through a shattered mirror. 

It should be said that I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. People doing the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing, just makes me happy. And also makes me cry. I cried a lot during Supergirl. At one point I actually sobbed. I was glad I was the only one there. 

I tend to cry a lot at movies, though, especially when anyone does something unselfish or noble or when something happy happens. Sad things tend not to do it for me or not to the same degree. I didn't tear up when Krypto got shot but I did when Supergirl told him "See Buddy? I told you I'd be back" at the end.

I laughed a lot, too. Out loud. There are some great lines. I think I missed a couple when Lobo and Supergirl were exchanging quips mid-fight. Fights are loud in cinema-sound. Jason Momoa as Lobo is... well, he's Lobo. He doesn't get to do a lot else but then when was Lobo ever anything but Lobo?

While I'm praising the plot and the writing I'll also mention a couple of things that absolutely don't ring true and yet ring completely true in comic book terms. Kara shouldn't win some of the fights she wins without her powers. Ruthye absolutely shouldn't win her one fight. They're both fighting way out of their weight class. But they win and they should win.

They win because they're heroes. Heroines. Whatever. They win because comic book stories are myth. If you don't get that you're probably watching the wrong movie.

And then there's the ending. This hasn't been too spoilery so far but here's a big one. I'll stick something under this paragraph in the edit so there's a break and you can leave if you want.

 So. At the end, Kara kills Krem. Krem's the main villain. He has no actual personality, no backstory, no arc. He's evil. That's it. Oh, and nasty. The two aren't always the same. 

Having a villain so straightforwardly villainous and unredeemable simplifies things. I was sitting there wondering just how they were going to resolve the storyline without killing the bastard when Supergirl killed the bastard. She ran him through the neck with Ruthye's sword after talking Ruthye out of doing the exact same thing. Oh, and first she stabbed him somewhere else because of what he did to Krypto. "That's for my dog".

In the source material, Supergirl does not kill Krem. She sends him to the Phantom Zone where he serves three hundred years. At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, he's released as a very old man. And he's learned right from wrong. It took him three centuries but he's done it. Rehabilitation worked. 

He apologizes to Ruthye, also very old by now because living three hundred years will do that to you. She clubs him with her stick and then hits him a few more times when he's down. But she doesn't kill him. She, too, has learned something in three hundred years. 

That's a good ending for the comic. It would be a terrible ending for the movie. We're supposed to wait three hundred years for catharsis and then it's an old woman clubbing an old man while Supergirl stands by and watches? I don't think so.

All this Phantom Zone stuff, anyway - and the damn place has a history as complicated as Ancient Rome - just doesn't play on screen. It barely plays in the comics, frankly. Calling the authorities isn't going to fly. Who they'd even be in this scenario, god only knows. Clearly Krem and his crew are doing whatever they want already. If there was an authority capable of stopping them or holding them, wouldn't they be doing it already?

I'm 100% against capital punishment in real life but this isn't real life. It's myth. Krem has to die. There's just no other ending that's going to work.

I know some fans agree with that but think it shouldn't have been down to Kara to do the killing. Lobo's right there. He's up on a ridge, watching it all go down. Lobo, as Supergirl warns Ruthye when they meet him in a bar, killed his entire planet. If you want some killing done, he's your boy. 

Except if Supergirl lets Lobo do this one instead of doing it herself, it doesn't define her as somehow above the act, it devalues her as too weak to do the difficult thing herself. Plus Lobo already saved her from what looked like (But obviously wouldn't have been, somehow.) certain death. How many times is he going to fix things for her? 

The two  or the three moments in the whole movie I didn't like all make Supergirl look briefly like she's not in control but at least in those she's mostly just unlucky. If Lobo swooped down on his big bike and killed Krem for her, it would make her look weak and indecisive. 

Supergirl is neither of those things. She's angry and bitter and sad and good and kind and strong and brave and irresponsible and responsible and human all the way through. And she needs to kill Krem, so she does. She's good. She does the right thing and, in that situation, that's it.

It's possibly the most responsible thing she does in the whole movie, ironically. And then she goes home and tells her cousin she's grown up. 

Except she doesn't tell him what she's done. Superman wouldn't have done it and he wouldn't get why she did. Best he never knows. She doesn't tell him she's grown up either. Not in those words. She doesn't have to. That, he knows and we know. He can see it. We can see it. He can hear it. We can hear it.

Coming of age story, remember?

I could go on, at much greater length. Sometimes I wish I was back at college so I could write a dissertation on something that fires me up like this instead of bloody William Blake. I like Blake but I never wanted to write five thousand words about him. I'd happily write five thousand words about Supergirl. 

I won't though. I'll just say the music is great and so are the special effects, the fights and the mise-en-scène. A lot of the scenes are lit really dark but I always could see what was going on. It's a mood piece so it works.

I won't say it's a masterpiece. It's not that. It's a great movie though and not just a great superhero movie. It has the feel of those bleak, existential seventies films I grew up with; Five Easy Pieces, Brewster McCloud, Dog Day Afternoon. Like that. Except in space and with lots of people punching each other up into the air.

It was nice to be back in the cinema. I'm glad I took the trouble.  Maybe I'll go again. 

What's My Motivation?

I'm having a slight problem just now, what with with this being, ostensibly at least, a gaming blog: I'm not playing any games. 

I haven't reached some kind of existential crisis, where I find I've outgrown or lost interest in what, for convenience, I'll call "The Hobby". I've noticed a few erstwhile games bloggers hitting that wall lately but I'm not one of them. I'm still enjoying my gaming. 

I'm not really even in a lull or slump, one of those times when interest wanes temporarily as you wait for some new game to grab your attention and pull you back in; a state of mind familiar, I'm sure, to plenty of people reading this.

No, it's more of an enforced hiatus, just while I sort out a new gaming PC. The one I'm using to write this post seems entirely reliable so long as I don't ask it to play games but I've decided, rather than try to rehabilitate it for that purpose, it's going to be relegated to a media center role downstairs. I'm still looking into what will replace it. Until I make up my mind about that, I'm kind of off games for now, whether I like it or not.

I've found taking an enforced break from gaming these past few days has been quite useful in clarifying a couple of things for me. I've mentioned a few times that I don't play games as often these days as I used to, or for as long, when I do. It made me wonder if my interest in the hobby might be winding down. 

I'm happy to say I'm now reasonably sure that's not what's happening. I found myself getting quite twitchy, not being able to play my games, Neverness To Everness in particular. 

Not being able to play, I've been reading about them instead. Nimgimli posted about the upcoming 1.2 update, which looks amazing. I didn't find time for the full hour-long preview but I did watch the almost eight-minute trailer.

It's impressive. Not to say insane. So much packed in to what's going to be a six-weekly update cadence. How do they do it?

Raph Koster was reported by MassivelyOP the other day as saying the theme park model for MMORPGs was unsustainable because of the cost of producing content and the speed at which players get through it, which seems fair enough until you consider games like NTE, Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact and the rest of the gacha gang. 

I left a comment wondering, among other things, what the difference was in terms of production costs, to which Raph replied with a terse two word answer: "Server costs". I'm not quite clear how that explains the way gacha games can pump out as much plotted, scripted, written, voice-acted content on a six-week cycle as the average Western MMORPG can manage in six months...

The second update for NTE adds an entire game-within-a-game, a fantasy RPG inside the magitech shell, the conceit of which is that the characters themselves will be playing it. I love that part. It even makes the medieval fantasy element palatable. It's permanent content, too, which is just as well for me since I may not have a machine capable of running it before the new update becomes the old update in a few weeks and we're on to the next thing.

My uninformed, outsider's take on how it's possible is that MMORPGs these days just aren't popular enough to generate the kind of income that supports this pace of content production. In that respect, Raph's quite right that the Western model isn't sustainable. 

We can see it, over and over, with every new attempt to break the market open. The locust swarm pitches up, strips a new game bare of content then flies away before the first update arrives. When it eventually comes, some come back for a fraction as long as the first visit and after that there's no getting them back at all. With ninety per cent of the customers gone, who can afford to keep making new content for the few that stay?

With the open world gacha titles, though, there's always another substantial content drop on the way. Even then, players still complain about not having enough to do or finishing everything too fast but instead of having to wait months for the next hit they're into the hype cycle almost immediately and the fix lands a week or two after the cravings begin.

Are theme park MMORPGs unsustainable or just inefficient? Is it inherently harder or more expensive to produce content for servers holding hundreds or thousands of players than for those serving solo or co-op play, even when the nature of the content is very similar? I have absolutely no idea but I'll take Raph's word for it that it is, somehow.

Even then, surely server costs can't directly affect the rate at which the content itself is produced, can they? Not even if it's orders of magnitude more expensive to get that content in front of the players. The issue of content drought, endemic in MMORPGs for many years, seems like it would be independent of the cost of keeping the servers up. 

And when, even in the glory days of World of Warcraft, did MMORPGs ever get content flow at this volume and speed? (I'll answer that one: First five years of EverQuest, that's when. And never since that I've seen.)

But what do I know? Or, frankly, care? My concern with Western theme park MMORPGs these days isn't so much whether they can provide me with content fast enough as whether they can produce content that interests me at any pace. If you remove nostalgia, loyalty and familiarity, the main factors that keep me playing some old favorites, I can't easily come up with many good reasons even to look at most of the MMORPGs I see being promoted or developed these days. They just don't look very... erm... modern.

All of which makes it quite ironic that my current darling, Neverness To Everness, a game a huge part of whose appeal for me is just how very modern it does feel, has chosen to add, for only its second update... a traditional, western medieval fantasy RPG. If they'd asked me what I wanted it wouldn't have been that.

Oh, wait! They did ask me! Several times. And what did I say? Like Mailvaltar, I said I wanted more city. 

Still, I'm not complaining. 999 Nights, which in a magnificently confident coup de theatre we're told should be read as ‘One Thousand Less One Nights’, looks very interesting. I'd love to give it a go.

Luckily for me, as is generally the case in games of this kind, most of the content won't go away when the next update arrives. The big FOMO push is always for the banner characters, none of which particularly interest me this time around, and the various mini-games and events. The substantive elements, scripted content, items, gameplay additions and innovations, those tend to hang around.

In this case there are a whole load of costumes I might be interested in, including some that have something I did ask for - customization. Okay, it's only colors and hiding some panels, not swapping whole pieces between outfits, but it's a start. And I really want that "Unassuming Warrior" outfit for Flora. Anything that looks like regular clothes is good with me.

There doesn't appear to be much, if any, new story content, which is fine with me, this once. It'll keep me from falling behind while I sort out my hardware problems, something I feel quite motivated to do now.

I'm not saying I'm going to buy a whole, new expensive computer just to play NTE but having a game I really want to play does clarify things a little. I was wondering if I needed to bother getting a gaming computer at all or if I couldn't just make do with this one and do without the gaming part altogether.

Yeah. Not happening! Bring on the One Thousand Less One Nights.

Sticking The Ending (Not Saying Where)

One of the beneficial side-effects of the recent heatwave was that I managed to catch up with some TV-watching, while I was downstairs keeping Beryl company. I finished the current (Fourth.) season of The Legend of Vox Machina and I finally got around to the final (Third) season of Good Omens. 

They didn't have much in common other than that I wasn't one hundred per cent happy with the ending of either but since I can still just about remember what happened in each of them, I'm going to wodge the pair into this one post anyway.

There will inevitably be some spoilers so now's your chance to bail. 

Here, I'll stick in one of the trailers as a buffer, just in case.

The Legend of Vox Machina - Season 4

I'm starting to realize I've been watching this one wrong. I didn't even realize it was the people from Critical Role until sometime in Season 2 and even when I did, it didn't mean much to me since all I know about them is what I've read on blogs. Then, yesterday at work, someone ordered a couple of the graphic novel collections and I had a flip through one when I took it off the shelf, which was when it occurred to me the TV show presumably has greater resonance if you're already immersed in the backstory, of which there appears to be plenty.

I probably should have taken the time to watch at least a few episodes of the original YouTube series as soon as I figured out that was where the TV series came from but I never even thought of it until a few days ago. I guess I could start now. It's still there. I just checked.

Maybe I'll get round to it before Season 5 but for now I'm just going to have to treat the TV show as a stand-alone cartoon. And it is a cartoon, I guess, although we don't seem to use the term so much any more. It's not anime, that's for sure, even if you allow that anime can be made anywhere outside Japan.

The trouble is, I'm so used to watching anime now that regular cartoons can look slightly off, somehow, at least until I reacclimatize. The animation in Vox Machina S3 started out looking thin and flat to me so it didn't help that Amazon decided to spit it out in three episode chunks every Wednesday. I'd just get used to the storybook graphics and then I'd have to start all over again the following week.

What made it really awkward, though, were the commercials. Or, I should say, the placement of the ad breaks. I can handle ads in shows if the shows themselves have been created with specific narrative breaks designed to hold them, as used to be the norm with commercial television, at least in this country. It's harder to put up with the constant interruption, when the damn ads pop up seemingly randomly.

I complained about this last time I wrote about a Prime show, so I don't want to make this all about the ads again but damn! Just have set breaks FFS! It's not like I watch the ads anyway. If I'm watching on the laptop I tab out and read a blog or something but last week, when I was on the sofa in front of the TV, I literally brought a book. I went and got one when the ads started and from then on I muted the sound and read until until the ads went away.

Enough about the presentation. What about the content?

Confusing is the first word that comes to mind. There was a basic problem in that I couldn't remember much about the last series. I thought the recap at the start would help with that but it didn't, or not much. As the episodes went by I gradually remembered enough to figure out what was happening but it doesn't say a lot for Season 3 that all those dragons had completely faded from memory.

I remembered all the characters, though, and that's really 90% of the appeal of the show. You just wait for them to come on and do their schtick. It still worked to some extent but we seem to have hit the point where only bad things happen and everyone's either depressed or angry or despairing or all three at once, which somewhat limits the opportunities for merriment. In my opinion that doesn't make for great entertainment.

As always there's a world-threatening crisis but this time half the team wants nothing to do with averting it. Everyone's at odds with someone or having some kind of existential breakdown and it's all quite tiring, if not tiresome. 

Since most of the cast aren't making with the snappy one-liners and the class clown isn't even in most of the episodes at all, we get a new character who gets to do all the jokes all the time. He's incredibly annoying to begin with but of course there turns out to be More To Him Than We Thought. I did end up quite liking him but I also felt I'd been maneuvered into it, which is never ideal.

The plot ticks along nicely enough although parts of it never seem to make much sense until eventually it reaches what passes for a feel-good ending, at least in context of what's happened before... and then the writers pull the rug out from under it so fast the audience get carpet burns. 

Would a happy ending be too much to ask for? Yes, obviously it would.  

Here's the thing. If I wanted a bleak, miserable, downbeat animated show, one that would make me wonder why I'd bothered putting myself through the emotional wringer in the first place, if that was all the catharsis I was going to get, I could just go watch Bojak Horseman again. At least that way I'd be watching something that had earned the right to make me feel emotionally roughed-up, not some half-assed D&D nonsense with dueling heavy-metal guitar solos and characters who never stay dead.

I guess now I have to watch Season 5, just to see how in hell they pull themselves out of the mess they've gotten into, although right now I'd have to say that looks pretty much impossible. Then again, as I just said, no-one ever stays dead for long in this show so I expect they'll manage somehow.

Let's just hope Amazon doesn't kill off the show itself before we get a resolution. Not that I could really blame them if they did. It's starting to look like one of those shows that's already gone on a bit too long.

Good Omens - Season 3

 

I say "Season" because that's what Amazon called it. It's one episode. Can one episode be a season? I wouldn't have thought so, no matter how long it is. 

This one's an hour and thirty-nine minutes. The length of an old-fashioned movie. And that's what it is, pretty much: a shortish movie. Not a very good one, either.

Oh, it looks quite nice. The production values are okay and the art department seems to have done a job of work although it looks mostly as though they're using the same old sets or no sets at all. And of course the two principals are great, Tennant and Sheen, and the supporting cast, which isn't all that huge, is fine...

The plot, though...

It makes sense until close to the end although it never feels very involving. It's more of an outline of a plot than the real thing. There's a murder mystery in Heaven that seems like it could be interesting until it gets solved with no real build-up or tension. Jesus comes back for the second coming and it's all a bit Life of Brian for a few minutes but then that just stops, too. 

No-one has much of a reason for doing whatever it is they're doing. They just amble along, making the right noises about why they're doing it without ever sounding the least bit convincing or convinced. The solution to the mystery, such as it is, turns out to be that an immortal got so bored of being immortal they decided to destroy the universe so they wouldn't have to keep on being bored.

And that would be it except for the coda, which is beyond stupid. I'd call it fan service if I thought any fans were actually being served. Okay, I'm sure some were. If all you ever wanted out of the whole thing was to see David Tennant and Michael Sheen holding hands as they slip peacefully into an idyllic, comfortable retirement together, then consider yourself served.

I mean, I'm not saying that wasn't sweet but to get there, first God had to be persuaded by way of some extremely dubious arguments from the would-be happy couple to destroy the entire universe, then she had to recreate it without being in the new one herself, which is a good trick if you can do it. Then all we had to do was wait 13.8 billion years (Or maybe it was 13.4 - I didn't take notes when the caption came up.) for the Earth to somehow go through exactly the same process not just of evolution but civilization too, so the now-mortal lovers could find each other in the same fucking bookshop and fall in love all over again! 

I don't know about you but I just can't quite see that happening, somehow. It seems like there might be a logical flaw in there somewhere...

I realize I'm slating one show for having a feel-bad ending and the other for the exact opposite but the awkward truth is neither of them made me feel good. Of the two, at least Vox Machina made me feel bad because something bad happened. Good Omens just made me feel bad because the ending itself was so bad!

We all know why, of course. Naughty Neil Gaiman and his unfortunate extra-curricular activities or proclivities or whatever it is that made Jeff Bezos feel queasy enough to decide not to go ahead with the full six episode season as planned. Heaven forfend Amazon should take any reputational damage from someone's antisocial behavior!

Even so, if that was the plot they were intending to stretch out until it lasted three times as long, I'm not sure a full season would have helped. Bad things generally don't get better just because they last longer.

And come to think of it, Season 2 wasn't all that great, was it? What did I say about it? 

Hmm. It appears I thought it was "short, rushed and incomplete... quite unsatisfying at times." If that's true, then I guess Season 3 should have been a dozen episodes at least.

Really, only the first Season stands up as coherent, complete and satisfying and that's the one Terry Pratchett co-wrote. He had nothing to do with Season 2, being dead at the time, but Season 3 is partly based on a plotline he and Gaiman hashed out in a hotel room thirty-five years ago. I kind of doubt it would have stayed like that if he'd had time to work on it.

All of that said, I quite enjoyed Season 2 for all its flaws and Season 3 at least helped a hot afternoon to go by passably enough. Pretty sure the whole thing would have a better reputation if they'd just made the first season as a mini-series and left it that, though.