6-5 - Mint To Serve...

 Summer's here! No, wait, that's not right... summer's nearly over. But not in Hethereau!

It does seem odd, dropping a summer-themed update in late August, but then a lot of games do it. It seems even odder when you consider that the big Summer Break in virtually all the regions where these games are played is just about to come to an end in a couple of weeks, whereas the beach-themed content is likely to be with us for a month and a half, well into the start of the new school year.

Of course, it's not only kids or even college students who play these games but given the kind of events and activities that feature in many of them, it's hard not to believe that's the target audience. If it was intended to appeal to an older demographic, there'd be a lot more alcohol involved.

The new update for Neverness To Everness brings a bunch of seaside fun, as I mentioned in a post a week or so ago. What I didn't mention then, because I didn't know, is that the seaside resort where it all takes place is in a new part of the city. 

The district is called Duskmoor, which doesn't sound remotely like anywhere you'd go to eat ice-cream and stroll along the promenade. It's described as "a vast mountainous region north of the Miguel District" and they are not kidding. It's gigantic, although I suspect a lot of it is open country.

I'd be a bit more authoritative but I've only taken a quick look so far and that was on the laptop, in bed the other night, so I don't even have the few screenshots I took, near to hand. (And I'm too lazy to go into the bedroom, power up the laptop and mail them to myself...)

 

I didn't do anything while I was there anyway, other than run all the way to the Wertheimer Tower to register the teleport and get the region opened on my map, which was when it became immediately obvious just how big the place is. It's damn near as big as all the rest of the districts put together. I'm very much looking forward to exploring the whole thing.

But first there's a story to get through. I started it this morning although that wasn't my plan. What I was going to do was try out some of the new summer events and I did, for a while, starting with the volleyball because when I logged in the intro quest for it, Jade Star, was already up on my tracker. 

I have no idea why it was there. I must have been looking at it when I was on the laptop, I imagine, although I can't remember doing it. Anyway, Flora was in Duskwood, next to the Anomaly Tower, and the blue quest marker was pointing towards the beach half a kilometer away, so I just went with it. I was curious, anyway, to see how this volleyball thing was going to work.

I did wonder if it might be player vs player. It's very easy to forget, but NTE is a an online co-op title and it seems a four-person sport like beach volleyball would be a perfect fit for four-person co-op. 

It might be yet, for all I know, but that's not how the event starts out.

Sidebar: By a synchronicitous co-incidence, a very odd thing happened as I was running through Duskwood today. A window popped up on screen, asking me if I wanted to accept a request from someone called Jana to join me in my world. This is the first time anything like that's happened since I started playing the game. I had no idea it was even possible. Jana was waiting for a Yes or No but the whole thing took me completely by surprise and I just stared at the pop-up, not responding, trying to figure out what was happening, until the timer ran down and it vanished. Sorry, Jana.

After it was gone I rummaged around in the settings until I found the section that tells you who else is playing and allows you to set parameters on invites. You can have Private, Friends or Confirmation Required. I had no idea any of that was there until this morning. I considered setting it to Private but in the end, considering I've only had one in several months, I figured I might as well leave it as it was. Next time, if there ever is one, I might even accept a request, just to see what happens. It might be someone wanting to play volleyball...

The volleyball event starts with a conversation with someone going by the highly unlikely name of Uncle Loong. I know, thanks to playing the MMORPG Loong many years ago, that a loong is some kind of traditional Chinese dragon. Any time I meet an NPC in a game and they have a name like that, it makes me suspicious. 

I don't think "Uncle" Loong is a dragon in human form but you can never be sure. As to whose uncle he might be, your guess is as good as Flora's. He looks about twenty-two, though, so that makes me even more suspicious...

Whoever or whatever he is, he sets you up for a warm-up match so you can learn how the game is played and show him how good you are. You need a partner but luckily Mint volunteers so fast you don't even have time to finish asking her. 

She's there in a nanosecond, dressed for the part. I had actually been wondering if Flora was going to have to play beach volleyball dressed in her pant-suit. She looked bad enough trotting along the sand dressed that way, weaving between all the beachgoers in their bikinis and cut-offs. Luckily, once the game starts, Flora magically re-appeared, dressed in some suitable beach-wear I had no idea she owned. It's absolutely hideous but that's by-the-by.

The game itself has quite a few controls to master. I haven't yet mastered any of them. By the time I'd played two matches, I just about knew how to serve and that was it. 

The Warm-Up is the lowest possible level of difficulty and I still only won one of the two maches. The first was a close-run thing that Mint and Flora eventually won 9-7. You need to get to seven and then be two points clear for a victory.

 

In the second match we were doing much better. We served to open and I seemed to have gotten the hang of that to the extent that we were 6-1 up by the time we lost serve. Unfortunately, I very much had not gotten the hang of returning serve, so we lost our massive lead and ended up losing 8-6. 

At that point I felt like I'd probably had enough beach volleyball for the time being. It seemed like something I'd probably be able to get to be at least passable at, with practice, but I wasn't convinced I had the motivation. It is fun and it's beautifully animated. I could do without Mint apologizing every time she misses a shot but other than that I enjoyed it a fair bit.

I was very surprised to find, when I spoke to Uncle Loong again, that we'd somehow met with his satisfaction, despite only winning one match. The quest completed and immediately another replaced it, telling Flora she needed to go to Eibon right away. So she did.

That turned out to be the start of the new Main Story Quest. I spent the next hour and a half on it and it was excellent. But that's a tale for another post. 

Reaching Too Far?

 Well, that was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one, too. I finally managed to get in and play some Stars Reach and guess what? I quite enjoyed it.

I played for about an hour and a half. Maybe a little more. I didn't time it and I can't remember exactly how long I already had on my Steam counter, which carried over from the pre-alpha.  

As well it might. They can call it Early Access if they like. (They are calling it Early Access.) They can sell expensive Founders Packs (They are selling expensive Founders Packs.) but anyone who was in the pre-alpha test can see it's basically the same build.

Although not exactly. Or at least, not for me. I didn't bother to log in for the last couple of hefty pre-alpha updates so some significant aspects were new to me. 

For a start, there's a proper introductory sequence now. There have been several but none of them really looked like the sort of thing you'd expect to see before a game begins. This one does.

 It has a simple narrative that, for the first time, explains clearly and simply where the game takes place, how your character got there and what's expected of them. It also has a hint of a suggestion, right at the end, that there could even be some kind of plot lurking somewhere in the background. I thought Playable Worlds were above little things like narratives and plotlines but maybe not.

It helps that they've gone with a visual style for the intro that really works for me, a kind of comic book crossed with children's educational publishing aesthetic and it works very well. My compliments to the graphic designer.  

The introduction is over quite quickly and then it's on to Character Creation. Yes, it exists! It's pretty basic by modern standards but it would have looked decent enough fifteen or twenty years ago, which does seem to be the era of gaming Stars Reach is looking to emulate. 

I wanted to be a cat-person, of course, but I couldn't remember the name of the race and when I scanned down the list I missed it so I ended up making one of the demon-types, the ones with the horns. I got mine to a state where I was quite pleased with her before I realised she wasn't, in fact, a cat. They do look pretty similar. Ears, horns, what's the diff?

Since it had only taken a few minutes, I tried again. The cats are at the bottom of the list, it turns out, and they don't have exactly the same options as the demons so there is a bit of variety there. 

Weirdly, I couldn't find any option to change either hair or eye color, which you'd think would be a given in any character creation process. You could pick your hair color in EverQuest almost thirty years ago. Conversely, you can change jaw lines and cheek bones, although not by much. Still, it seems odd you can morph your bone structure that but you can't change your hair color. 

Maybe the option is there, somewhere. I might just have missed it. That'd be a lot easier to believe than that it isn't there at all. In 2026.

After that it's into the Controls Tutorial in the metal tunnels. It's completely arbitrary and pointless in any narrative sense. I think the ship we were in got attacked or something? The whole thing is only there to explain WASD, Crouch and Jump and it's been pared down to an absolute minimum now so if there ever was any story to it, it's long gone. That takes about fifteen seconds and then you're on Haven for the real Tutorial.

I've always had a problem with Haven and it's only gotten worse as they've improved things. The trouble with Haven is that it's precisely what the name suggests: a lovely, comfortable, safe place. They keep tweaking it and it gets nicer and nicer. Why would anyone want to leave?

At some point since I last played, it must have received a substantial makeover. In the current build, it's very impressive visually and also much larger than it used to be. The grass is deep and lush, there are flowers everywhere, snow-capped mountains loom in the distance and to cap it all there are now giant arches of rock soaring over the town. It's spectacular.

What's more, it's entirely explorable. Those impossible ellipses, tens of thousands of tons of rock hanging in the air, suspended by nothing, so terrifying above your head? You can climb them and look down on the city from the clouds. I did and it was the single most interesting thing I've done in Stars Reach since it began.

Haven is the sort of place I'd love to explore in depth and detail. It would make a seriously satisfying zone for any MMORPG. And they've just thrown it away as a one-time only tutorial area. The Mayor makes a point of telling you, as he gives you the Key to Space, that once you leave you can never come back. 

If I was a refugee from a doomed solar system, transported halfway across the galaxy by some Elder Gods and dropped into somewhere like Haven to make the best of things, I wouldn't leave. I'd stay there. They'd fricken' have to drag me out.

There's food on the trees, no aggressive wildlife, buildings to sleep in, even a dance club. Why would you take the risk of flying into space, especially after you've had a glimpse of the alternative on the aptly named "Crucible"?

Crucible, the volcanic planet nearest to Haven, never made any sense and it makes even less now, if that's possible. There used to be a series of missions there but now there's just one and it takes about thirty seconds. They moved the ore you need to mine to within sight of the guy who wants it. All you have to do is walk about fifty paces, blast it with the Terraformer and take the bits back for the hand-in.

 Then it's back to Haven and you never see Crucible again. Obviously the entire planet only exists because you can't mine on Haven and they want to show you how before they let you loose on a real planet. And equally obviously mining is only banned on Haven because Playable Worlds doesn't want you digging up the starting area, griefing newbies with your Terraformer and making the first place they see look like a disaster area.

It's a kludge on a kludge and it's indicative of the underlying problems Stars Reach suffers in so many areas. Too many of the mechanics feel more like temporary fixes than permanent solutions. It's the hallmark of a game still in relatively early development. What they need is to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, not shifted around and shored up so they kinda-sorta work, for now.

This has always been present in the development process but it's getting harder and harder to pass it off as work in progress. Haven looks so much better than either Crucible, which is just horrible, or the next planet I went to, the name of which escapes me, which is ugly as fuck.

I just don't understand why, if you have an art department and a graphic engine that make somewhere as attractive to look at and spend time in as Haven, you'd want to encourage your players to leave it as quickly as possible to go somewhere very much less pleasant. It just seems calculated to drive people away. Why is so much of the game so damned ugly when clearly they could make it look so much better if they wanted? 

 But then, very little about Stars Reach makes sense, least of all the decision to go to market with what was openly described only a few weeks ago as a "pre-alpha build". I'm all too aware that Early Access is a widely-abused term but this really is pushing the margins of what's generally deemed appropriate.

My feeling on Early Access is that it ought to be somewhere around the equivalent of what we used to call Open Beta. An Early Access build should include the full gameplay loop, sufficiently polished to be fully playable and fun to play.

The "Early Access" descriptor tells you you're getting to see it before it's in a final release state but it does not mean it's still in testing. It doesn't need to be "Feature Complete" but it has to be fully functional. 

There could certainly be more content to come. Additional systems and mechanics. More landmass. An extended narrative. It's fine for there to be more of just about anything on the way but what's there already has to be complete, in and of itself.

This isn't a pipe-dream. It isn't an unreasonable expectation. It's exactly how the games that have been moderately to extremely successful have handled it: Valheim, Palworld, Enshrouded... Do Early Access right and you don't just sell a lot of games, you build trust and loyalty. Do it wrong and everyone except your hardcore loyalists will take a quick look and leave, never to return.

The irony is that this Early Access build does feel like a step forward for Stars Reach. I haven't had this much fun playing since the very early days, when it was all new. It looks a lot prettier and gameplay feels smoother. If this was the latest update to the pre-alpha playtest, I'd say things were moving in the right direction. We might be almost ready for alpha!

But this isn't a playtest. It's Early Access, for which they're asking a minimum of $30 and as much as $80. There's no way to play now other than to buy your way in and once you tell your customers they have to pay to play, you're not in testing any more. You have launched.

I keep drifting on Stars Reach. Do I like it or do I not? I have had some good sessions. I have had some fun. I had a good session today. It was fun. The game looks much better than it used to. My character was much more customiseable and crucially didn't change appearance every time I zoned. Combat was noticeably better. 

Good things are happening but they're small good things and they're happening slowly.

As many, many people have been saying, including most of those whose reviews lean towards the positive, Stars Reach is not ready to be in Early Access. It's a pity because there are signs that it could, eventually, become an interesting and enjoyable game. Unfortunately, as things stand, it seems extremely unlikely it will get the chance. 

Early Access may be the end of the journey for Stars Reach, not the beginning. And that would be a real shame. 

In Jazz They Call It Improvising

 

Another half-assed post today, I'm afraid. What is wrong with me?

Well, to be honest, it's mostly that I just seem to be really busy. I have no idea why. It's 6.30 in the evening now and this is the first chance I've had to think about writing a post. Let me walk you through my day because that's what everyone wants from a blog about MMORPG gaming, isn't it? Someone running through a repetitive list of mundane daily chores. Oh, wait...

Anyway, like it or not, that's what we're getting, so buckle up. Buckle in. Which is it? Or maybe it's buckle down. 

Okay, we're doing that are we? Alright then. I did an English degree, albeit nearly fifty years ago. I ought to be able to do this without looking it up.

There's "Buck up" but I'm not talking about that one. That's completely different. (Or is it...?)

Then there's "Buckle in", which I can't in good conscience say I've ever heard anyone say. I've heard people say "Strap in" or more likely "Strap yourself in", which obviously means the same thing, there or thereabouts. A strap has a buckle, after all, or it's not much of a strap.

What is it that Bette Davis says in All About Eve?  In my head I hear her saying "Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride" but I bet that's not right. It's been almost as long since I saw All About Eve as it has been since I did that degree. In fact, I first saw the movie at one of the college film society showings, although I have seen it on television since. But that was in the eighties. Hardly surprising I can't remember the exact line.

 Hah! The exact line is "Fasten your seatbelts! It's going to be a bumpy night!" Bette's not buckling anything. Not up, in, down or sideways. She's fastening.

That didn't help much, did it?

Let's come at it from the other side. What I meant was something like "prepare yourself". I wasn't trying to suggest it was going to be difficult, let alone turbulent. Just that you should face the fact that it's coming, like it or not, so you might as well accept it.

I'm not sure any of the buckles or straps quite do the job there. I think I actually was unconsciously eliding the "pull yourself together" encouragement of buck up with the "get ready for trouble" implicit in buckle in. 

All of which gets us precisely nowhere. Bloody philology.

So, Beryl wakes me up at about 7.30am, which is an hour later than usual, probably because the heatwave has receded and it's nice and cool. She won't get on the bed and settle down because she wants to play but it's too early for all that nonsense so she goes off and lies down at the top of the stairs while I lie around in bed for half an hour, listening to Hancock on the radio until I'm properly awake.

To be strictly accurate, it's a fairly modern recreation of one of the "Missing Hancocks", one of the shows from the fifties that was scrubbed or skipped or lost, recreated by a bunch of actors impersonating the original cast. I stopped listening to the real Radio 4 sometime around Brexit, for obvious reasons, and I've never started again.

I only listen to Radio 4 Extra now, which is a weird hodge-podge of old sitcoms, drama, whodunnits, panel games and documentaries, all running on a daily loop so that if you listen all day, you'll hear everything three times. Which I often do. Hear things three times, that is, not listen all day. 

The big attraction for me is that it's the only station that has absolutely no news at all. I'm more than happy to hear the same awful 1980s sitcom dredged up from the dregs of Radio 2 if it means I never have to find out what's going on in the real world.

I get all my news from various entertainment websites through Feedly, which does give me a slightly (More than slightly.) skewed world view. I know a lot about the legislative program when it comes to things like the collapse of the live music infrastructure in small venues around the UK, the problems bands have touring in Europe post Brexit and the issues arising out of huge companies gaining monopolies over ticketing.

I know who's died within hours of them joining the choir invisible, which is presumably what they are doing, since most of the celebrity deaths I get to hear about are musicians. On the other hand, I didn't know Bill Oddie had died until someone at work told me. I'm not surprised Stereogum and Pitchfork didn't think it was worth mentioning but shame on the NME! The Goodies had five singles in the Top Twenty back in the seventies and Bill Oddie wrote all of them.

I just want to make it clear I don't think that's a good song, by the way. Or even a funny one. Bill Oddie wrote a lot of much better, funnier songs than that, although he didn't write any of them for The Goodies. But that was their biggest hit. #4 in 1975. You can see why we needed punk to come along...

Anyway, getting back to the plot, after I get up and have breakfast (A wholemeal bagel and a piece of wholemeal toast, both with sliced banana, and a cup of tea.) I go and do the weekly shop, as I always do on a Wednesday. After that, I catch up with all the Blaugust posts from overnight and leave a few comments. (Is this historic present working? I think it was at the start but not any more. I'm going to drop it.)

Since I was at the PC I sorted out the issue with Stars Reach not updating. It's ready to play now but it's 7.45 PM as I type this and I still haven't found the time to log in.

Then I had a bath and after that I moved a whole load of stuff out of the "conservatory" (Lean-to, really.) into the car so I could take it to the recycling center, where I had a 2pm appointment. After that I hung out the washing that I'd had to bring in last night because there was rain forecast. 

Then Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if I wanted to take Beryl on Paw Patrol. That's what we call a twenty minute loop around the neighborhood that Beryl likes to do at least every couple of days so she can reacquaint herself with the messages left by all the other local dogs and add her comments. It's dog blogging, basically.

Not long after I got back, I got a text telling me I had some stuff I needed to do, relating to the sale of my mother's house. That involved logging into a website, reading a bunch of legal nonsense and printing it out so I could sign it and get it witnessed, which is going to have to wait until the weekend when I'm at work because I don't talk to any of the neighbors except about dogs so I can hardly pop round and ask them to witness me signing a legal document. Put a paw-print on it, maybe.

That took me pretty much up to lunch and lunch took me up to the time when I needed to get in the car and go to the recycling center.

After I'd done that, I had to take two bags of clothes and two more of books to the charity shops. I say "shops" because there are about half a dozen in the same road but at any given time only one or two of them will be accepting donations. Today was a good day. The first one I tried took the lot. 

Since I was there, I went round all the rest just to see what I could find. I do not want to get into a death spiral of clearing stuff out only to fill the space with more kipple but I'm okay with the odd replacement, now and again. I got a book by Peter Bogdanovich called " "Who The Hell's In It?", which should make a good bathroom read.

I always forget Bogdanovich was a writer. I think of him as a director but he was a critic before he directed, just like Truffaut, Godard and the rest of the Cahiers du Cinema crew. And now I want to watch some of his movies again. And Truffaut's. Not Godard's, though.

By the time I got home it was about three in the afternoon. I'd said I was going to look for some places we might go away for a couple of days in September so I did that for about an hour until Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl came back from visiting a granddaughter. I sent her links to a few holiday ideas (Mrs Bhagpuss, not Beryl or the kid.) and then I just had time to read some more Blaugust posts before it was time for tea. 

After tea I sat down at the PC again and booked one of the places, under Mrs Bhagpuss's instructions, and then I got myself up to date with Blaugust before starting this post at half-past six. And even then I only got as far as Bette Davis before Beryl bounced in to tell me it was playtime, which took up another forty-five minutes.

And now here we are, gone eight in the evening and I haven't logged into a single game yet because I haven't had time! This is most days at the moment. No wonder I only play games in short bursts.

I'm going to say I think this will improve, in respect of the blog, when a) Blaugust finishes and b) the days get shorter. I do a lot less around the house in the Autumn and Winter and that frees up a lot more time for gaming. And I do think Blaugust leads to a lowering in quality all round, approximately commensurate to the increase in quantity. There are a lot of filler posts and I'm writing too many of them.

Can do better. Will do better. 

Tomorrow, with luck, I might actually play Stars Reach for half an hour and then I can post about it, which will be the only reason I'm playing it. In the meantime, I'm sure everyone's already seen Wilhelm's report. Also there're the new updates for  both Neverness to Everness and Wuthering Waves this week so it's not like I'm short of something to play or to write about.

But now, though, I'm going to have to slap a couple more pictures in this post, think of a title, press Publish and then go take Beryl for her final walk before I wash up and go to bed, where I plan on watching some more Dr. Who and maybe another episode of the positively bizarre anime Chainsmoker Cat, which I'm determined to get through if only so I can blog about it.

Three Reasons Why This Isn't The Post It Was Going To Be

Thanks to ChatGPT, I don't have time for much of a post today. 

Thanks to time zones I don't have time for much of a post today.

Thanks to hoarding I don't have time for much of a post today.

Take your pick.

Let's start with the AI story. We all hate AI, don't we? Don't we? Except when it's really useful, of course.

Regular readers with absolutely nothing better to do with their time will remember I've been having problems, on and off, with this relatively new PC. First I thought it was conflicts with the graphic card and the onboard graphics. Then I thought it was a hardware issue. Then I thought I'd fixed it. 

I hadn't fixed it. But I have now (Fingers crossed, touch wood.) After a few weeks of behaving itself it started to play up again, even though I wasn't doing anything different and I started to think it was a software issue, probably some corruption of the OS. I reinstalled windows but that didn't help so I figured it might be the drive.

To test that theory, I took the hard drive out of my old PC, connected it to the new one, directed it to boot from the old drive and it worked. As I was playing around with that, I noticed the old drive had Windows 10 on it but in the new PC I could upgrade it to Windows 11. Well, why not?

I know now! I didn't then! 

So I tried that and it didn't work. The upgrade kept hanging, possibly because the drive was almost full. In the end I thought "Why am I even bothering?" and stopped. I decided to get a new drive and install Windows on that, even though disk checks hadn't found any problems.

When I was looking at drives on Amazon, I started to wonder if I could use one of those new-fangled M2s so I checked if my motherboard had a slot and it did. Then I checked if the one I was going to get was compatible and it was. So I bought it.

When it came and I tried to fit it I couldn't find a slot and do you know why? Because I already had an M2 drive and it was using it! It was the faulty one with the OS on it and I never even realised. The one I'd disconnected when I hooked up the old one wasn't even the right one! No wonder disk checks hadn't found anything wrong. I was checking the wrong sodding drive!

 

Anyway, I got all that sorted out, figured out how to fit this weird new drive, stuck the USB with the installation into the slot and let the process run. And to my great surprise it all worked perfectly. Now I have a PC with a clean installation of Windows 11 Home on a 512GB M2 drive with nothing else on it and it runs beautifully. And fast!

Except... there's always an "except", isn't there? Except I can't Activate Windows. I can use Windows, which is all that really matters, but I have an irritating watermark in the lower right corner of the screen now, reminding me I need to "Activate Windows" and there are a few minor personalization tweaks I can't apply until I do. Other than that, I can't see it makes any difference.

But of course I couldn't leave it alone so for the past few days I've been tinkering with it. I found and applied a whole bunch of fixes, none of which worked. I contacted Microsoft and they were very helpful apart from the doing anything about it part. I contacted the company I bought the PC from and they were very helpful. They sent me a couple of new 25 digit keys, neither of which worked. 

They didn't have any other ideas so I thanked them and told them I'd manage. By then, though, I'd noticed  that although I definitely have Windows 11 running, the system thinks I installed it in 2009 so I wondered if by swapping the hard drives I've somehow managed to get the details of the two Windows installations conflated. 

So I thought I'd ask ChatGPT if that was possible.

I only meant to ask a quick question but I ended up having an in depth conversation with ChatGPT for an ahour and a half. The AI asked a series of intelligent questions and made a series of practical suggestions. It was like being on the phone with a really polite, knowledgeable, patient  IT department. If you can imagine such a thing.

We (It's the convention to personalize conversations with AIs, I believe, so I will. I feel like we know each other now, anyway.) narrowed down the issue until I think we're pretty clear on what's happened.  We're down to it being one of four things:

a Windows 10 → Windows 11 licence/edition mismatch,
a digital licence that is attached to the wrong Microsoft-account device record,
an OEM/retail licence issue,
or simply a licence that needs to be re-associated after the clean installation.

Since the original M2 drive won't boot up, I need to get an enclosure to see if we can interrogate the old drive externally and maybe narrow it down even further. I'm dubious we'll ever get to the point where I'll be able to activate the current installation but it's fun trying. 

And that's the thing about working with AIs. They do make it feel like fun. It's almost identical to live chat with customer support (I was doing that with Microsoft today on the same issue, too.) but all the pressure is off. There's no rush to reply, no sense you're holding anyone up or that if you don't answer fast enough they'll terminate the call. I was able to get up and do other things inbetween replies. It all felt very relaxed.

Best of all (Or worst, then best.) because I hadn't logged in to ChatGPT properly at the start, when I'd been chatting for about 45 minutes the session timed out and I had no record of it at all. But when I logged in properly and told ChatGPT what had happened, even though it didn't have the actual record of the conversation, it was able to reconstruct it pretty accurately from my brief summary and we carried on much as before.

So, that was one thing that got in the way of the post I was going to write today. Another was that apparently the 18th of August doesn't start, as I thought, at midnight, but sometime after tea. 

I was going to log into Stars Reach and write something about the EA launch but there turned out to be a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, I didn't have a key. It took me about half an hour of trying different accounts, reading Kickstarter, looking through my Pledge history and generally faffing about until I finally figured out which email and account I needed. They say they make it easy but they really don't. They make it possible, which isn't at all the same thing.

 

I got that sorted eventually and registered my Steam key but then I discovered I was going to have to wait because Playable Worlds' idea of being able to play from 18 August is very different to mine. At time of writing I do, finally, have an "Update" button but using it gets me the peculiar message "No Internet Connection". 

I have an internet connection. Steam has an internet connection. I tested it by starting the download for First Descendant and that's going just fine. I can only assume it's Playable Worlds that's offline. So that post is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

[Edit: Just after I typed that paragraph I received an email from Playable Worlds telling me "Today is the day! Stars Reach is now out in Early Access!" Two of them, in fact. It still won't update.]

[Edit to the Edit: Googled it and found it was a cache problem. Updating now.] 

And finally, when I found out I couldn't write about Stars Reach, I ended up taking four bags of publishers proofs and a huge box of VHS cassettes to recycling. Not even our local recycling. I'm going there tomorrow with a load more stuff but you have to book a slot and they were fully-booked for today.

Instead, I drove a few miles to the really big recycling depot in a nearby town. Publishers proofs are a real pain because you can't legally sell or give them away. They have to be destroyed or recycled. And I have literally hundreds of them. A couple of hundred less as of today, thankfully.

As for VHS cassettes, these were all movies I'd recorded back in the 90s. I've been hanging on to them because I know there are quite a few that aren't easily available on streaming or DVD or BluRay. And I do have a working VHS recorder so I could play them.

But I won't. I know I won't. I've reached that time in life where I can admit to myself there are some things I'd theoretically like to do but that I will never do and watching badly-recorded movies on old VHS tapes is one of them.

So that's why there's no proper post today. If it hadn't been Blaugust I could just have skipped a day but you know how it is. Please don't feel you have to read this nonsense.

Oh. A bit late for that now, I guess, if you've made it this far... 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

None. Well, except those four possible reasons. I cut and pasted those from the ChatGPT log. So that, I guess... 

We'd Just Like To Ask You A Few Questions...

 

Roger, who likes questionnaires, answered one that used to be given to guests on a French TV show. Obviously, I've never heard of the show or its host, Bernard Pivot but since he's a) French and b) interviews people like Michel Foucault, I think we can assume he's some kind of  <shudder> intellectual.

Best steer well clear of him, then.

I do like a questionnaire myself, though. It's always nice to be asked questions, especially about yourself. I've always been puzzled by the reactions of suspects in crime dramas who, when they're being interviewed by the police, get upset about having to answer questions they've already answered. It sounds like an ideal opportunity to really get into some deep detail about the trivia of your own existence to me. People pay therapists a fortune for that kind of service and here are the police, offering it for free. What's to complain about? 

Well, being sent to prison if you give away too much, I guess. There is that...

But I digress. As usual. Getting back to Roger and Bernard, I didn't find the questions particularly interesting. A bit lexicological for a start. Almost a third of them are about words. I like a word as much as the next blogger but it seems an odd place to set focus. 

Luckily, Bongo Twisty (Great name!) also dodged the French Intellectual bullet and dug back a little way into Roger's blog to find a much more amenable survey. Roger took it from The Guardian, a newspaper I haven't read since upper management decided the company wasn't going to pay for newspapers any more and if we wanted to read The Guardian or The Independent in the staff room at lunchtime we could damn well buy them ourselves.

So, naturally, no one did and newspapers haven't been seen there since. That was a bit of a shame because I learned a few things from The Guardian over the years. Not news, obviously. I didn't read any of that. No, about movies and music and pop culture generally. The Guardian has always been fairly good on that sort of thing, albeit by the time you get to read about a trend in their culture sections it's almost certainly about to go out of fashion. 

Still, they did introduce me to Lana del Rey, for which I shall ever be grateful. It's one of those "I was there" moments that you never forget. I was in the staff room, reading the paper, when the phrase "Video Games" caught my eye. In the music section, which was a bit odd. I made a mental note, went home, fired up YouTube, watched the video and the rest you know. Well, you do if you're a regular here.

That was in latish 2012, when you could still buy the Lizzie Grant album on Amazon. I ummed and ahhed about it and left it a week because spending £10 is always a big decision and when I decided to risk it, it was too late. When people say "If you could go back in time and change one thing about your life...", that would be close to the top of my list.

Anyway, I was not aware, no longer being a reader, that The Guardian has a thing called the Honest Playlist. As Roger describes it, "There are a dozen or so stock questions that they use to grill their guest, although they don’t always use the same ones." You could, if you wanted, go through some of the back catalog and pick a few but I'm too lazy for that so I'm just going to answer the ones Roger chose.

I really like the way Bongo Twisty laid out their post with the videos embedded but since I just did a music post I might not do it that way this time. Or I might. Let's find out together.

The first song I remember hearing.

Well, that's a difficult place to start, isn't it? It just demands a digression about the deep unreliability of memory. But that would be more Bernard Pivot's kind of thing...

I'll take a stab at it being something by Los Trios Paraguayos. Possibly Guantanamera. My mother had an EP by them that she'd play on the Dansette, when I would have been five or six. Curiously, now I come to think about it, there's no sign of that EP or indeed any vinyl in her house, which I've been through with some interest now she's died. I guess she must have gotten rid of all the vinyl at some point. She had quite a lot, including several of my Uriah Heep albums, which she asked for when I was about to sell them, back in the punk years. Not that I want them back...

The first single I bought.

Now, that's an easy one. It was The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by Joan Baez. That would have been in 1971, when I was thirteen. A much more difficult question to answer would be why was that the first single I bought. I have no idea. I mean, I know I liked it but I liked a lot of songs on the radio by then. What was so special about that one that I felt I had to own it? I find hard to imagine. It is a good record, though.

The first song I fell in love with.

Another easy one. Heroin by the Velvet Underground. It was absolutely not even close to being the first song I really, really liked or even loved but it was almost certainly the first I fell in love with. By the time I discovered the Velvets, I'd been "into" music, as we said back then, for at least a couple of years. I can date my introduction to Heroin with some accuracy because, once again, I remember the specific trigger.

Lou Reed had just broken through to the mainstream with Walk On The Wild Side, which I loved (But didn't fall in love with, crucially.) and I owned the album it came from, Transformer. I was listening to the Johnny Walker show one Radio One one afternoon (It would have had to have been in the school holidays because he was either on at lunchtime or mid-afternoon.) and he played two songs by the Velvet Underground. One was, I think, Waiting For The Man and I have no clue what the other was. No, actually, I'm pretty sure it was Sweet Jane. Whatever it might have been, you can bet it sounded utterly bizarre coming out of a transistor radio in the middle of the day back in 1972.

Off the back of that, I bought the first VU album I could find, which happened to be the double compilation album often referred to as the "Coke Bottle Album" at the time and which Wikipedia claims, somewhat unconvincingly, had been released in the UK in 1971 "to capitalise on the interest from Warhol's "Pork"."

I played that album to fucking death over the next couple of years but the one song I would not play more than very, very occasionally was Heroin. It was just too good to listen to more often than maybe once or twice a year. I still think it might be the best song I've ever heard but it's hard to be sure because now I never listen to it, just in case it isn't.

The song I inexplicably know every lyric to.

Lyrics are very, very strange. They're incredibly important because without them, songs aren't about anything. I take them very seriously and always have. These days, it seems everyone does. Both professional music critics and random fans on social media all seem universally to focus on the words in preference to the music, when discussing any song of any genre. Providing it does, in fact, have words.

And yet I can barely remember the lyrics to pretty much any song I've ever heard, even if I've been listening to it on hard rotation for weeks. I know certain phrases and maybe... only maybe... the chorus and that's it, even though I frequently have the words up on screen these days to read (And sing.) along. 

In the olden days I used to sit with the gatefold sleeve of an album open on my lap rolling a joint reading the lyrics with devotion. I even used to buy Disco 45 and Smash Hits, magazines where the lyrics to the current hits were handily printed out for you to admire and learn by heart.

But can I remember all the words to anything? Nope. Except for one, single song. Roxy Music's In Every Dream Home A Heartache. If you don't know it, it's the heart-rending story of a boy and his blow-up sex doll. Why I can remember all the words to it is, indeed, truly inexplicable, but I can. Or I could for a long time. I used to sing it to myself in my head to send me to sleep, like some people count sheep.

The best song to play at a party.

The best song I ever played at a party wasn't really a song and it wasn't my party, either. The song was one side of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and the party was at my childhood sweetheart's house, when we were both about eighteen. It was after midnight and there were some stragglers who didn't want to leave. They left pretty sharpish after I put that on, I can tell you. It wasn't my album, either. It was hers. You can see why we were suited. 

Another option would be George McCrae's Rock Your Baby. A few years earlier, my best friend and I thought it would be a wheeze to organize a disco at school and invite a bunch of girls from another school to come over. Amazingly, we got permission for this doomed enterprise and on the evening in question we learned that teenage girls, on the whole, do not much like hard rock. And even if they do, they certainly don't want to dance to it. I mean, who would?

They do, however, or they did then, like George McCrae. I was doing the DJing and for some reason I happened to have it in my box of records alongside Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and the like. I pretty much played that one record over and over for an hour until the party broke up. Then I threw it across the room into a wall and it broke in half. Which was a shame because I like George McCrae too. I must have or I wouldn't have the record, now, would I?

The song that changed my life.

Hmm. Has any song ever actually changed someone's life? There'd have to be some very particular circumstances going on for that to happen, wouldn't there? I certainly can't think of any song where the words and their meaning had that kind of impact on me. There have been a few times, as with Heroin or Video Games, that the sound of a song has changed how I've thought about music. Never Understand by the Jesus and MaryChain would be another. No Pussyfooting by Fripp and Eno. I'm Stranded by The Saints. (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) by the Beastie Boys. Tokyo Calling by Atarashi Gakko. Venice Bitch by Lana del Rey... I could go on and on.  

But that's opening the mind up to new sonic possibilities rather than changing the way you live your life. I can't think of any song that's ever made me re-evaluate my life choices.

The song that makes me cry

Letter to Hermione by David Bowie and Hey, Rusty! by Lloyd Cole. I'm not sure about actually tearing up but they're the two saddest songs I know and they make me feel very weird if I listen to them at the wrong time. It's making me feel a bit weird now, just thinking about them, to be honest...

The song I can no longer listen to.

Hmm. Are there any? I already covered not listening to songs because they're too good to spoil and not listening to songs because they make me too sad. I think the question is getting at songs you did listen to with pleasure, once, but can't any more, for some reason, something that can happen to any song if you hear it too often. There are a lot of songs I liked once that, if I hear them again by chance, I can't remember why I ever liked them to begin with but even that goes in phases. Twenty years ago I could barely stand to hear 90% of the punk songs I loved so much in the late '70s but that alienation passed and now I like a lot of them again.

It would be so tempting to say something by Morrissey but I still like the songs. It's just him I can't stand. I guess Bengali In Platforms would be hard going now but I haven't heard in a couple of decades, thankfully. And you can go find your own link if you really feel you have to hear it again.

The song I secretly like, but tell everybody I hate.

Hah! Like there'd only be one! I used to do this all the time. It'd be nice to say I've grown out of it, like Roger claims he has, but really I've just replaced it by leaning into the dissonance and glorifying it. 

There are still places it feels very difficult to go, though. I've made my peace with Fleetwood Mac. I can admit, even to myself, that I did always quite like Rhiannon, for example. It's so much easier now that they're considered some kind of rock legends, rather than the embarrassing dinosaurs of a previous generation they were almost universally considered to be, when I was in my twenties. I can even listen to In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins with a modicum of pleasure now and that's not something I thought I'd ever say.

Admitting to liking anything by Dire Straits, on the other hand, seems tantamount to asking your children to put you in a care home because you can't be trusted to look after yourself any more. And yet I do vaguely like Sultans of Swing, which I first heard on John Peel, when no-one knew who they were. And Private Investigations has something going for it although I'd be hard-pressed to say what.

The song I want played at my funeral.

Well, isn't that a cheerful note to end on? The truthful answer is I absolutely could not care less. I won't be there to hear it so whoever gets the short straw can play the Birdie Song for all I care. I was recently in that position, arranging my mother's funeral. She hadn't ever mentioned it and she left no instructions but the form of the service required something and I had to pick. I went with Pretty Flamingo  by Manfred Mann because I remember she used to stop and listen to it if it came on the radio when I was a child. I'm pretty sure if I'd have asked her last year, she'd barely have remembered it but it went down very well on the day and that's all that really matters.

I'd say pick something pleasant that people can hum along to and that won't have any unpleasant connotations. Don't make anyone more upset than they have to be. No grandstanding from the grave.

And definitely no Morrissey! 

Anyone For Cricket? Some Random Thoughts On The Fifth Doctor. And Voles.

I absolutely would not be posting today if not for Blaugust so whatever this is - and I have no idea yet what it's going to be - it'll just have to do. I'm great at handing out advice about not worrying about getting your 31 posts in and being ready to stop when it's not fun but I'm not so great at taking it. 

Then again, scrabbling to meet deadlines, especially when they're coming at me like trains down a tunnel, is fun for me. Always has been. It's like playing chicken. Which, I am going to say, I never did. 

I think, given the circumstances, I'm just going to ramble and the first thing (Might be the only thing if I really get into it...) I'm going to ramble on about is Dr. Who. 

I grew up watching Dr. Who. I'm fairly, although not completely, sure I saw the first episode when it was broadcast in... I think it was 1963? Maybe 1964? Hang on, have to fact check that...  

Yep, 23 November 1963. I would have been five.

I have the faintest memory of watching that episode and not finding it all that engaging. Five would have been to young, I guess. I'm not at all convinced I watched much more of the first season but I know I got a Dr Who annual every Christmas from the first onward because I still have them all. I guess I must have been interested enough to ask for one from the start.

By the time the second season came along I was I definitely into it. I vividly remember the storyline with the Zarbi, the giant ants. They turned up in Episode 17. 

I think I was so taken by them (And the Menoptera, the bee-people.) because I was one of those kids who's fascinated by all kinds of wildlife, including insects. A lot of kids like insects because they're generally the easiest to get your hands on. Some schools and educators call them Mini-Beasts now to make them seem even more exciting.

I didn;t need any encouragement. We had a lot of garden where I grew up and an orchard and we lived by a river so there was no shortage of insects and bigger animals to watch. 

Not that I left it watching. I'd catch them if they couldn't get away fast enough. I caught plenty of toads, the occasional frog, a couple of slow worms, a bat, a hedgehog, a poisoned wood pigeon that we nursed back to health and which then flew straight into a window when we released it and broke its neck... Oh, and some voles... 

Short-tailed voles must be the easiest small mammals to catch. Well,  after dormice, but you don't see many of those. 

Dormice are very rare and now protected, although I doubt they were back when I caught one. It didn't take much catching. I was going down a long path to a rocky beach on a day out at the estuary about twenty or thirty miles from where I lived. It was a warm summer day and there it was, sitting by the path, half asleep in the sun. I picked it up and it just sat in my hand, quite happy, until I put it back down. Then it wandered off into the bushes. No wonder the Romans used to eat them. 

Voles aren't quite that easy to catch but it's close. I used to put a piece of galvanized metal down in the long grass in the orchard, wait a week, then pick it up and often as not there's be a vole or two looking up, dazed by the light, wondering where the roof had gone. I 'd just pick one up (With gloves on, just in case it bit, which they never did.) and voila! Pet vole.

They domesticate incredibly quickly, too. They'd feed out of my hand the next day. They acted like they'd had a stroke of luck, finding themselves magically transported to somewhere with comfortable bedding and free food. I didn't keep them long, just a few days, then I'd put them back. 

I only really did it a couple of times Interest wanes quite quickly where voles are concerned, I've always found. They don't do a lot.

Hang on. Wasn't this post supposed to be about Dr. Who?  Hasn't been much about him so far, has there?

Well, that's what I get for starting at the beginning. I don't know why I bothered going so far back. It's not like I need to explain who Dr. Who is to anyone reading this, I'm sure. Why don't I just get on with what I was going to talk about? 

Peter Davison. That's what it was. Or who. 

Peter Davison was the fifth Doctor. I watched most of his three series when they were first shown, from 1982 to 1984. That was right after I left college. It was right after my favorite Doctor, Tom Baker, had left and I didn't think a lot to seeing Peter Davison in the role, unsurprisingly. 

Worse was to come with Colin Baker, although obviously I didn't know that at the time. And, honestly, I don't know it now, either. Not until I get to his stint, anyway. Who knows? Maybe I'll find out he wasn't crap after all.

Last year, I think it was, or it might have been the year before, I started re-watching, or in some cases just watching, the entire run. For reasons I can't exactly recall now, I started in the middle of the Patrick Troughton years (He was the Second Doctor.). Now I'm almost at the end of the first Davison season.

Peter Davison is better than I remember but he's not great. Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were all, in their own ways, excellent. William Hartnell probably was, too, although since I skipped his era I can't say for sure. Davison had a lot of expectations to live up to and I think it shows in his performance, which seems oddly tense much of the time. He seems perpetually worried, which isn't really what you want from the Doctor.

Where Troughton was whimsical and puckish, Pertwee confident (Over-confident, really,) and Baker just a pure force of chaos, Davison is... not dull exactly, as I remembered him, nor bland but oddly frustrated, trapped, locked into what looks very much like a performance he's not wholly at peace with.

There's a bit - and it is a bit in the Vaudevlle sense - in the his first episode, where he tries on various looks and appearances, eventually settling on the cricket whites he wears for the rest of the season and very probably the entirety of his time as the Doctor. It's a decent attempt at a signature look and he's almost obligated to have one, since all the Doctors before him did, but not only does it feel inauthentic, forced even, but by the end of the first season he looks like he knows it.

With the benefit of post hoc foreknowledge, I can say, without even having got there yet, that Davison's "Victorian" cricketer shtick (I thought it was supposed to be Edwardian until I watched the video above.) is going to look positively naturalistic compared to whatever the hell Colin Baker is going to think he's wearing but at the moment it's just adding to the sense that Davison is uncomfortable in the Doctor's skin.

It doesn't help that he's inherited probably the worst set of companions in the entire run up to that point - and this is the 19th season so there have been a few. All three of them were passed down to him by the outgoing Tom Baker, who would probably have been glad to get rid of them, if by that point he hadn't clearly lost interest. 

Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton,is fine. She doesn't have a lot of personality but she at least adds a much-needed element of stability and calm. Tegan is well-enough played by Janet Fielding but her personality is wearing and that's being polite. She complains almost the whole time and shows very little sense of either humor or proportion. 

She's a positive pleasure to watch, though, compared to Adric, who is just unbearable. Not only does he have a gratingly self-centered personality with a chip on his shoulder a mile wide but Matthew Waterhouse is deeply unconvincing. I won't say he can't act but if he can he certainly doesn't appear to be doing it in any of the episodes I've seen. And he died in the last one, so I guess that's that.

Even more unfortunately, he's not the only one whose acting is less than convincing. A few months back, when I'd watched all the Troughton and Pertwee and about half the Tom Baker episodes, I made a point of telling Mrs. Bhagpuss how consistently very much better the standard of acting was than I expected or remembered. And it wasn't just the principal actors, either. 

Almost every supporting actor, even in the smallest roles, seemed to be taking it as seriously as if they'd been cast in Play for Today. It was evident the standard was far higher than a half-hour sci-fi series, primarily aimed at children, needed to be and it went a good way towards explaining why the show broke out of that niche and became so widely watched by adults.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for the Davison era, or at least not the first of his seasons. There's still some committed and skillful acting going on in places but there's a lot of pretty obvious going through the motions too. It's not bad but it does feel a little tired and sometimes perfunctory. Knowing how much longer the show had to go, it's not hard to see why it ended when it did. 

Apparently there was a deliberate move to make the show more serious following the anarchy and sometimes silliness of the Tom Baker years. I'm not sure how apparent that was at the time. I remember feeling the it had just gotten a bit dull. Watching it now, it looks strained. 

And that, while by no means all I have to say about it, is all I'm going to say for now. If and when I ever get to the end of the whole first run, which is to say the end of the Seventh Doctor, I might attempt an overview of the whole thing. Maybe even a ranking. I do love a numbered list.

For that, though, I'd have to get through another two seasons of Peter Davison and three of Colin Baker and I'm not at all sure I can do it. It's so tempting to skip straight to Sylvester McCoy, who I remember as doing a very good job with what looked like zero budget.

If I stop this post now, I might just have time to fit in one more episode before I go to sleep. Or, if the last few are anything to go by, I'll get about ten minutes in before it sends me to sleep.

 Season 19 really is very dull.

There Must Be Something You Like...

And so, Blaugust moves into Creator Appreciation Week. That sounds like a nice, easy post. I like stuff. I can name people that make stuff I like. I can say "Thank you, person who makes stuff I like. I appreciate it."

Well, you'd think so, wouldn't you? How hard could it be? But I'm having a bit of an existential problem with the concept. 

Creator Appreciation Week used to be Developer Appreciation Week, which was a lot more specific. I also found it very easy to ignore. I'd been playing games for decades before I really came round to the idea that anyone "created" them and even when I did, I thought the idea of thanking them for doing it was weird. 

Actually, when I break it down, it's not quite that simple. There's a progression that makes some sense of my shifting attitude. Here's a rough timeline of my engagement with video games:

Late 1970s - Very Early 1980s - Arcade Games. Played almost exclusively in pubs. Mostly made by companies whose names I didn't know or, if I did, meant nothing to me.

Early 1980s  - Atari 2600 Console on which I mostly played games I rented by the weekend. Either Atari's own or with brand names that again meant nothing to me.

Early- Mid 1980s - ZX Spectrum - Bought on cassette or rented for the weekend. Games made by teenagers, hippies, visionaries and rip-off artists, many of whom were treated like rock stars by the media, especially in the gaming magazines that suddenly filled the newsagents racks.

Late 1980s - Early 1990s - Amiga 512 - Mostly games by larger, more faceless companies or, increasingly, not games at all.

Mid 1990s to Late 1990s - PC games from what seemed like fairly large companies although who knows? They were in high street stores so that was my assumption.

Early 2000s to Present Day - Digital purchases, usually direct from the developers or publishers or from the storefronts of  various aggregators like Steam.

There's plenty of bleed-through in those porous date divisions. The final one incorporates a whole raft of attitude changes that directly affect my reaction to the idea of appreciating the work that goes into making a game. I'll come to that later. perhaps, but for now I can say, with a degree of accuracy I think, and with not too much benefit of hindsight, that of the first five divisions, the only one for which it would have made sense to me, at the time, to think of in terms of "appreciation" would have been the ZX Spectrum era.

Spectrum game developers were like indie bands. They either put out weird games that weren't like anything else or they put out bad copies of whatever the others were doing. Sometimes they blew up, mostly they sank. By no means all the games really worked, either. I never had one that literally wouldn't play at all but some of them were, shall we say, unoptimised...

There were a lot of one-hit wonders and a handful of developers who managed a couple of successful sequels. A lot of not very good games were sold on the strength of a single decent title somewhere in the past. I can still remember the names of a few of them and not because I liked them, either. 

There was Melbourne House, who did the Hobbit, one of the most boring takes on Tolkein it's been my misfortune to suffer through. The sentence "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold" is still stuck in my head to this day. Then there was Llamasoft, the home of the obnoxious, post-hippie surrealism of Jeff Minter, none of whose games I ever played but all of which were unaccountably loved by the gaming press, most of whom must have been Gong fans. Or, even more likely, bong fans...

The one and only Spectrum developer for whom I did, in fact, feel a modicum of brand loyalty was Ultimate Play The Game. Ultimate, for short, was the software house behind Attic Attack, Sabre Wulf, Cookie and the rest. The very fact that I can remember their name and three of their games without resorting to Google search just shows how into them I was. If I was ever a fan of a game developer it was Ultimate Play The Game. 

And then they put out something I didn't much like and that was the end of that.

No, that's not fair. What really happened was that they outlived the useful lifetime of the platform they were developing for. The ZX Spectrum had a good run but ever-developing technology and Clive Sinclair's bizarre obsession with unconventional personal transport did for it in the end.

I never knew what happened to Ultimate after that. Or cared, frankly. I was onto a new machine and more interested in playing dungeon crawlers like Eye of the Beholder or sampling Twin Peaks to make Dale Cooper hip-hop pastiches. Looking it up, I see now that Ultimate morphed into Rare, before being purchased first by Nintendo and then Microsoft. 

Had I wished to express my appreciation for those great games, it wouldn't have been easy to know how to assign it. As a fervent reader of (And very occasional contributor to.) the gaming press in the '80s, I did know the names of the Stamper brothers, Tim and Chris, who together were the driving force behind Ultimate, although I can't pretend I remembered them until I read the Wikipedia page just now. 

What either of them actually did, though, I haven't a clue. As it says in the entry, Ultimate was a very secretive organisation and no-one outside the company really had a clear idea who did what. Even in those golden days, when gaming was a new frontier and mavericks roamed the lands, it still came down to brand names over individuals in the end.

And that's one reason I have never really felt comfortable offering appreciation to game developers. Unless it really is one of those (Increasingly common and successful, I'm feeling...) solo developers, it's never really clear who deserves the praise. Worse, the field is cluttered with Big Names From The Past, all still trading on successes that came decades ago, if they even were successes at all. Is that something we want to encourage? Do we want to stoke up more Chris Roberts for the future?

By the mid-90s, after that brief but thrilling moment of chaos, when you might easily switch on the news and hear about some 17 year-old who'd just made a million from a game he wrote over half-term, it became a lot harder to pick the relevant names out of the inordinately lengthy credits at the end of the manual. Have you seen the credit list for the original EverQuest? I'd show you, if I could find my original boxed copy which, somewhat unsettlingly I can't right now. I'm sure it will turn up. 

I do have the credits from the second expansion, Scars of Velious, to hand though, and they're bad enough.

By the time I started playing online RPGs and then MMORPGs, it had all started to feel much more like going to see a blockbuster movie at the multiplex than buying indie singles in a grimy record store up a dark backstreet. Everything was a huge production with a vast team, almost all of whose names appeared in tiny print at the end, where almost everyone could be guaranteed to ignore them.

 I suppose the likes of Brad McQuaid or Mark Jacobs could have been seen as the equivalent of directors, particularly if you bought into auteur theory, which was going out of fashion around the same time, but the suspicion was always that maybe they were more like film producers than directors. And who appreciates a producer?

When I learned that there were conventions where fans gathered to listen to these people speak I was dumbfounded. I used to compare it to going to meet the people who'd made your refrigerator. I mean, yes, sure, they were necessary to the process but why would you need to know their names, let alone go gawk at them?

As I got more deeply embedded in the culture, the idea of celebrating individuals involved in the making of games got to seem less completely crazy than it had done but even now I struggle with it a little. When you go to a gaming convention, what do you actually get from the developers who attend? At a comic convention, an artist can draw you a picture of your favorite character. A writer can at least sign a comic they've written. What's a digital artist going to do? Draw on your iPad?

All of that was a roundabout way of saying I've always had issues with the concept of Developer Appreciation Week. You'd think it would be a lot easier now the remit has stretched to include just about any medium you care to throw into the mix. But that comes with issues of its own, mostly that I feel I'm doing plenty of appreciating already.

I do plenty of music posts. By implication, I'm celebrating the creativity of anyone whose work I share. Embedding a video is a very practical way to express appreciation, I'd say. 

I've done posts about authors I like and once I retire from bookselling I plan on posting a lot more about books and the people who write them. I do TV and movie reviews whenever I've watched something I like. If I like something, chances are I'll have used this blog to soapbox about it. It feels a bit invidious to pick anyone out for special treatment in a designated "Appreciation Week". 

In fact, I don't very often post about things I don't like. If I'm writing about anything there's a good chance I'll be appreciating it at least to some degree, even if I'm being critical, too. I'm only saying it because I love you! 

What I would like to do for Creator Appreciation Week is take the name in its very specific, 21st century context and thank some "content creators" who run YouTube channels I watch or podcasts I listen to. Those almost never get a post to themselves and not very often even a passing mention in someone else's. 

 Only I'm not listening to any podcasts at the moment and I haven't added a new channel to my YouTube subs,or not one that wasn't a band or a musician anyway, for at least a year. There are only two non-music YouTube channels I watch regularly and one of them is entirely dedicated to AI, so that's not going to go down well... 

The other is so unhinged and open to misinterpretation that the couple of times I've mentioned it, I've kept it pretty low key. I really would love to express my profound appreciation of astryuuna and encourage people to watch her channel. I do think she's a genius or at least an inspiration but whether she ought to be encouraged, let alone promoted, is another question entirely. And as Roger was saying, there are some things you just don't write about...

Looking back at last year, I can see I was an awful lot more positive abut the whole thing. I focused on appreciating Blaugustinians and I'm happy to say that I'm still reading some of the blogs I mentioned and using the utilities they put me on to. So thanks again for that.

All in all, this hasn't been much of an appreciation at all, has it? I do apologise for that. But hey, it's a whole week! Maybe I'll take another run at it in a few days, see if I can't do better.

There must be someone I can say something nice about...