Three Down, Three To Go

No point hanging about. I ripped through two of the six, chosen Next Fest demos last night and knocked off a third this morning. My speed run was helped by the fact that my PC crashed after each of them, twice when I was just re-logging . That's an issue with the machine, not the games, but it gives me a great reason to stop where I'd normally have carried on until I'd finished the whole thing.

None of these demos require completion for judgment, anyway. It's very clear with all of them after just a few minutes what the game is trying to be and how successful it is at being it. And since none of the three is trying to do anything new, other than cross-breed a couple of genres that don't usually sit together, they're all a pretty easy read.

On with the micro-reviews.

Over The Hill (23 minutes - Not wishlisted)

I could just refer everyone to Nimgimli's comment on yesterday's post for this one and save myself the trouble. Here, I'll quote him so you don't even need to click through: "It is almost EXACTLY Snowrunner with worse graphics, right down to the controls for the Winch and stuff being exactly the same."

I haven't played the game Over The Hill is trying to emulate so I'll take Nimgimli's word for the similarities. What I can say, with confidence, from personal experience is that, while it looks quite a lot like the game I was comparing it to, Outbound, the way it plays is completely different.

In Outbound, you drive around some lovely scenery in a camper van, doing some extremely simple tasks and occasionally stopping to remove the odd obstacle, like a fallen tree, or to fix something, like a collapsed bridge. It's a relaxing, chill experience - too much so for many, judging from the reviews. In Over The Hill it's all obstacles and no roads. Getting from A to B is the gameplay.

Over The Hill is not, as I thought it would be, a driving game. It's a puzzler. The driving, such as it is, is incidental to the puzzle of getting your vehicle past an endless succession of obstructions - mud, water, rubble, loose sand - just so you can drive for fifty yards before you have to do it again. 

The inducement to keep moving seems to be to reach various marked points on the map and see what's there. It could be something you can add to your vehicle - I found an antenna - or a fast travel point. I imagine it could be all sorts of things but I'll never know because by the time I'd reached the end of the tutorial I'd had more than enough. 

At that point the demo tells you you've acquired the ability to choose where you'd like to start from the Main Menu but when I went back to do that the game crashed and I felt no inclination to try again. I'm still in the market for a relaxing, easy driving game with a lot of pretty scenery but this isn't it.

Spirit Vale (50 Minutes - Not wishlisted)

The one MMORPG on the list this time, Spirit Vale is less than a month away from an Early Access release on Steam. Is it ready? Hard to be sure after less than an hour but, yes, I'd say it probably is.

It's going to be a very familiar experience for anyone who's played any traditional MMORPG before, too. You're not going to need much instruction getting to grips with this one. The art style is about the only mild surprise. 

As I said yesterday, the humanoid characters look disturbingly like babies. Ok, toddlers. If they had the license for the IP, it could be Rugrats: The MMO. 

Character creation is pretty good. There are seven classes, all of which can specialize. It's the usual suspects - Ranger, Warrior, Mage and so on. I picked the Summoner, who can become a Necromancer when they grow up, mostly because they get a cat for a pet. (It turns out they also get a dog and an angel. I'm not complaining)

There are a lot of hairstyles, colors, eyebrow options, eye shapes and so on, laid out in a grid so you can click through them and immediately see what your character would look like. That was fun. 

I can't remember if you get to choose gender or body type. If I did I don't remember it. I suspect the classes might be gender locked. It's a bit of a moot point anyway, given the character models. That was why grandmothers used to knit pink or blue booties, wasn't it? They'd need more colors of wool these days, of course.

Once you're through with character creation it's out into the world. You start in town and you get pretty much no instruction on what to do there. It's OK. You don't need any. It took  me about thirty seconds to figure out where the 1-5 starting zone was and thirty more to go there so I could start killing things. 

And that's where it gets really old school.  Oh boy, have they gone all-in on the dopamine hits! XP flies in, levels rack up, mobs drop clothes and weapons and runes and potions and everything has a ton of stats you can read and compare. If grinding mobs for xp and loot is your thing you'll be in murder hobo heaven!

If there are quests, I didn't get any. I didn't need any. I didn't want any. I got myself a sword and pair of pants, worked out how to sit to heal, spent some points on spells so I could summon all three pets and then I ran around killing anything that moved. 

Combat felt more like an ARPG than an MMORPG. Most of the time I was surrounded by hordes of mobs, me and my dog, killing as fast as we could go. The mobs were supposed to be "Neutral" but sometimes they attacked us anyway, which was fair because most of the time my dog attacked them without either being provoked or told to do it. 

Sometimes one or other of us got overwhelmed and died. If it was my dog, I just resummoned him. If it was me, I respawned in town and ran back. If there was a death penalty, I didn't notice it at my low level so it didn't seem to matter.

I did that for a while until I was too high for the first zone and then I moved to the second. There's a map that makes the place look huge but the zones are tiny. As for levels, they've got them marked as high as 135 on the map, although that would be a weird place to cap. 

I got to Level 10/Job Level 7 before I stopped, by which time I could easily kill Level 16 mobs. Job Level drives your points allocation for new spells and abilities. I spent lots of points on spells, not all of which I figured out how to use. I did work out that you can upgrade your pets. My dog started out as a puppy and ended up looking like a werewolf. I wasn't convinced it was an improvement. 

The whole thing was ridiculously enjoyable. It's like an MMORPG from the early 2000s on fast-forward. It reminded me particularly of one of the earlier imported titles I used to enjoy, Eden Eternal, which I'm amazed to see is available on Steam now. I might have to take a look.

And I might still be playing Spirit Vale now, if I hadn't somehow bugged the game taking a screenshot. I toggled the UI off and nothing I could do would get it to come back on, so I logged out to see if that would fix it, which caused my PC to crash because that's what it does with all games now, until I add the executable to Windows Defender's exclusion list, which I'm too lazy to do for demos.

That broke the spell and I have had the sense and self-discipline not to go back and start again. So far. I have also not wishlisted the game because the last thing I need is to start playing another addictive, old-school MMORPG. If you still want to play like it was 1999, only with prettier pictures, you could do a lot worse.

Hawthorn (44 Minutes - Wishlisted and signed up on website)

If you look this one up, you'll find it widely described as a cross between Stardew Valley and Skyrim. That probably tells most people everything they need to know. Unfortunately, those are two games I've never played so it doesn't do much for me.

The demo is what the developers, NEARstudios, describe as a "Proof of Concept" build. It's what they... but no, why paraphrase? Let them explain:

Considering the provenance, there's a lot here already. I only played for about three-quarters of an hour because I had to stop so we could go pick up Beryl from the dog-groomer but I was clearly nowhere near the end. Had I not needed to do something else, I'd happily have carried on. If this is Proof of Concept, I'd say the concept is very firmly proven.

The gameplay loop as as seen in the demo ought to be easy to describe but now I try to pin it down it feels a bit more slippery than that. It's a segment taken from somewhere in the middle of the game, apparently, and it certainly has that in media res feel to it. 

There's a big feast coming and you, playing an anthropomorphic but quite realistically envisioned woodland animal, seem to be the facilitator. Animals keep coming up to you and making suggestions, which you follow but only to set things up. You decide where things like the feast table and the chairs go, choose the menu and generally make sure all the basics are in place. Then the other animals do all the gathering and the building to pull whole the thing together.

Before any of this starts, there's some chatter about some animal who's about to leave town and all the time you're trying to get the feast organized, animals keep running up to you and offering suggestions or just wanting to "have a word". It's like Animal Crossing Pocket Camp only with somewhat more realistic graphics. 

Frequently, I found myself talking to a new animal before I'd had a chance to do whatever the last one wanted but none of them seemed to remember what they'd asked me for, anyway. They'd often come back before I'd even started with another idea they wanted to try out. 

The Owl wanted to take me fishing, which I'd have liked to try, since he said we'd do it with me riding on his back and him swooping low over the lake so I could grab the fish out of the water. That never happened but I did go to tea at his house. It was only after I'd accepted that it occurred to me an Owl inviting a Mouse for a meal might have unpleasant connotations but I needn't have worried. It's not that  sort of game. 

Oh, yes, I didn't mention I was playing a Mouse, did I? The options in the demo are Mouse, Owl or Otter. Each has a unique specialty - mice are tool-users, otters can swim and fish, owls can fly and be ridden by other characters as mounts - but you also get to choose Traits and Quirks at character creation to personalize your character. 

Traits are useful abilities like being fitter (More hit points) or being able to carry more (Larger inventory) and Quirks are disadvantages like being dainty (Fewer hit points) or being scared of mushrooms. (I took that one.) You get one Trait for free but if you want more you have to take a Quirk for each one as a counterbalance. 

There's housing, too. Really lovely, characterful, delightful housing. My Mouse must be pretty important. Her house is the biggest in the village. It's fricken huge! You can decorate but I didn't figure out how. 

The whole game looks gorgeous, especially for something at this early stage of development. It also played very smoothly for me. Character movement was fluid, the UI was intuitive and even with very little instruction, it was easy to figure out what to do and how to do it. 

The writing is good. All the animals have personalities that come across clearly in the way they express themselves as well as in what they want to talk to you about or what they tell you about themselves. They gossip about each other all the time, too. It feels very much like a village.

I'm guessing the presence of stats and particularly the way there are both hit points and a trait to increase them means there's some kind of combat in the game, although there was no hint of it in the parts of the demo I saw. I don't know how big the world is or what's out there, though there are hints in the conversations. One character talks about having lived in the city, for example, but whether that's somewhere you can visit I have no idea.

I'd love to find out. I have high hopes for this one. It's immediately enjoyable and it has a very obvious potential market. "What if Stardew Valley but Skyrim?" is an irresistible elevator pitch.

The problem would seem to be whether it will ever get the funding it needs. There was a successful Kickstarter last year, when the total came in at double the ask, but that's still only $400k. And according to an update in February, the team only includes five full-time devs. Is that enough money and/or enough people?

I hope so but I guess we'll find out. 

Another Summer, Another Next Fest

Here we go again. Can't say I'm feeling as thrilled as I might be. Could it be they run these a tad too often? Maybe the whole idea of dumping a couple of thousand demos in a big heap on the floor and expecting everyone to pick through them to find everything worth trying, then finish playing it all before the end of the week is a bit much.

Or perhaps it's just that Next Fest is an event that fits more comfortably into the darker evenings and damper days of winter than the bright, light, warm summer months. But maybe that's just me. 

Whatever, I did manage to pick my half-dozen demos on Monday evening. I was working yesterday so I had no chance to play any of them but that's okay, I guess. Six demos, six days left. Should be able to get through them all, I'd hope.

First, though, why don't I list them all so we can see what we're looking at? Conscious of how predictable I am, I did make some slight attempt at variety although as usual I haven't even poked my head out of the foxhole of my comfort zone. 

I'd give notes on my methodology, if I had one but all I did was look at the Recommended For You banner first, then scroll down the Browse All Titles column until I lost the will to carry on, at which point I regressed to selecting some familiar genres and sub-genres from the drop-down menu. 

I think I'd only looked at Point and Click and Turn-Based Strategy titles before I'd filled my quota. Usually I throw in Visual Novel, RPG and a few others but I didn't need them this time. I did check out the eleven demos listed as MMORPGs but most of them didn't seem even remotely like anything I'd include under that heading. I did pick one from that pot and it was the obvious one. I'll start there.

Spiritvale - "A class-based action MMO inspired by classic RPGs. Explore a fractured world of monsters and ruins, build your own playstyle, and fight alongside friends in real-time, cooperative combat."

I'd seen an itemm or two about this one at MassivelyOP so I recognized the name but that was about all. Nothing they've written about it has caught my interest so far. 

I had the vague impression it might be some sort of cozy crafting and building game but reading the detailed description on the Store page it seems a lot more combat-focused than that. In fact, based on the screenshots and videos they're sharing there, it would  appear to be a game where babies fight monsters. Weird. I guess I'll find out more when I play it. Can't say I'm looking forward to it much.  

Over The Hill - "Explore the world in the golden age of offroading. Drive iconic vehicles from the 60s to 80s by yourself or with friends through challenging trails and beautiful scenery."

Remember Outbound from last time? Here it is again! Let's just hope they remembered to put a game in there this time.

Unfair, I guess, but I have bad feelings towards Outbound thanks to the way it majorly underperformed when I picked it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League. Over The Hill looks slicker and more like a driving game. I like driving games, in theory, although I'm very, very bad at them. At least in this one you're meant to come off the road.

Hawthorn -  "Former developers from Bethesda, BioWare, and Naughty Dog bring you the sandbox RPG realm of anthropomorphic animals and fairy creatures. This early Proof-of-Concept Demo is an intentional look back at where Hawthorn's development journey began and an invitation to shape the future of Hawthorn!"

Now this one does look interesting. Made by people who might possibly know what they're doing for one thing. And right up my street with all the anthropomorphic animals and the heavy twee factor. 

The downside is that it's in super-early development. We're not even talking alpha here, just "proof of concept". That means if it's good it'll be a long wait but also it could change out of all recognition by the time it gets here. 

On the other hand, if it's bad, I guess it could get better. Acorn cup half-full and all that.

The Fifth Bell - "The Fifth Bell is a premium 2D point-and-click mystery adventure set in 1994 Europe. Investigate hidden mechanisms, decode historical clues, and stop a forbidden instrument before it is awakened."

This could not look more like a classic Point and Click from the '90s. It's even set in the fricken' '90s! Someone obviously looked at Broken Sword and thought "We could do that!" I hope they're right. 

This is also an interesting little test-case for AI use, judging by the AI statement at the end of the description. In the previous paragraph, I was about to type "and the graphics look fantastic" when it occurred to me to check if they were hand-drawn or if AI was involved. 

It's instructive that it even occurred to me to wonder. It's not a thing I normally think about so something must have triggered in my backbrain. It was the only demo on this list where it even occurred to me to check. And guess what?

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

"Pre-generated AI tools were utilized to create the foundation for the 2D background art, character sprites, and audio. All of these raw assets were then extensively edited, cropped, and manually integrated by hand to ensure they perfectly fit the game's mechanics, atmosphere, and engine requirements."

Now isn't that interesting? Somehow I could just sense it. 

The results are excellent so does it matter? It will to some people but if the game is good, will Point and Click fans deprive themselves of the pleasure of playing because of the faint, lingering AI taint? Looking forward to finding out if makes any difference to my enjoyment or appreciation as I'm actually playing rather than just thinking about it.

Monstopia - "This is a casual detective game featuring interview simulation and "find the differences" gameplay. You will play as an ambitious young demon, determined to transform the dilapidated park into the most thrilling horror-themed attraction."

I deliberately didn't search for detective games this time. I've played enough demos now to be fairly sure I don't like them nearly as much in practice as I do in theory. I read plenty of detective novels and watch plenty of detective shows but I'm not one of those people who tries to figure out who did it before the reveal and it turns out that having to do all the investigating yourself doesn't feel so much like having fun as like having a really tedious, annoying job to do.

This one appealed to me for the setting more than the detection, anyway. The set-up reminds me of Dead End: Paranormal Park and I just happened to be wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Courtney on the front as I was picking my demos so it felt like a bit of an omen. (Omen might not be the best word to choose when you're talking about things demonic...) Courtney's my favorite demon, by the way. Who's yours?

The gameplay sounds unusual, too. Not sure I've ever conducted a job interview in a game before let alone a whole series of them. Got to be better than interviewing suspects although I wouldn't be surprised if there's some of that in there, too.

Wild Tactics - "A character-driven turn-based tactical strategy game where planning and positioning decide every fight. Lead a squad of wild agents with shady pasts through high-pressure missions, manage their relationships, and make hard calls that shape every operation in the crime-ridden city of Clawville."

I have to say, this one looks great. More anthropomorphic animals, a 50's neon noir sheen, strong visual design and allegedly a "killer soundtrack" although I'll withhold judgment until I hear it. Gameplay looks solidly X-Com, which is fine with me. I liked the combat in that game. It was everything else I couldn't stand.

And that's the six. I do still have a couple of other demos in hand that I downloaded a while ago and haven't gotten around to playing yet, so I might throw one or two of those in as well. Depends how much I have to say about these six and how much time I have to play.

I might, if I can bring myself to do it, try not to write two thousand world reviews of all of these as though I was reviewing the finished game. Really goes against the grain to keep it short but posts on demos are about the least-popular thing I ever publish here. Even music posts do better. And it does seem a bit like overkill, going into that much detail over a demo that takes maybe half an hour to play. I'd quite like to do what other people do and keep it down to a paragraph or two for each of them

 Yeah. We'll see if that happens...

I Guess That's What Everything Is Now.

I certainly wasn't planning on making any political statements today - or any other day for that matter - but sometimes it's harder to avoid than you might think. Like when you're browsing your media feeds after lunch and this comes up. 

I was pondering a response when Roger at Contains Moderate Peril beat me to it. Thanks, Roger! Saves me having to formulate any kind of reasoned, rational response, something I'm not sure I'd have been capable of, at least not just yet. 

Games Industry chimed in after that with an assurance that gaming wouldn't be affected, which I'm sure was the first thing on everyone's minds but kudos for staying in your lane, GI. Rest assured, the kids will still be able to play Minecraft and Roblox, apparently, although there needs to be some clarification on what the exemption actually means. Supposedly it excludes games but  not "gaming platforms" and media, so expect to have to supply Google and WordPress some ID any day now, if you want to carry on reading your favorite UK-based gaming blogs. 

Seriously, on that last point, I don't see why blogs wouldn't qualify as a form of social media, unless the legislation is only interested in some form of direct messaging, not conversations carried out in public. I guess we'll have to wait for the exact wording, although now I come to think about it, the ban includes YouTube, which I've never even remotely thought of as social media anyway. 

Who knows? If blogs really aren't included, maybe we'll see a revival of interest. For a couple of weeks, until they get added to the proscribed list, that is.

I can't make much sense of it yet. Livestreams are banned. But does that only mean livestreams like on Twitch, which have text panels where everyone talks at once in real time? Or is it also livestreams like sporting events or music festivals on Amazon Prime or Netflix or the fricken' BBC, where no-one talks at all and we all just watch like it's television? Who knows what the hell they're talking about. I guess we'll have to wait for the paperwork.

This has to be an overstep, doesn't it? I mean, I'm pissed off by it and I am very much not one of the annoying crew that keeps bleating on about the daed internets. I'm not even all that especially bothered by the current fad for supplying "identification" to all and sundry, although I was pretty pissed off by the time I'd had to send selfies of me holding up my passport five times in one week (Almost true story. Only slightly exaggerated.)

Every medium has its Wild West era but it never lasts. Enjoy it while you can is my advice but don't expect it to stay that way. We had some fun. Now it's over. Teacher came back into the room.

That said, this blanket ban seems like a response on the level of John Major's infamous Dangerous Dogs Act. I was tempted to go a lot further back, compare it to King Cnut holding back the waves, but as we all know, I'm sure, he was trying to demonstrate how he couldn't do anything so ridiculous, not to prove he could. He was trying to make the point that just because he was King didn't mean he could do anything anyone wanted him to do. Our currently elected overlords seem not to have taken that lesson to heart.

I guess, since I'm nearly seventy now (I need to keep saying that out loud in a vain attempt to get used to the idea. I do still have a couple of years to go...), I ought to be able to stand back and ignore this nonsense. It's not going to affect me, after all. Except I'm sure it will. Not sure how, yet, but I'll bet it won't be anything good.

Perhaps the most interesting thing will be to see how the target demographic responds. Are they going to welcome it? Accept it? Ignore it? If it works, will teenagers genuinely feel they've been given their childhood back? And if they have, will they want it?

I didn't think "childhood" was anything most adolescents particularly valued but maybe that's changed. It's been a long time since I was a child or a teenager, although you might not think it to read this blog. When you were in your teens, did you think of yourself as a child? Did you want everyone else to see you that way? I didn't. At least I don't think I did. As I said, it was a long time ago.

And come to think of it, wasn't the current government talking about lowering the voting age to 16? Is anyone sensing a degree of inconsistency? 

Oh, well. No point going on about it. It hasn't happened yet. It might never happen. If it does happen it might not work. Anyone from Australia reading this? How's it working out for you over there, so far?

I was going to leave you with a final word from Astryuuna on one of my favorite YouTube channels. She's  a lot closer to the target age bracket and although I think she'd probably just escape it, she's having some problems of her own with people trying to tell her how to use the social media and technology she grew up with.

Astryuuna's widely praised for flying the flag for how the internet used to be before it got ruined by a devil's handshake of censorship and commercialism. She's also very NSFW, so be warned. She makes a lot of good points in her latest video, though. She usually does. You don't have to be sane, rational, balanced or reasonable to be right. Or, as the proposed legislation suggests, very, very wrong.   

And then I thought, no, why take the risk? She does go in hard in the latest rant. I don't want to get into trouble by association. Which is indicative of how a moral panic gets to you, isn't it? Go look her up yourself if you're interested. It'll be worth your time. 

Instead, I'll go out with a nice, safe option. Here's a Voice Of Today saying something vaguely relevant. 

Chloe Slater, aged 23, already waxing nostalgic about the good old days of her Southern Youth, although from the video it looks more like she grew up in the '80s. It's not quite jumpers for goalposts but it's not far off. The camcorder's a particularly nice touch.

Cracking song though. I wonder how all the new Chloes out there will get to see videos like that, when YouTube's banned?

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Just the two images, both generated through NightCafe as usual, although I'm typing this listening to some songs I made last week on Suno. Does that count?

I made the second image first, using the prompt "King Canute on his throne on the beach with the tide coming in. He's  surrounded by sycophantic nobles. Canute is checking his mobile phone to see what people are saying on social media about his attempt to hold back the waves. In the style of a stained glass window in a medieval cathedral." You'll note I spelled Canute the way it was spelled when I was growing up, not the way it's usually spelled now. I don't know why I thought an AI wouldn't recognize it otherwise.

For that image I just used whatever model was in the chamber, which happened to be Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I was pretty happy with it, too, but when I needed a second image I thought I'd run the same prompt through one of my Pro freebies, in this case GPT Image 2 Low. Blimey, Charlie! It's a lot better, isn't it? So I used that one for the header and relegated poor old Flux to the body. Maybe there is some point to paying a sub after all.

Idle Thoughts And Meaningless Musings : Neverness To Everness Edition

I spent most of the morning writing a lengthy post about AI and then I read it back and decided it was full of things I'd already said. More than once. There were a few ideas that hadn't been done to death mixed in, here and there, but those probably need a proper post of their own, a post I don't want to write just now, so the whole thing will have to stay in the draft folder for the time being.

I'm technically on holiday anyway (Although when you only work two days a week and you haven't gone anywhere, the expression doesn't really carry the weight.) so there wouldn't normally be a post here today, anyway. Also, it's a Saturday. No-one reads blogs on a Saturday. That's a proven fact. 

Of course, they do read posts that were posted on a Saturday later the following week, when they're at work and bored and the boss is out of the office, so it's not like you can put stuff up on the internet at the weekend and expect no-one's going to see it. More's the pity.

Given all of that, I think I'll just indulge myself with a hotch-potch of screenshots and observations about Neverness To Everness. No theme, no purpose. Take it as it comes.

I just really like those shots of Lacrimosa. She's very photogenic. I ought to remember to get her out when I take screenshots instead of always showing The Appraiser. It's very clear, looking at Lacrimosa, how much more effort went into what she's wearing than the utilitarian outfit Flora's stuck with, at least until she can build a strong enough bond with someone else to steal their look.

Speaking of bonding, Flora still has a house guest. She came home one day to this, which was when it occurred to me there was only one bed.  

I mean, there is a sofa...  I thought Mint must be sleeping on it but apparently not. So I bought another bed. 

Sidebar. Are there any games where characters actually sleep in a bed? As in under the covers? I can't think of any. Everyone always lies on top. At least in NTE they do wear nightclothes to sleep although only by the expedient of walking around the flat like that all the time. Still, better than going to sleep in your clothes. Which, come to think of it, is what Flora does...

There's hardly room on the mezzanine for two beds, though. I could do with moving to a bigger apartment but Flora doesn't seem to have made much progress in that direction. I probably need to look up how it works.

And anyway, now I come to think of it, Lacrimosa might make a better flatmate. At least she'd sleep in her own coffin. 

Flora went to the drive-in with Nanally the other night. We saw Sin City Chronicles because of course we did. I'm not sure Nanally knows there are any other movies. We also didn't take a car, even though Flora has one. For some reason we sat on top of someone else's car and it wasn't even anyone we knew.

There were fireworks at the end and a strange bit of dialog where it was made clear that didn't usually happen but not why it was. I'm not sure if it meant anything. 

I was a bit disappointed the cut scenes don't show any of the actual movie. I could hear some of the soundtrack in the background but that was all. When Flora went to the movies with Mint we got to see a few scenes although it turned out to be the same movie that's the only one that ever shows up on Flora's home wall-screen.  

Kuro's missing a trick here, I think. I bet they could quite easily arrange it so you could stream from your PC onto the screens in the game. I would happily sit in my chair at home, watching Flora and Mint watching actual TV shows or movies in their apartment, instead of watching those same shows on my laptop. I bet a lot of people would.

If you think that's weird, following our successful manga-reading party, Lacrimosa is planning an anime marathon. She wants to hold it at Eidon because she doesn't have a TV and she thinks it would be a great idea to watch anime on Taygedo's head. I don't know if this is a thing that's actually going to happen in the game but I'm praying it is!

It's perfectly feasible, too. It's already well-established that Taygedo can show broadcast images on the TV screen he usually uses for his face. The only problem seems to be whether he'd be willing to sit still for long enough, which knowing him seems unlikely. Then again, he's easy to intimidate. Or trick.

Harping on the theme of who are they writing this stuff for, I did another very good, long quest the other day that revolved entirely around helping an architect to come to terms with repressed feelings of grief, loss and guilt over her mother's death, when she was a child. There was some fighting near the end but it was pretty much a short, stand-alone point-and-click adventure. It would fit right in on Itch.io. 

That's a screenshot from the quest, above. It's from the part where Flora had to go into a florists and pick out a suitable flower for the architect to plant in the garden of the house she was having built for herself. Just the kind of thing every adolescent male dreams of doing in a video game, right? I mean, that's why Call of Duty's so successful - all the flower arranging.

Or maybe you'd rather spend an hour running messages between three talking dogs that aren't on speaking terms any more because they're all behaving like seven year-old girls who'have had a falling out over who's best friends with who? I did that one last week. Again, a theme guaranteed to grab the attention of any red-blooded, twenty-something male, I'd say.

It sounds like I'm cherry-picking but the whole game is like this.

Getting back to Lacrimosa for a moment, she's really pathetic. As in she oozes pathos. She's a Sad Goth Girl, which weirdly doesn't seem to be a TV Trope. It should be. 

The scene where you visit her home is quite disturbing. She has hardly anything in there, just some small pieces of furniture and a lot of tomatoes. She rents the place from an old couple, who we don't get to meet, but they seem to be as much her guardians as her landlords.

She didn't find the place herself. Skia, who Lacrimosa refers to as "Doggo" (She gives everyone nicknames, possibly because she can't actually remember their real ones.) found it for her. She certainly would never have managed it on her own. She barely seems capable of looking after herself. 

Lacrimosa may have some mental health issues but exactly what they could be is, as always, unclear. The sheer amount of subtext packed into this vignette is astonishing but I'm finding Neverness To Everness to be all about the subtext. What's often missing is any actual text. 

It's not just written subtext, either. Compare Lacrimosa's barely lived-in room with Nanally's. The effort that's gone into the detail in both. It tells you so much. Nanally evidently has a full and almost certainly happy home-life. The stuffed toys, the Anomaly Guide, the drawing materials, the family pictures on the wall. 

There's a basketball, a soccer ball, the bass guitar Nanally plays now she's in The Whoots!!!! There's the beanbag chair and the potted plant and the bookcase with all the knick-knacks cluttering up the shelves. And look how untidy it all is, while still looking clean and cared-for. That fedora on the rug is a masterful touch.

This is the room of a girl in her early-mid teens, for sure, although to return again to the vexed question of just how old these people are supposed to be, I can't forget something Nanally says in Dreamwalk Corridor, the quest where we learn what little we know about her and where she loses half her mind and half her soul.

She asks the Appraiser "Can I still be the boss of the family if I'm this weird kid, like for ever and ever and ever?" We know Espers frequently experience changes when they come into their powers - physical changes like horns and tails but also temporal ones, like shortened or extended lifespans. I'm wondering just how long Nanally might have been a teenager. The Anomalies began forty years ago. She could be in her fifties but like Peter Pan, she just never grew up.

As for Sakiri, abut whom I know nothing, not having done any character quests with her yet, she looks half Nanally's age but she talks like someone at least in their thirties. In a way it doesn't much matter but in another it's crucial information. It's odd enough sharing an apartment with Mint. I don't want to think about sharing one with Sakiri...

Shark: Got. Bee: Got. Supergirl: Want

Hey! I did something I said I was going to do! That makes a nice change.

This morning I downloaded and installed DCUO again. The client's a svelte 38GB, positively slimline by today's standards. Still took about an hour. Daybreak doesn't have the pipes, I guess. 

It's always interesting, coming back to an MMORPG you haven't played for a while. Since I have a blog (Oh, you noticed!) I can often check back to see when I last played something. Chances are I blogged about it and those chances are especially high when it's DCUO .

A long time ago, I fell into a pattern with the game. I haven't played it seriously since... well, ever. But not even half-seriously for years. What I have done, fairly consistently, is keep an eye on the freebies Digital Ink hands out, so I can log in when there's a good pet or a base decoration or maybe a cape I want. Then I patch up, log in and grab it.

The thing about that is, there's often a long enough gap between freebies that enough has changed in the meantime to make coming back slightly disorienting. (Disorientating? Never know which of those is right.)

Since I was last there, which was towards the end of August last year according to the record, the whole UI seems to have undergone an overhaul. It looks like a new font to me, a lot thinner and tighter. Some of the menus seem easier to follow. And the conversations with NPCs are now shown in social media style, extremely similarly to how they appear in Bagel in Neverness To Everness. Everyone got to be modern, don't they?

It's an improvement all round, although that's not saying a lot. I love DCUO, even though I only ever futz around there, but boy, is it showing its age. Visually, that is. Especially the faces and the animations. They weren't great fifteen years ago and they have not aged well. And yes, before you ask, for once I have the graphics jacked up about as far as they'll go. 

If you look at my character up there, Nini Mo her name is, (Why, I'll explain in a moment. In a Sidebar. I really like sidebars now. So much better than footnotes. I can do footnotes, you know. It's just way too much trouble and footnotes are intrinsically more disruptive than having the information in the body of the post. I'm not writing a sodding dissertation! Also, I could have put this in a sidebar, now I come to think of it...) you'll see it looks like she's wearing a mask. She is not. That's her face. 

Most characters, player or NPC, look like they're wearing kabuki masks to me. And nothing in anyone's features ever moves, It's like we're all playing china dolls.

Sidebar: Nini Mo, since no-one asked, is named after Flora Fyrdraaca's idol and role model. She's "the Coyote Queen, greatest ranger ever" and Flora thinks she's just a character in a book until they meet. Flora, as all regular readers ought to know, since I must have name-checked her here almost as many times as Lana del Rey, is the titular heroine of the trilogy by the frustratingly inactive Ysabeau S Wilce. Write a book, Ysabeau!

All her old books are either out of print or will be soon, by the way. Prices are rising. If you haven't taken the hint the last ten times I dropped it, now's the time. You can get them on Kindle...

Once I'd sorted myself out and figured out how to use the refreshed controls, I had a chat with Supergirl, who inevitably had a job for me. The DCUO superverse is a weird place like that. You can be the absolute newest hero on the block, barely able to handle a street mugging without referring to the Hero Handbook, and you'll still get a call from some megastar telling you your powers somehow fit the exact requirements needed to face down some intergalactic overlord or other.

In this case it's some arch-villain going by the extremely unimpressive name of Kryb. I assume she's in the comics but I have never heard of her. Then again, I didn't know we had Blue Lanterns and there was one of those standing right next to the Girl of Steel. 

Sidebar: I just checked and there are now eleven colors of Lantern in the DC Universe! Eleven!  Green, Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue , Indigo, Violet, Black, Grey, White and Ultraviolet.

Kryb has been doing unspeakable experiments on children. No details (Or "deets" as Supergirl extremely unconvincingly puts it. Would Kara ever say "deets"? No, she would not.) but I'm betting it involves turning them into some kind of monsters so she can weaponize them. It's almost always that. 

Kryb has the Blue Lantern's niece. (She has a name but I've already forgotten it. The Blue Lantern that is. Not sure about the niece. I mean, I'm sure she has a name, just not that we get to know it yet.) I assume we'd be going after Kryb regardless but the family connection adds a little frisson.

Niece or no niece, (Now there's a game show...) I had absolutely no plans on doing the new chapter but it takes place in a version of Argo City that's somehow on the floor of the ocean and I wanted to see if we had underwater content now. We never had any before. 

And we don't have any now, either. I guess Argo's in a bubble. But then, Argo's always in a bubble . In space, underwater, what's the diff?

Anyway, I got sucked into all of that and ended up spending the morning kicking Kryptonian robot ass, which is less fun than it sounds but still some fun. I was in a group for a while, too, which always seems to happen in DCUO. It's about the last game I play where I get group invites. No-one ever says much and I generally don't know what's going on but it's easier to accept than refuse so I join. 

I don't know how to play my character and Nini Mo's not even level 30 yet, which as I always say is Basic Tutorial Level in the game, so I don't contribute much but no-one ever seems to care. I think it's just one of those "If we're grouped we all share credit" things. The xp certainly flowed. I dinged 29.

People came and went and I died a bunch of times because don't know what I'm doing and eventually I was on my own again. I kept going. Supergirl whistled up Krypto, which led to my character making a sarcastic comment that I found quite amusing. You're bringing your dog in now?

Well, yes, of course she is because the superdog is the superstar these days. Except Krypto in DCUO is Original Krypto, the short-haired kind-of-a-Labrador, not the super-cute tousled terrier from the movies.

Come to that, DCUO Supergirl isn't the one from the movies, either. Or the TV show. Or, as far as I can tell, the comics.

As a DC fan, albeit an out-of-date one, I rarely recognize any of the heroes in DCUO as the same people I know from the comics or the TV and movie spin-offs. They look like them but they don't talk like them. Or act like them. 

Or sound like them, if you have a particular voice actor in mind. All the voice acting in the game is generic and always has been. Competent but unconvincing. Then again, you try being convincing, reading some of that dialog.

So that was all fun but by the time we reached the underboss, Annihilus...  no, wait, not him... Atrocitus, that's it... I'd had enough. I'd have had to stop and relearn my skills for him and I didn't feel like it. Instead, I warped out to my base and started hanging some posters. Base building is the real endgame.

Before all of that, though, I popped into Metropolis to visit the Pride Parade and pick up my free flying shark. They've made an effort for the event as usual. Lots of balloons, flags, music, dancing...

I was curious to see which heroes were staffing the thing this year. Ha! I say "heroes"... Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were there, of course. And Aqualad. I cannot get used to the American pronunciation of his name, by the way. Him and Aquaman. That long first "a" is just weird. 

Batwoman was there, too. And a few others I've forgotten. I'm guessing all of them have some established gender identity in the comics but I'm out of that loop. When I start my DC Universe Infinite subscription, maybe I'll get caught up.

The shark is as great, as I knew it would be and I also got a bee. Haven't flown that one yet but it looks good in the preview. I'm guessing it's from last year. I must have missed it.

 

That was more than I'd planned on doing so I felt pretty pleased with myself. About the only other thing I might do for this Chapter is try to pick up Supergirl as an Ally. 

To get her for free I'd have to log in just about every day for a a month and actually do something so that's not going to happen but there's a peculiar system in DCUO, where you can chip away at the monthly Chapter rewards by doing a little every day or you can just buy them for Daybreak Cash. The price is on a sliding scale. The Buyout is 4K DBC but one session this morning knocked 200DBC off the total and it only took a few minutes to get the update. 

You can do that once a day while the event runs. After you trigger it each day, it makes no difference how long you keep on doing the content, you won't get any more credit. There's a 24 hour time gate so grinding isn't an option.

I think that's good? Hard to tell. It's a tax on impatience, basically, which I'm fine with. Then again, I would be. I have a lot more DBC than I know what to do with. I might just buy Supergirl's loyalty for cash money.

And that's about all I have to say about it for now. DCUO: it's always there and I always have fun whenever I play. For an hour or two. Then I've had enough for a month. 

Still, I might drop in a few more times before the event comes to an end,. Drive the price down a little but also fly around a little, show off my shark and my bee. 

If you got 'em, flaunt 'em, right?

Gnomes, Pandas And Flying Sharks - It Can Only Be Summer At Daybreak

I've been out and about doing stuff today so this is a bit of a cobbled together at the last minute post. It's also one of those "Here are some things I'm going to do that I haven't actually done yet" affair, by which I mean I've taken a few press releases and made a post out of them.

Which, yes I know, is cheap. So sue me. You think I get paid for this?

In all cases it's Daybreak I'm talking about. We're just about to hit the big summer festival season in EverQuest II and Niami Denmother has a couple of articles up at EQ2 Traders about it. The first is about Tinkerfest, which she describes as the "annual gnomish (including honorary gnomes) celebration".  Ratongas like to tinker, too, but gnomes don't like to talk about that much. Don't like the competition.

I used to take this one quite seriously. Well, as seriously as you can take anything involving gnomes. I played a few of them (And Ratongas, too.) and at least one of my gnomes had a suitably gnomish residence (See how I resisted saying gnome-home there?) full of the kind of widgets and cogs that make any self-respecting gnome happy.

And, let's face it, all gnomes are self-respecting. A bit too much so for some people. Have you ever met a gnome with an inferiority complex? Or a gnome suffering from imposter syndrome? No, they're all hyper-confident megalomaniacs with delusions of grandeur. It's compensation for their obvious deficiencies in other departments, I imagine, although I'm no expert in gnomish psychology. Thankfully.

But they sure can tinker. If you want something bolted onto something else, these are your guys. Tinkerfest is one of Norrath's  bigger festivals so after a couple of decades it's acquired a lot of cruft. EQ2 Traders has a neat overview and I'm going to steal it, just to fill the post out a bit:

Is this your first time celebrating this event? Or is your memory fuzzy enough that you need a refresher?

• Gnomeland Security in the Steamfont Mountains is the main hub for this event, with portals from all "celebration" areas sending you back to the main hub in Gnomeland. (Celebrating gnomes, surrounded by harvestable cogs and purple shinies, can be found in all home cities as well as the docks of Thurgadin, the gnome area in Solusek's Eye, and Dropship Landing in the Moors)
• The shiny tinkerfest cogs, used for shopping and for crafting, are harvestable "!" items in all celebration areas. They can also be brought back by an upgraded pack pony (100 per 2-hour run).
• The second purple shiny collection (added in 2016) requires that you have completed (and handed in) the first purple shiny collection. Once you have done so, half of the collection can then be found in the Gnomeland Security area; the other half of the collection will be found in Qeynos and Freeport in the celebration areas.
• You will need to know the gnomish language (from a language trainer if you're not a gnome) in order to obtain some of the quests.
• Vendor Tarly in Gnomeland Security will sell all of the past Tinkerfest recipes and items for you while vendor Myron will sell the current year's recipes and items. You will need some shiny tinkerfest cogs before you can buy the books, so scrounge up a few before you go shopping.
• The quest tracker included in a section below will be a godsend if you are trying to run more than one alt through the event. Quest details for all quests can be found on the wiki's Tinkerfest article.
• During the event, there will be a markable sign in several of the Tinkerfest areas, for the Party Sign! Excellent! achievement for those who missed getting the Tinkerfest update for it last year.
• Protip: if you see an item sold on either Myron or Tarly that costs 2 Shiny Tinkerfest Cog, it usually means that it can also be crafted. (Or is a special achievement unlock.)

That quest breakdown, linked in Niami's piece, is huuuuuge. I'm reasonably confident I've done everything on there at least once, some things many times. and by this stage, I'm pretty much tinkered out so I have no plans on doing any of it again. 

I do generally try to do any new quests that get added, just for the sake of being able to say I've done them all, but by now there's really no need for any more activities in most of the festivals. There's literally more than enough to do already. Technically, there is one new Tinkerfest quest this year but it looks to be nothing more than a repeatable option added to an existing quest. If so, I'll pass, thanks.

Even if you're done with the event itself, though, it's still worth noting down the dates because the special Summer Jubilee dungeon, Triad of Elements, only opens during the big three. 

The three tent-pole attractions are:

Tinkerfest — June 6, 2024 to June 19, 2024

Scorched Sky Celebration — June 28, 2024 to July 11, 2024

Oceansfull Festival — August 8, 2024 to August 21, 2024 

Running Triad of Elements multiple times is the only way to get this year's Plume for your Plume slot. I don't think there are details on stats for those yet but if things follow the usual pattern, it will be better than any of the inferior Plumes crafters can make. 
 
As to how essential Plumes actually are, I'll leave that to someone who does the harder content. I got mine the first year they added them and I haven't bothered since. I'm not a fan of running the same dungeon over and over.

The Summer Jubilee currency, Platinum Medals, can also be earned while the other summer festivals are running, the regularly-scheduled minor festivals that sprawl across the summer months, things like the Moonlit Enchantments and the City Festivals. The full, official write-up for the Jubilee is on the EQII website and EQ2 Traders version is here.

And that's it for EQII for the moment. I am still playing most days, by the way, although by playing I mostly mean logging in to set and collect my Overseer rewards. We'll see if the summer splurge of festive activities draws me back in. I do like me a good festival.

On, then, to DCUO, which I am very much not playing. I'm not playing it to the extent that I haven't even installed it on the "new" PC. It wasn't on the SDD I transferred across so it's languishing on the old machine. 

I am contemplating setting the old one up to be permanently available. The issue is where to put it. Until then, though, if I wanted to play DCUO, I'd have to re-install it. And why would I want to do that?

That's why! Come on! Wouldn't you re-install for that shark? I want that thing!

Daybreak has a very solid record on supporting Pride Month. I haven't mentioned EQII's contribution to the cause yet because I'm incompetent and disorganized but it's moar pandas!

I actually have more multicolored rabbits and red pandas than I know what to do with, which won't stop me collecting these, too. I might hold back on getting them for every character this time, though. It's a lot of bag space. 

That shark, though... with the flag! Gotta have it!

Just to round out the Daybreak news, there's a limited time promo on subscriptions happening. Wilhelm wrote an excellent piece comparing MMORPG subs, in which I thought Daybreak's All Access came out clearly on top. It's going to be an even better deal for a while because they've added some extras. 

100 slot Broker boxes and a 25% boost to what is now arguably the game's primary currency, Status, are  not to be missed. And while they're limited-time offers, the limits are pretty generous - the end of August for quarterly subs and the end of November for six and twelve months. If you were vaguely thinking of subbing, that might swing it for you.

And that's all I have from the Daybreak News Desk for now. I'm off to download DCUO and get my flying shark!  

Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now

This is going to be a very short post. I know I say that a lot and then run on for several thousand words but that won't be happening today. I had a specific post in mind and I haven't been able to write it so this is the "what would have been" version.

It was going to be about the Wuthering Waves/Edgerunners collab that started this week. I'd been trying to pretend it wasn't happening so I wouldn't start fomoing at the mouth about it but yesterday I saw the trailer in my YouTube subs and couldn't resist. And it was excellent.

 So, I watched that and I read a whole bunch of people saying how good it was, not just in the comment thread but in articles like this one and I thought, well, maybe I'll just check to see if you really have to be all up to date in the game to see the story. And it turns out you don't. 

Kuro recommends you do it in sequence to get the most out of it but they also realize a lot of people might be coming back just for the Edgerunners content because that's one of the main reasons companies do collabs like this in the first place. With that in mind, they've made it a standalone episode you can access immediately or as part of the storyline, as you prefer.

I haven't played Wuthering Waves for a while. A good while. Last September in fact. I didn't stop because I got bored or lost interest. I stopped because it got to be too intense and I found myself taking it too seriously, which is very much not what I want from my gaming. I did plan on watching the story content on YouTube instead, since it felt like I was watching a movie every time I played, but in the event I just drifted out of thinking about it at all. Until now.

The next thing was to check if I had the game installed on this PC. I didn't think I did because I bought it after i stopped playing but as it happens I moved the relevant SDD across and although I removed a few things, Wuthering Waves wasn't one of them.

Great! No need to download the whole thing again, then. I can just patch it up. Yeah... nope. I had to download a new launcher from the website because the old one no longer worked and the new launcher insisted on downloading the entire game, all 100+GB of it before it installed it in the same directory. It took a couple of hours and by the end I had a fresh 108GB client, up about 20GB from where it had been.

That took me past the time I had available to play the thing so I left it for this morning. After breakfast I opened the launcher and hit Play and the damn thing downloaded another massive update. The client now weighs in at an enormous 133GB!

Phew! Still, at least I can finally play the game, right? Ahahahahaha! No!

I can't play Wuthering Waves because I do not have my account details any more. In the quarter of a century I've been playing online games this has barely ever happened to me. I almost always keep a note of my account details for everything - games, services, forums, you name it. And if I don't, I can always at the very least work out what email address I used and recover them.

Not for this one. I almost certainly used the extremely tempting and convenient "Sign in with Google" option. I use it a lot because I'm lazy. It's a bad idea and I know it's a bad idea but I do it anyway because what could go wrong?

Apparently what could go wrong is I could not be able to figure out which google account I used. I have a lot. At least a dozen I use regularly and probably as many more that I've made and then forgotten about. There are only about five or six I regularly use for something like this, though, so again, how hard could it be just to go through them all and find the right one by trial and error?

Harder than I expected. In fact, impossible. 

I tried the obvious two or three and they weren't right. Then I had the clever idea of checking my email to see which one had been sending me the press releases. I have all my in-use email addresses set to forward to one central address so I don't have to keep logging in to all of them.

It was then that it occurred to me that I don't seem to get any emails from Kuro about Wuthering Waves. None at all. I did a search and I never have. Not a single one, ever. Which is very weird. Surely they send them? They'd be the only gaming company ever if they didn't.

Just in case the mail was going to an address I hadn't set to forward, I went through the laborious process of logging them all in. None of them had ever heard from Kuro. While I was at it, I even checked some of the more obscure addresses I haven't used in years. It was a useful hour in that at least I've reset the timers on those so Google won't delete them for a bit longer but it didn't get me any further.

I went through my Little Black Book of Logins page by page. Nothing. It seems I never wrote down anything about Wuthering Waves at all. I don't keep as many handwritten notes about this sort of thing as I once did but I do usually at least make a note of which email address I've used for a new game. Not this time.

Even if I don't keep a note of it, Google must or how would it work? I googled that and found out how to check what apps you've given permissions to, which is a handy piece of information to have. Then I checked all of them and none of them showed "Wuthering Waves" or "Kuro" in the list. 

By this point I was pretty much stumped. I tried checking my laptop, where I once tried to play the game and found it wouldn't run, and my old PC, which meant connecting everything back up, which was a pain. No joy with either of them. And that was the last, worst idea I had.

Reading around the web, it seems there are some quirks with Kuro's login process that mean accounts set up by typing in an email address are registered independently of the same email address selected through "Play with Google" but either way you'd think there'd be a stream of promotions going to that address, which as far as I can see there never has been.

There's also an issue where your account is specific to the Region where you chose to play. If you pick the wrong one on login, the game acts as if you never played before. I tried Europe and America, the only two I'd ever have chosen. Nothing on either. 

I do have a blog though. I know I would never have mentioned a specific email address in a post because I am not completely irresponsible but I do sometimes mention other useful details. So I checked my First Impressions and came up with this potentially telling piece of information: "Downloading and installing the game (It's something like an 18GB footprint.) took just a couple of clicks.... There was no time wasted registering an account. It accepts a Google login, which it doesn't even bother to confirm with an email to the Gmail address you give it." 

Hmm. First, it's grown like Topsy, hasn't it? Second, it never sent a confirmation email. Now that is odd because, while I was trying to get in this morning, I used Google to start a new account and that did send me a confirmation, although it didn't ask for any response. Not that it helps at all but it's a data point.

I'm in on that account now and I see there's an option to "Link Email". Maybe I never took it on the real account. That would explain why I never got any emails. 

Anyway, I've tried everything and every account I can think of and nothing works so the only other option is to contact Kuro Customer Service and see if they can restore access. Thanks to screenshots, I do have the name of my character and the User Id but I never spent any money in the cash shop so I don't have that crucial piece of evidence, without which I'm not sure they'll be all that interested.

I could start over from the beginning. As one person advising someone else with a similar issue helpfully pointed out, if you skip all the dialog it wouldn't take long. Or I could go back to Plan A and watch it all on YouTube.

That sounds like the better option. I'm not convinced pressing the buttons adds anything much to the experience.