And They All Lived Happily Ever After... Or Did They?

I was going to skip posting today [Edit: yesterday.] seeing as how I posted yesterday [Edit: the day before yesterday.], when normally I'd have been at work. 

Sidebar: I'm on holiday again. I didn't book any holiday this year but leaving it until you actually have a reason to book it isn't deemed acceptable any more. If you don't book the whole year by the end of April, someone you've never met, who works in another city, books it for you. So that happened and I got given a week off in every month from June to October which, unbeknownst to the person who booked it for me, is when I'm going to retire. All of which means I'm not working another full month, ever. And I only work two days a week now to begin with. Yay me!

Sidebar: Wow! Sidebar after one sentence! That's a record. And now another! They don't teach you this in blogging school.

Getting back to the point, although whether you can get back to somewhere you never went in the first place is an interesting piece of metaphysics, I was going to give myself a day off from posting but then I finished Warrens Continent on Story Difficulty and I thought I probably ought to record that somewhere for posterity. It's 8pm though [Edit: 8.40 am now.] and I can pretty much guarantee Beryl will be in any moment to demand at least an hour's entertainment, so chances are this won't get posted tonight anyway. [Edit: It did not.] I could have left it for the morning but we're here now, so let's press on. [Edit - For a while, at least.]

As Nimgimli said the other day, "if AI wrote these posts it wouldn’t add all that superfluous preliminary junk. That’s how you can know I still write my own posts!" Whether that's a good thing or not, I'll let the reader be the judge. 

Getting back to getting back to the point, finishing the story in a major update in a gacha game isn't all that unusual for me, although doing it less than a week after it landed certainly is. What's more unusual is that I've also completed most of the associated Event Table. There are three parts to it; I've done two of them and I'm 7/9 on the third. I just have to repeat-kill a couple of bosses and get Shinku to 60 to finish but I'm not logged in right now so I can't check.

That puts me at 21/23 on the full Events Reward progress bar, the "Grand Prize" for which is five Fabricated Dice. That strikes me as the kind of  "Grand Prize" you'd give a seven year-old for coming third in the sack race at Sports Day but what can you do? It's not like I paid an entry fee.

And anyway, I didn't do it for the reward. I didn't do it for the glory, either, although it's true the Fuzzies are building a statue in my honor. Well, in Shinku's honor mostly but Flora gets a smaller statue as one of her Trusted Companions. The Dice Lord told us that in the epilog.

No, I did it for the fun. And boy, was it fun! Most fun I've had in a game for ages and by that I mean sheer, knockabout, punch-em-inna-face, rock-em-sock-em fun. The story was up to NTE's expected, excellent standard but it was mostly the non-stop, explosive combat and the showers of loot that kept me coming back. Twice a day most days. Playing longer sessions than I most likely would have otherwise.

GeForce Now can take some credit. Super-smooth 99% of the time. Never lost connection. Maybe 30 seconds of intermittent lag in ten hours play. All with my PC sitting there, quiet and calm as you like despite the weather. The only one overheating was me. 

Sidebar: I do have to give NVidia a demerit for not allowing the use of keyboards to control games on GeForce Now when you play via TV. I'd have been downstairs in the relative cool of the lounge if they'd let me use my keyboard. I didn't find that wouldn't work out until I'd already set the app up on our Google TV and bought a new wireless keyboard and mouse to go with it. The mouse works fine but the keyboard isn't recognized once you get past the GFN front-end. 

I had to google it to find out why. It's NVidia's policy, for some bizarre reason. You can only use a controller to play games on their servers if you're playing on a smart TV. No idea why. And just to make it even more awkward, GFN isn't fussy what controller you use but NTE is. Neverness To Everness only officially recognizes the PS5 Dual Sense Wireless Controller, apparently, which is not what I have.

I don't want to play NTE with a controller anyway so I'm not going to get one. I can just run an HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV and do it that way if I really want to play couch-style. I bet NTE would look amazing on the big screen though...

All of which tells you very little about the actual in-game experience of the Warrens Continent end-game. Or the Story Difficulty end-game, anyway. What happens when you go back to do it on Challenge and Nightmare difficulty I can't say because I haven't done it. Yet. [Edit: I had to go back in to get a screenshot so I can tell you a little but that's coming later...]

That "Yet"speaks volumes. I never repeat content on higher difficulty. I'm not sure I've ever done it, in any game. I've always struggled to understand why anyone would want to do the same thing but harder. Personally, if I was going to do the same content again, I'd want it to be easier. 

But this was so much fun the first time... And who knows if it's going to be the same each time? Maybe something different happens on each difficulty setting. If so, I'd want to see it. 

It's not like I saw everything the first time. I didn't even take a look at all the mini-games and events, much less finish them. I only completed one of the half dozen or so quests I took. I could maybe catch up with all of that on Challenge, if the content is exactly the same. If not, maybe there'll be new quests and events.

One thing I definitely won't be doing is going back to Story Difficulty to catch up on all the things I left undone. I tried that this morning and you can't. Once you kill the Crimson Dragon, watch the cut scenes and get transported back to Hethereau, you're done with Story. If you try to go back, you'll find a big "Completed" over that button and no option other than to start again on "Challenge".

That did irritate me. I bet it will irritate some completionists a lot more. All those unticked boxes! Fortunately, Hotta are on the case, as usual. When I poked my nose into Challenge mode, I found I'd already ticked off quite a few of the goals there. Things like "Gather 100 Resources" or "Activate 2 Set Effects" that I'd done in Story Mode turned out to be on the list and my prep-work counted. 

I hope that works both ways because there's only one thing I missed in Story Mode for a full sweep - lighting a single campfire. I lit 29/30. I don't generally care about loose ends but coming that close and missing would rankle even me. If I'd noticed, I'd have made sure to have found one extra fire but I was having too much fun to check fiddly little details like that.

This has been a fairly spoiler-free report so far, except that thing about Shinku and the statue at the beginning. I'll try to keep it that way but I'll give fair warning now there may be a few minor reveals in the rest of the post.

There's more about Shinku for a start. It turns out she's the key to the whole thing (No surprise there.) She goes through every fight as a passenger until almost the end. She doesn't have a class, she can't equip anything that drops, she levels more slowly than the rest of the team. She'd be a liability if you ever let her do anything although if you have any sense you'll just keep her on the bench the entire time.

And then, very late-on, she gets her moment and suddenly she's the big hero. I'm not sure if you have to use her for the final battle with the Crimson Dragon but you'd be daft not to. 

She did about two-thirds of the damage when I did it. I started off using Iroi and the Lambs but the Crimson dragon was too smart for that so I brought in Shinku and she soon fixed his wagon. The team beat the dragon on their first attempt. I doubt they'd have done it without her.

It would be a bit weird if you weren't using her, though. You'd have to be pretty stubborn not to take the hint. And it would mess up the story. There's a big cut-scene when you get the dragon to about a third of its health and it all revolves around Shinku. If she'd not been in the fight before then, as she hadn't been for me in every other, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. Luckily, as soon as she had her epiphany, I'd given her the lead so the plot flowed perfectly for me.

There's a fair amount of exposition in the cut-scenes but I still wouldn't say I understand Shinku's backstory. I was a bit confused over what was metaphor, what was internalized conflict and what was memory. Maybe that'll be clarified later but if not I don't mind. I prefer a little creative ambiguity in my narratives.

Speaking of which, there's some of that after Flora and her pals return to Hethereau. They all go their separate ways. Bizarrely, the Appraiser gets to stay on, alone, in Mint's apartment, where I'm ashamed to say she took every opportunity to snoop around like some kind of creepy stalker.). Then Shinku sends the Appraiser a message to say she had such a good time playing 999 Nights she's tried to buy a copy of the game for herself but it's sold out.

No big surprise there. It's the most popular game in Hethereau right now. But she's also discovered no-one selling the game has even heard of the Warren Continent scenario. She names a couple of other scenarios she was offered (Which I'm thinking could be content for us, some day.) but the one they all just played? No sign of it anywhere.

Flora, being the smart cookie she is, asks Shinku why she didn't just get Mint to tell her where she got her copy. Shinku, also being a smart cookie, tells Flora she asked her but Mint couldn't remember. 

Now, as we all know, Mint is a bit of a dumcat, but in this case I'm pretty sure it's not just absent-mindedness. The Warren Continent version of the game just somehow appeared in her apartment. She can't recall buying it, even. And Mint herself said, when they emerged back into reality, that the whole thing hadn't even felt like they were in an Anomaly Realm. It had felt like somewhere real.

I suspect if 999 Nights turns out to be a very popular and successful addition to the game, we might find out more about what all of that implies. If, on the other hand, as seems quite likely, the overall reaction is "That was fun but can we please get back to the real game now?", we might never find out what was going on.

And I'll be fine with it, either way. I hope it's all going somewhere but if it's a mystery never to be solved, that's okay too. Pursuing this storyline to far might be a mistake, anyway. For the health of the game, that is.

Dropping an entirely different game into the middle of one that's barely gotten going was an extremely high-risk choice, both commercially and aesthetically. It looks like Hotta are going to get away with it through the sheer quality of the work they've done but maybe it would be best to quit while they're ahead. 

I was skeptical when I heard about it but I'm having a great time. If it was a game in its own right, I'd carry on playing it. Even so, it'll be good to back to the city. There are more fantasy RPGs than stars in the sky and quite a few cyberpunk dystopias but upbeat, cheerful futuristic cities make for a much rarer backdrop. Maybe stick to your lane in future, Hotta?

Or maybe that's just what they are doing. Maybe they plan on making unpredictability NTE's USP. 

I could live with that. 

Chocolate Milk - or - The Dragons Of Warrens Continent

I'm not sure I can think of any precedent for what Hotta's done to Neverness To Everness with the 1.2 update that landed last week. Something similar must have happened somewhere before because there's nothing new on this earth but if it happened in any game I was playing, I can't remember it. And it does seem like something you'd remember.

The closest I can think of would be Super Adventure Box in Guild Wars 2 but that wasn't remotely on the same scale. 999 Nights (Which, I'll remind you, because it never ceases to amuse me, is pronounced "One Thousand Less One Nights.") is a complete, full-featured ARPG, playable from within NTE. 

It's not a holiday event or a mini-game or even a special zone. It's a whole fricken' game! Last time, I estimated it might keep someone busy for about 30 hours but having played through the first two big dungeons, I'm going to have to revise that upwards. There are two more to go so it's going to take me maybe fifteen hours just to do it all on Story mode and there are two further difficulty levels.

That's just the main quest, which is what I've mainly stuck with so far, (There are also side-quests. I went all round the Fuzzy Village, where the not-really-sheep live, and picked up about half a dozen, although so far I've only finished one.) but there are a large number of other attractions, quite a few of which I've done, some several times, mostly because curiosity has led me to go up to a lot of creatures and objects and most of the events are on a proximity fuse.

Some you have to speak to an NPC to start, some start automatically when you get near and some have portals you can go through. The overworld is handled very much like the way Shroud of the Avatar does it, albeit a lot more stylishly. The map is some kind of model village, with the player character taller than the buildings as they wander down the paths from place to place. 

You can't jump or climb and there are lots of invisible walls. It's a representation of a place rather than a place in it's own right and I find it works very well.

There's a good variety - ring events, jumping puzzles, arenas, logic puzzles and more - and they're all as repeatable as you care to make them. I wandered about, doing some at random for a while in an attempt to level up and it was good fun. 

I wanted some more levels because, as I mentioned last time, Flora and her team did not do well on their first run at the Molten Dragon. Defeat was so swift and inevitable, I figured there had to be some trick to it, which did indeed turn out to be the case. Before I even tried to figure out what that trick was, though, I thought I'd give the the tried-and-trusted over-leveling method a go.

Gaining a few levels does help but the effect is limited by the much higher influence of gear on combat effectiveness. The primary way more levels help is that they allow you to equip higher level-limited items but since, at least as far as I can tell, you need to beat the bosses before you gain access to the areas where the next tier of gear drops, it's kind of a Catch 22. 

Luckily, a random comment I just happened to spot on a reddit thread gave me a clue what was needed. Someone tossed an aside into a thread where people were talking about the problems they were having with the first boss, saying there was an "artifact" that would protect one member of your team against dragon fire. 

It was the fiery breath of the dragon, or possibly some kind of massive fiery AE, that had done for my entire team in seconds. I figured if I could find the artifact and give it to Iroi, she could heal herself well enough against the rest of the dragon's damage to solo the damn lizard if she had to. 

That would turn it into one of those long, attritional boss fights I'm all too familiar with from both GW2 and EverQuest II. Not much fun, sure, but if you get it right, you only have to do it the one time and that's bearable. 

I was settling myself into the idea but first I had to find the artifact. I thought maybe the mysterious sheep vendor might sell it but it was more obvious even than that. It turned out the person who'd left the comment on reddit was making it sound more abstruse than it really was.

The so-called "artifact" that nullifies the effect of dragon flame isn't an artifact at all. It's an accessory and it drops off... who knows? Not me. Not google, either, as we'll see. Probably just a low chance off any mob in Chocolate Volcano, I imagine. When I came to look in my bags for it, I found I already had two of them. 

They were still in there because I hadn't even noticed there were accessories or slots to put them in. It tells you something about how I play games because the slots are right there on the paper-doll and yet somehow I hadn't noticed them.

My feeble excuse is I hadn't been looking at the paper dolls when I was gearing my team. I'd been using the scrolling list of slots down the left of the screen to swap out and upgrade gear and you have to scroll that one down past the bottom of the display to see the accessory slots. They're right down the bottom, after the boots. 

I found that out by chance, not long after I'd been reading about the artifact. I just happened to scroll a bit further down than usual by mistake as I was swapping out gear. Once I'd noticed the slots for accessories were there, I clicked on them, which brings up anything in inventory that might fit the slot and it turned out I'd already looted quite a few rings and gewgaws. I'd been lugging them around in my bags for ages without knowing about it.

And guess what? There were two copes of the "artifact" I was after. It's called Hot Spring Egg and it "Grants immunity to monster burn damage." Perfect! 

Here's the really weird thing. Google doesn't seem to know the Hot Spring Egg exists. None of my searches then found it and even now I know what it's called, I'm still coming up blank. Even with the name of the game and the item there are no results. Well, no meaningful results.

If you search, as I did just now, for "Accessory in Neverness To Everness Warrens Continent that negates NPC fire damage.", the AI summary confidently informs you "In Neverness to Everness, the "999 Nights" (Warren Continent) content does not feature a single accessory that universally negates all NPC fire damage." Even if you use the exact wording from the egg and call it "burn damage" it's the same. Doesn't exist, apparently.

Yeah. Well, it does.Shows what you know, Gemini!  I have three of them now after another dropped yesterday. And you're not restricted to using the Egg on just one character, as the reddit comment implied. They're not whatever NTE's equivalent of Lore-Equip in EQII would be. Everyone on the whole team can have one. 

I probably wouldn't have known that if I hadn't found two of them in my bags. I'd have gone with my initial plan to use just Iroi and it would most likely have worked, even if it would have been teeth-grindingly slow.

With two Eggs, I had a better plan. I stuck one on Iroi and one on Flora, figuring the two of them could duo the dragon easily enough if they weren't on fire. The Appraiser has good DPS and Iroi is an amazing healer. Since plot mechanics mean Shinku has barely contributed anything to the team anyway, I've effectively been trioing the fights all along. Things would go slower without Mint's DPS but with Flora involved it would certainly be a lot faster than with Iroi on her own. 

I was almost looking forward to it now. I was about to port back and give it a go right then, when it occurred to me I might as well fight my way back through the whole volcano and get a couple of levels while I was doing it. 

That really says a lot about how much fun I'm having. It's the first time I've ever felt like I got the point of an ARPG. Killing hordes of mobs and picking through heaps of loot for upgrades hasn't really been my thing until now. I guess it can't have been the mechanics that were putting me off when I've tried other games that use them, after all. It must have been something else - the setting or the aesthetic, probably. 

It really helps that all the main armor slots displays, there's a great variety of looks to discover and the avatars are large enough to see what it all looks like, something that's never been the case in any isometric-perspective game I've played. The developers have done a really great job, not just adding a complete ARPG to the game but making me enjoy it, too.

So that's what I did. I enjoyed it. Specifically, I enjoyed the return match with the Molten Dragon and I especially enjoyed kicking the crap out of it. 

By the time I got to the dragon's room, the whole team had dinged 21 except poor old Shinku, forever a level behind. But she wasn't going to be fighting anyway. 

Flora woke the dragon up up and whacked it about with her sword. Iroi tagged in to drop her big heal when it was needed. I think Mint might have made a brief appearance, too, mostly to drop her Ultimate then vanish again. She couldn't hang around for long, not having an Egg of her own.

With its fire and lava attacks proving utterly ineffective, the dragon went down pretty easily. As did the  second dragon, over in the Milk Ice Mountain, which was where I went next. I was expecting to have to find some new item to protect me against freezing damage for that one but no. I never checked what damage the Frostspike Dragon who lives there was doing but whatever it was it didn't have much effect on my team, three of whom had the Hot Spring Egg by then.

Maybe that dragon does burn damage too. Or maybe it was my clever strat that did for him. 

I'm being ironic, at least somewhat. No strat I ever come up with is likely to qualify as clever. I think I'm doing pretty well if I know what my characters' main abilities do. Combining them for some kind of dramatic payoff is generally well beyond my remit. 

That is what your supposed to do, I think. NTE, like all the gacha games I've tried, assumes players love complexity. It's ferociously complex in terms of synergies between characters, gear, effects, abilities and a whole lot of other factors, all of which I'm sure the developers imagine the players will just lap up (And probably spend money trying to min-max.). Luckily for me they also seem quite forgiving of lazy bums who can't be bothered to figure out how it all fits together, which is just as well or I'd not be playing.

Sometimes, though, things happen that are hard to ignore. On the way up the milk mountain, something weird occurred often enough to make me tab out to try and find out what the heck was going on. Three-quarters of my team kept turning into flying lambs mid-fight. After that, I couldn't control them at all until combat ended, when they snapped back into their own forms as if nothing untoward had happened.

Fortunately, google knew what it was. It's what happens when you hold down "E" for a little longer than just a key-press, when Iroi's on the field. E triggers what I think of the "ranged" skill. (The game calls it Redirect.) Everyone has one but I'm not sure they all vary on a short and long press. 

I wouldn't necessarily know without looking it up because I rarely use the long-press at all. I hadn't been doing it intentionally this time, either. It was just a fluke but a very fortunate one. What happens when Iroi does it is that she turns the whole team into her puppets. In that form, they can't be damaged at all but they can still attack. 

Given that Iroi is an amazing healer who can keep going for ages on her own, it means she can tank the mob while her flock of lambs whittle away at it. (The lambs all have special attacks as well but I haven't figured out how to get them to work yet.) Perhaps best of all, if Iroi does die, all the characters who were lambs pop back up as themselves, at full health!

That's what happened in the Frostspike fight but by then the dragon was at about 10%. Flora and Mint finished it off with no trouble. And that was the second mountain done.

Next, it's off to the lake. Amber Syrup Lake, to be exact. And to tell the truth I've already made the trip. But that's a story for another day, if only because so far I've only gotten as far as the first campfire so there's not a lot to tell. 

It's Too Hot For Clever Titles - Just Play Us The Damn Songs Already

It's really hot today. In my room especially. Too hot to play games or write a blog post or do much of anything. Maybe I won't bother. 

Or maybe I will. It's been two weeks since the last What I've Been Listening To post and I did say that was the cadence I was aiming for. If nothing else, they're easy to write. Do I have enough songs, though?

Hmm. Not at all sure I do. Still, I expect I'll come up with something.  Might be a short post, though. Stop that cheering at the back...

Terri - Micky Dolenz (Paul Westerberg cover)

I bet that was a surprise. Certainly surprised me when I heard it. Last man standing and he's making it count.

I love the Monkees. They've had an up and down kind of career. I grew up watching them as a kids' show but they were also in the pop charts, which might have confused me if I'd been just a few years older. They went out of fashion to the point of derision and then weirdly came back in with punk, when the Sex Pistols covered (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone. Since then it's been mostly acceptance into the canon if not outright adulation although it didn't help that they reformed and made some not very good records.

Not that Steppin' Stone was really a Monkees song. It was written by the men who made the Monkees, Boyce and Hart, but they shopped it around to a bunch of bands before the Monkees had the hit with it. And this isn't a Micky Dolenz song either. It's a Paul Westerberg number although kind of an unofficial one.

It's from a bizarre solo album Westerberg released as a 49 cent Amazon download in 2008. Full story at Stereogum, which is where I learned it and from where I'm ripping it off. The album had one, continuous forty-nine minute track and included no information about the songs on it, not even the names. Apparently this one is generally referred to by fans as "(Tell Me) Who You Gonna Marry." Mickey obviously prefers something shorter.

I have never really got Paul Westerberg. He's one of those people, like Alex Chilton or Nick Drake, who I do get, who constantly comes up as a reference point for other artists. I listened to his original version of this one and it sounds a lot more like Eve of Destruction than Micky's cover.

 CPR - Wet Leg (horsegiirl remix)

I still haven't acquired the second Wet Leg album. I say "acquired" because I probably was never going to buy it for myself. It seems like I would have put it on my birthday/Christmas wishlist last year but I didn't. 

Partly it was over-exposure. There was a while when you really couldn't get away from Wet Leg. There was a brief respite and then they came back, firing off singles ahead of the sophomore album and doing interviews non-stop and honestly I felt like maybe I'd had enough of them for now.

Which was a bit silly given the new singles were all good. Just not as good as the old singles from the first album, which were all great. But it turned out the lack of immediacy with the second batch might have been because they were growers. I've heard some of them a few times now and they get stronger with familiarity. 

That could be significant. The main reason I didn't put the second album on a wishlist was that, great though all the individual songs on the first were, listened to all in a row they could be... enervating. That's the bane of all great singles bands and Wet Leg are categorically a great singles band. It's why I can barely stand to listen to Greatest Hits albums by anyone, even people I really, really like.

A good album needs pacing as much as it needs bangers. Light and shade. Otherwise it's like eating a whole box of chocolates, one after another. I realize some people aren't going to see why that's a bad thing...

This, though, is very different. horsegiirl (Not to be confused with Horsegirl.) takes the sugar out and replaces it with a bit of acid. Not that kind. The sharp stuff you get on acid drops. (Seriously? Acid drops? How old do you think your readers are? Even you don't remember acid drops. When you read about those in the Beano when you were a kid, you had to ask your grandmother what they were...)

Talking to myself in the second person now... I told you it was hot.

 CUT THE LINE - deBasement

Okay, I have no idea what that is. I just had it bookmarked. It's great though, isn't it? I love snippets of conversation used as lyrics. Used to be a bit of a thing back in the '90s. Don't hear it so much any more, more's the pity.

Shall I look them up? See who they are? Okay...

"deBasement are a queer/trans electropop-bass duo based in LA, comprised of Alli Logout (front person of the critically acclaimed punk outfit Special Interest), and Margo XS (esteemed DJ and in-demand producer who is a primary collaborator for Kim Petras, Zara Larsson and more)."

 Ohh... that makes sense!

MORNING DEW (DONK) - Beyoncé

I'm guessing I don't have to explain who Beyoncé is. Although she doesn't crop up here very often. She's in the "I understand why she's good but it's not doing it for me" pot most of the time. And honestly, I just like the way she goes "DonkyDonkyDonk."

I mean, who wouldn't?

Come and Go - Bodywash

Alright, I'm not going to gab on about who every last act on the bill this week might be. I have no clue who this lot are although I'd lay good money they're Australian. 

The way this works, or one way, is that I listen to a bunch of new stuff every day and if I like it I ignore it because I like a lot of things. Just liking something doesn't get us anywhere. 

If I really like it, though, I bookmark it to come back to when I'm considering candidates for the honor of being included in a post on a blog that's mostly read by people whose main interest most likely isn't music and whose tastes most likely aren't all that close to mine. (Then again, this one has less than a thousand views on YouTube so maybe they'll be glad of even a couple more.)

If I really, really like something, though, I listen to it a few more times and chances are I'll go take a look to see what else they've done, meaning when it comes time to write the post, I usually at least have a vague idea who they are. 

This is one I really liked.

Florida Water Blues - Twisted Teen

And this one I really, really liked. So I looked up who they were. Which was a mistake. I liked it better when I thought the band was the guy and the girl in the video. It's not. It's the two riding in the pickup at the end.

Sometimes, the less you know the better. 

I still really, really like it though.

Nobody - Computerwife

Takes a while to get going but it's worth the wait. Video needs a motion-sickness warning.

Couple of covers to end, I think. I did say I didn't have much and it's too damn hot still to go looking.

 Go F*** Yourself - Fat Dog

Their asterisks, not mine. So coy!

 Dog Dribble - Getdown Services

Oh, I see. It's like that, now, is it? Maybe it's time to stop. How about we go out with something tasteful?

 The Chain - The Tullamarines (Fleetwood Mac cover)

I liked the Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac, back when even getting to hear music from five years ago was like finding fragments from the Great library of Alexandria. Then punk came and they were the antichrist for a while. Now I can see them in the round and I like some of it and not the rest.

The only bit of The Chain I really like is the bit they used for the motor racing on TV back in the eighties. And I mostly liked that because it gave me warning so I could change the channel.  

I like Tusk. Shame they didn't pick that one.

And that, I think, will do for now, especially since my PC just crashed, either because it's fucking up again or because it's hotter than the surface of the sun in here. Think I'll give both of us a break to cool down.

Owning The Problem

Sony's recent decision to abandon the physical format for Playstation games kicked off a frenzy of hand-wringing and name-calling across the gaming media but, perhaps surprisingly, there didn't seem to be much of a reaction here in this neck of the blogosphere, other than this excellent post by Yeebo, to which I'll return later. 

The main concerns I've seen revolve around three quite specific issues:

• Archival
• Income
• Ownership

The first seems like a very niche problem indeed from where I'm sitting. It pre-supposes a future in which academics are sufficiently interested in the social, cultural, technical or creative history of video games to feel they need more than a broad, historical overview. It also assumes academic institutions won't have the capacity or the will to arrange storage for themselves, outside of stockpiling commercially available disks. 

We know there's already a huge problem with archiving always-online, live service and digital-only titles. It would seem Sony's opt-out from physical media just adds their future catalog to that vast, intangible pile. 

You might think the onus for preservation would fall on the preservers rather than the producers, in either case. It's not as though Sony is asking for the games to be archived. I'm sure if they wanted to keep an archive of the games they've issued, they'd be perfectly capable.

I find it hard to worry unduly about the convenience of notional professors in twenty-second or twenty-third century universities, too. If I was going to try to work up some kind of concern on their behalf, even as a life-long gamer I'd be more likely to be bothered that they were fussing about two hundred year-old video games in the first place. I'd like to imagine there'd be better things for them to spend their time and energy on by then.

The whole "Everything Must Be Preserved" attitude, which really only goes back maybe fifty or sixty years, bothers me more than the blasé "Let it all rot" attitude that preceded it. Even for the purposes of academia, representative samples and contemporary accounts usually suffice to recreate an era. Why we need to keep one of everything, in working order, like a gang of crazed, technological half-Noahs, beats me.

That may just be my lack of sympathy with the whole concept, of course. One thing that seems to have gone out of currency during my lifetime is ephemerality. We used to talk about some things being "built to last" and others being "throwaway" and pop culture was firmly in the latter category. Now it seems every last flyer and graffito must be saved for posterity.

There used to be seven day wonders and five-minute fads. There were trends that came and went. There still are, of course, but at some point we seem to have decided, collectively, to assign lasting value to them, meaning they need to be saved, cherished, preserved for future generations and studied in schools and universities. 

In a way it's a welcome recognition and celebration of the work that went into creating these things as well as the pleasure and joy that came out of them. That's nice. On the other hand, it's dead-wood strewn all over the floor of the cultural forest, getting in everyone's way and stifling new growth. 

It's pretty much a truism now that popular culture feeds on itself but the scavenging goes wider and deeper all the time. I'm always moaning that no music I hear any more fails to remind me of something I heard years ago. It's not old geezeritis or not just that. 

Musicians wear their influences not just on their sleeves but as badges of honor. Music critics are all but incapable of describing any new song or act other than in terms of who, in the great back catalog of their memories, it most reminds them. I try not to do it myself but often I just can't help it. Everything really does sound like something else, now.

As for movies, almost all the successful ones are are either sequels or adaptations of familiar IPs from other media. Originality is almost a commercial flaw.

And games are in perhaps the worst state of all, when it comes to living off their past. Most of the most-successful games now are old. We're constantly celebrating the 10th, 20th and even 25th anniversaries of MMORPGs, but mainstream gaming is chock-full of decade-old hits that won't quit. The most ironic thing about Sony's decision is that it's not impossible that, in a hundred years' time, some of those diskless games might still be in the top twenty!

I wonder, more and more, if it wouldn't be healthier and more aesthetically satisfying to let everything have it's natural run and then slip away. That way, one day, a decade or a century from now, maybe some diligent researcher would write a paper and a new generation could marvel at how the elders and ancients amused themselves. And, I hope, think themselves lucky that their own entertainment is so much better! 

So much for the archivists and their problems. On to the developers.

I was quite surprised to learn that developers, who put out games for Playstation, rely in part on sales of physical collectors' editions and the like. The last console I owned was the Atari 2600 and if there were any Special Edition cartridges for that, I never knew about them.

I do know something about online games, though. Digital online games. With no physical editions. All MMORPG players know about those. We have no choice. There used to be boxes but they went away. I have a whole row of them on the shelf of a bookcase next to me right now. I don't think there's anything there less than a decade and a half old.

I remember there being a good deal of angst about the end of physical media for online games. People liked their boxes. I liked my boxes. And honestly, if games came in boxes now, with manuals and posters and cloth maps, I might still buy them. They make nice keepsakes.

The question, though, is did MMORPG developers deny themselves the revenue that comes from being able to sell people a bunch of tat in a box, when they went all-digital? No, they did not!

I refer you to Daybreak's near-infamous Collectors' Editions of every expansion for the aging dinosaurs in their stable, EverQuest and EverQuest II. What were they asking for the top-end imaginary boxes last year? Let me see...

Two hundred and fifty fricken' dollars! That's what! Makes all that fuss about GTA6 costing $80 look a bit wet, doesn't it?

And did you get a disk for your $250? Hell, you did! 

I'd call that precedent. I'd imagine any games with an actual fanbase could make out like bandits, selling digital special editions, always assuming Sony would cut them a deal. Although maybe there are console-specific technical considerations there I'm not seeing. As I said, not a console person. 

But even if there are, there's always merch. Bands worked out years ago that's where the money is. Daybreak cottoned on late but they're all-in on it now. Want a mug with the symbol of your class? A poster? A mouse mat? A T-shirt? Any of the extras they might have bunged into the Collectors' Edition box, back when there was a box?

Anything, in fact, except a disk with the game on because you can't fit the fricken' game on a disk! How small would your game have to be now to fit on a single disk? EQ is ancient and quite small. The installation on my drive would fit on three DVDs. Neverness To Everness, though, would need a dozen. And what's actually going to be on these disks the archivists want to preserve? 

Sorry - we covered archival already. Let's move on.

And so we come to ownership, which I'm now realizing probably ought to have a post of its own. Ironically.

That was Yeebo's main concern, I think, and so it is most peoples', for very good reason. Some very, very big businesses are hell-bent on converting the capitalist system to a quasi-feudal Lords and Peasants arrangement, where at best we're all tenant farmers on the Lord's lands and most likely we're merely digital serfs.

It's not an appealing prospect although, just as it was in the middle ages, it does depend on what sort of Lord you've got lording over you. If it's the typical squeeze em 'til they bleed then feed what's left to the hounds type, you're pretty much screwed but if it's the responsible steward of the land sort you might at least hope for a quiet life with Sunday mornings off for church.

Badly thought-through metaphors aside, we are clearly slipping into a rental culture without necessarily being aware of it. When I was pondering the virtues of playing my games on someone else's servers on Tuesday, Angry Onions, the appropriately-named regular commenter (The angry part, not the onions...) popped into the thread to point out the shortcomings, namely that NVidia could switch the servers off any time they felt like it and I'd be S.O.L.

That, though, is a somewhat bad example. GeForce Now only lets me play games I already own or games I don't need to own because they're free to play anyway. It doesn't pretend to sell me games that only exist on their servers for as long as they care to keep them running. No, for that you need to go to Steam.

We all talk about our Steam libraries as games we own but ownership there is predicated on Steam a) continuing to exist and b) not morphing into something else. As everyone always says, if you want to own your games, you have to go to GOG. 

But do you want to own your games? Some of them, sure. The ones you know for certain you'll play again. The rest, though? Not just the ones you bought in a sale and never played or played for an hour and didn't much like or even the ones you finished and were glad to see the back of? 

Not all games have much replayability and not all of those that do actually get replayed. I can count the number of games I've replayed on the fingers of... hold on... yes, one hand.  

Re-experiencing entertainment is a bit of a niche hobby anyway. Most people don't do it or that's been my impression. 

I re-read a lot of books, often more than once, but when I talk about re-reading at work, in a bookshop, with people who read obsessively, nearly everyone thinks it's a downright weird thing to do. I was thinking about movies the other day. I re-watch those as well, or I used to, but I doubt there's any movie I've seen all the way through more than three times and not many of those. For most people it's once and done and then maybe once more that they didn't plan on, like when a friend drags them to see a movie they saw already.

And that's probably the right way for everyone other than the poor old professors and students who have to study this stuff. I'm in the process of clearing cruft out of my house. It's going to be a year-long job, if I'm lucky. I have a lot of comics, magazines, books, DVDs and VHS cassettes. That I own. Most of them I read or watched once, if that. 

Would I have been better off to have rented them? Then rented them again, if and when I ever wanted a second go? I'd sure as hell have a lot more space in my house now. And probably more money in the bank, too, assuming a rental culture priced itself appropriately. 

As for games, of which I also have quite a few boxes from the old days, I was delighted when I could just download the damn things so the only space they took up was hard drive space. And even that's a pain, frankly. Cf. my current enamorment with playing the things on someone else servers.

The real problem I see with the current push to get us all to rent rather than own is the blatant dishonesty behind it. I'd say a big notice you absolutely could not miss, right at the point of purchase, saying "YOU ARE RENTING THIS ITEM. YOU ARE NOT BUYING IT AND YOU WILL NOT OWN IT" would solve the problem altogether.

And I'd be happy to rent. I'd prefer it, honestly. The only hard copy media I use these days are CDs for music and physical books, the former only because I have to have something to put on wish lists for birthdays and Christmas and the latter because I work in a bookshop and I get a shit-ton for free.

I'd love to drop both and go all digital. And also I wouldn't. I'd hate it.

Because physical objects feel nice and look nice. It's not about ownership for me. I really don't care about ownership all that much. I care about access but that's a different talk. 

No, it's about tactility. Touching stuff is hard-wired into us. You can't touch your digital games which I'm guessing has as much to do with the furore over Sony's decision as anything else. How many people really go to Gamestop to sell their old disks or hand them on to their friends or descendants? I bet most of those disks sit on a shelf to be looked at and sometimes taken down and handled for the sheer pleasure of it.

That's what I do with my old PC games, anyway. The question is, do I miss not being able to do it with the new ones? 

Hmmm.... well, I didn't until you asked me but now I'm thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a box with Neverness To Everness on the front and a cloth map of Hethereau inside that I could pin up on the wall.

As I knew before I started, there's no answer to any of this. I like it and I don't like it. I think it's important and I think it's trivial. I think we should keep everything and I think we should let it all fade away. 

But what I really think is I'm glad it's not me that has to decide. Well done to Sony for pulling the plaster off. Let's just hope too much skin didn't come off with it. 

Dicing With Dragons In NTE

 It's not entirely my intention to turn Inventory Full into an "All Neverness To Everness, All The Time" kind of blog but I have to say the game just throws out ideas for posts like Beryl shaking off grass seeds after a walk in the country. I could very easily write four or five separate posts based on just what I've seen, done and thought about in the game over the last two or three days.

The temptation today is very much to weigh in on Version 1.2 which dropped this morning. Top line: it's very, very odd and so far quite wonderful. 

I patched up my own installation this morning - it was a 13GB download - but I didn't use it. Instead, I thought I'd give GeForce Now a real test run. I'm very happy to say it passed the test with the highest of marks.

I played two sessions, each about ninety minutes long. I only stopped the first time because someone came to the door and Beryl went nuts so I went down to show her we weren't being raided by pirates or bears, which is always her first assumption. 

Once I opened the door, she decided it would be a great time to sunbathe on the front lawn, despite it being just over 30c in the shade. Dogs aren't supposed to move about much in temperatures over 25c and we're assiduous about not taking her out in the heat and making sure she drinks plenty of water and stays in the cooler parts of the house but she does love to lie in the sun for as long as she can stand it. 

In the current heatwave that's about four minutes so I usually indulge her. I sat on the front step in the shade to keep an eye on her while she basked until she baked and then Mrs Bhagpuss decided it was cup-of-tea-time, a mid-afternoon ritual, so it was about three-quarters of an hour before I got back to the game.

I played all the way through the new storyline until I got to the first real boss, the Molten Dragon. Up to that point there'd been no problems with the combat, of which there's a fair amount, but the dragon handed each member of my team their individual ass in short order so I thought it might be a good place to stop.

Three hours and change is a long session for me these days, even with an intermission. It's very clear that GeForce Now's six hour session limit is never going to bring the curtain down early on any game I'm playing. I doubt I'll ever break the three hour session barrier again, probably in the rest of my life. 

For ease of access and quality of performance, I can't fault GFN at all. Now I'm subbed it's a single click to open the interface, another to start the game and in I go. No queues, no wait, no fuss. 

For a lot of games on the service, that would be the end of the story but there's a slight wrinkle where NTE's concerned. I used Play With Google when I set up the account back when the game began and my Perfect World/Hotta account is tied to a Google email address. 

That's absolutely fine on my own PC, where all the necessary details are safely stored. Unfortunately, because I'm playing on a remote server with GFN, Google wants me to confirm my identity every time I log in, which means entering my email address and password and also a security code they text to my phone because I have 2-factor authorization. And I even have to type the bloody phone number in every time, too, for extra security.

None of that is NVidia's fault and it only takes me about a minute but it's just the tiniest bit fucking annoying. Still, at least I'm going to learn my own phone number this way. 

Sidebar - I can tell you from my time as a bookseller, at least from back when I actually served customers, which seems like a long time ago now, since I got a nice back-of-house role not long after the pandemic, that almost no-one knows their own mobile number. I regularly used to have to wait while someone fiddled with their phone to find it in the settings when I asked for it for customer orders or to set up a loyalty card. At least I have mine written down in a book on my desk. I'm not going to need to look at that for much longer, the way this is going...

Once I was in the game, though, everything worked immaculately. In fact, noticeably better than on my own machine, even before it went wrong. At the subscription level I've taken, my sessions automatically take place on the RTX-equipped servers. I didn't think to check the setting but the graphics looked exceptionally sharp and detailed so I imagine the game must have defaulted to one of the higher options.

As for lag, there was absolutely none of any kind. None whatsoever for the whole three hours. Neither frame rate nor hitching nor internet lag. 

To prove it, at one point I came across a jumping puzzle. A real, honest-to-god, could easily have been from Guild Wars 2, jumping puzzle. I am neither great nor terrible at jumping puzzles and I neither like nor hate them. And yet I'm not neutral about them either. How's that, you ask?

I really like jumping puzzles that I can do. It's a lot of fun and very satisfying if I don't fall off. In fact, of all the kinds of content I can think of in games I've played, the two with the closest correlation to Goldilock's taste in porridge and feather beds are logic puzzles in adventure games and jumping puzzles in MMORPGs. The difficulty has to be just right.

This one was perfect for me. It looked very daunting indeed and I did fall off a couple of times but the developers had thoughtfully included staging points (Without flagging them up or making you click on them.) so even when I missed a jump, I didn't have to do much of the puzzle again.

What would have made the whole thing no fun at all, of course, would have been even the slightest hint of lag. A lot of the jumps were quite hairy. I wouldn't have made them if there'd been a hitch or a stutter let alone any rubber-banding. But there was absolutely nothing. Smooth as melted butter. 

Since I've mentioned the jumping puzzle, I will say a little about the new game-within-a-game. But not much. I'll save any full review for after I finish it, assuming I figure out how to get past the first boss. 

I'm waiting for the walk-through for that one or at least a few hints because there's obviously a trick to it. I suspect I should have bought some special item from the vendor that fortuitously popped up right before the boss room. Or maybe it's down to which of the three lying sheep mercenaries you pay to join you.

Ah, but there I go again, digging into the detail. Maybe I should leave that sort of thing for when I know what I'm talking about, assuming such a time ever comes. Let me draw a broader picture instead.

Here's the set-up. It's "several weeks" after the attack by the Scarlet Letter that left Nanally traumatized, and you get a call from Mint, inviting you over to hers to play games for a sort of games night, except it's in the afternoon, or it was when I got the call. 

She says to bring Nanally, who's still recovering, so you go to pick her up from Eibon. She's in the garden and she seems much better, back to her old self almost. She's keen to come but she says she'll have to sneak out because Adler is making her rest and recuperate. Adler turns up, unseen and silent like the creepy stalker he sometimes seems to be. He's overheard (Or rather eavesdropped on...) the whole conversation so Nanally's plan's a non-starter.

Nanally stays at Eibon (She's pretty good about it so she can't be back to her full stroppy self quite yet.)  and you go alone. At Mint's you meet two new BAC employees, now on Mint's team because she seems to have finally been promoted to team leader. She introduces them in typical Mint fashion by making up names for them that they'd rather not be called but you already know one of them - it's Iroi, the girl who showed you around the island last time. 

The other is Shinku, a young woman with an absolutely gigantic lizard-like tail. I don't believe we've met her before but I might be wrong, although you'd think it would be hard to forget a tail like that.

Mint then explains, again in typical Mint fashion, i.e. leaving most of the important stuff out, how the game works. It's basically a tabletop fantasy rpg with the extremely important proviso that it's GM'd not by any of the people in the room but by what seems to be a very powerful anomaly. 

The anomaly, whose name is Dice Lord, takes the form of a ten-sided die. It not only talks to all players both collectively and individually, as a GM naturally would but, unlike any GM I ever met, it can physically change the players into their characters and send them to another dimension to have their adventures in the flesh.

 

This is the game-within-a-game that's been added to NTE. It's called The Warren Continent (Or the land where it all happens is, anyway.) and it is quite literally a full ARPG complete with just about everything you might expect - quests, dungeons, loot, levels, NPCs and as I discovered jumping puzzles. Well, one of those, at least.

It's an astonishing conceit, especially so early in the life of the game. I don't know how much content there is but the main quest (Because of course it has an MSQ of its own.) is tripartite and the Molten Dragon is presumably the boss of part one. That took me three hours, so shall we say ten hours for the whole thing? 

And it has three difficulty levels, as ARPGs do, so you redo it twice for better loot. That'd be maybe thirty hours. You could very reasonably sell that as a standalone game and the quality would totally justify doing it, too.

But it's a lot more than just a clever maxi-game. It's one of the most metatextual experiences I've had in a game for a long while. The writing is really top class, extremely nuanced and complex. There's the game itself, which works perfectly as an ARPG but there's Mint's limited and partial understanding of it and her desire to make sure everyone has a good time, which leads to numerous, knowing side-comments about the nature of role-playing games, the mechanics they use and the way they seek to manipulate the people who play them.

That's very funny. I laughed out loud several times. But there's a lot more going on. For a start, the whole thing is being controlled by an Anomaly and as we've learned, anomalies always have an agenda. This one is clearly up to something. It's an unreliable narrator at best. Whether it's evil or just tricksy isn't yet clear but something's going on.

And then there's Shinku. Something is very clearly up with Shinku. She knows more about how these kinds of games work than she's saying and her Warren Continent character is substantively different from everyone else's. 

Mint, Iroi and Zero all have very recognizable classes - Barbarian, Mage and Swordsman - but Shinku is a Commoner. She levels more slowly and not a single piece of gear she could use dropped in my playthrough, where the other three received literally dozens of possible upgrades. She knows something is going on but she's not sharing.

The world is also populated by Fuzzies, a familiar kind of fairly harmless anomaly, here representing as sheep. They are also liars. Some of them are probably being voiced directly by the anomaly, which makes them exactly the kind of lying NPCs some GMs love to use. Others might just be confused.

It's hard to be sure because it's hard to be sure about anything. You're in an anomalous realm that's pretending to be a role-playing game. Who knows what's real?

And that's where I'm at right now. Maybe it'll all make sense later but knowing Neverness To Everness, I wouldn't count on it. One of the big draws for me is the way the game rarely seems to feel the need to explain itself. 

Suffice to say, having been a little apprehensive about the idea of the lurch into high fantasy, I'm now completely sold. More when I know more. 

Local Games For Local People?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this has given me something to think about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm....

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

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

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

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