Rating Pukaland For Fun And Profit

After I finished yesterday's post, I cracked straight on with this one but - surprise, surprise - it ended up running a lot longer than I planned. I wrote most of it last night, then some more in the morning and I finally finished it in the afternoon. Was it worth it? Let's see...

The first thing I did yesterday, to save me the trouble of logging back into the game for the umpty-umpth time to check for myself, was to ask Gemini to give me the names of all the rides and attractions in Pukaland. It gave me the following list, which as we've come to expect from AI isn't entirely accurate. It's correct as far as it goes but a few are missing. 

The thumbnail descriptions seem about right, though, and it's a handy template so I used it. I kind of wish I hadn't now but too late for that now. It didn't save me any time in the end, either. I had to log in several times anyway, to check details and replay some games to see exactly how they worked. I also watched a bunch of short YouTube videos to refresh my memory of some of the others. 

Then, as I was writing the post, I realized that while I remembered the rides and games well enough, I didn't have a very clear picture of the Pukaland Travelogue event, and it seemed silly not to cover that at the same time, so I spent a while looking at it in detail. 

It's in three parts. One section's called Spooky Adventures, another's called Dreamsnaps and the third doesn't seem to have a name. 

Dreamsnaps is all those big rides you just sit on and go round and around or up and down. Each of those, you only have to do once for the event rewards. This section also includes the fireworks display replay, Where Wishes Bloom, and the gambling tent, Magic Spin, for some reason. 

Spooky Adventures is the Maze, Punchulum, Pixies, Candy Jar, Gold Rush and something called Spooky Cookies, which isn't in the game yet. 

The third, unnamed, section is everything else.

 

 

Here's how Gemini laid it out: 

Scenic Rides & Attractions

Lavaton Gold Rush: A minecart roller coaster that races through a chocolate volcano.
Punchulum Ride: A thrilling swing/pendulum ride located along Puka Avenue.
Candy Jar Raid: A water-based teacup ride where you pilot a cup equipped with a harpoon and cannon to gather treasure and fight off octopus tentacles.
Dreamland Tea Party: A classic spinning carousel-style tea party ride.
Puka Wonder Wheel: A large scenic Ferris wheel.
Pearl Cloud Odyssey: An atmospheric scenic ride.
Pixies Waltz: A spinning or waltz-style ride featuring the Pixies characters.

Mini-Games & Activities

Flora Maze: A large snow/hedge-themed maze where you race against the timer and look for cakes to extend your countdown.
Candy Carousel: A candy-themed rotation challenge.
Plushie Shootout: An interactive shooting gallery mini-game.
Star-Struck: A dart-throwing/timing mini-game.
Whack-a-Puka: A Pukaboo-themed whack-a-mole style game.
Pukaboo Stack: A skill game where you knock down stacked cans/objects. 

Missing from that list are Secret Match, The Magic Spin, the Cloud-Chasing Tour and Where Wishes Bloom. I don't think the way they're split up in the Travelogue makes any more sense than how Gemini has done it so I'm going to stick with the AI version for convenience and just feed the extras in where they seem to fit best.

 

As far as I can tell, everything on the list is in the Travelogue and therefore required but for lots of them you also need to get all the grades (S, A, B, C) from those activities that award them and fulfil four specific criteria on top of that for each, if you want to max out the rewards and get completion for the event. I am not about to write a full walk-through for all of that. There's a decent one here if you need it. 

 

If you just want to farm Stars, you don't need to do any of that. You can just pick your most efficient option and grind it 'til your arms fall off. But the event does hand out huge quantities of Stars, so you'll probably want to do at least the gimmes. And there are plenty of those. 

 

What I'm going to do here is give my impressions of all of the rides and activities in terms of a) how much fun they are and b) how productive they are for earning Puka Stars. It's entirely subjective and if you do it, your experience may be totally different because you may be good at things I'm bad at and vice versa. You'll certainly have different ideas on what is and isn't entertaining.  I've graded them using the same grading system the game uses.

 

With all that in mind... 

 

 

Lavaton Gold Rush - There's a Wild West mining town in Pukaland with a ride that's basically a roller-coaster. You get in a mining cart and race around the track, running into gold coins as you go. The track splits often and comes to dead-ends a lot. You have to hit the directional keys to jump tracks or hit space to jump the car up to hit hanging coins or dodge obstacles so it's one of the most active events. 

 

And it's... alright. Very easy to understand, which is good because none of the rides or attractions come with any kind of instructions and some aren't at all intuitive. Fun once or twice, I'd say. I found it a bit jarring and jangly on the nerves and I wouldn't want to do it too often, which makes it a pretty close analog to a real roller-coaster, I guess. Rewards didn't feel great for the time it takes, though. Generally too much effort for not enough reward.

 

Fun - B

Efficiency - C

  

Punchulum Ride - Speaking of things that aren't intuitive... I had to go look this up online to figure out what the hell I was meant to be doing. It's a big mechanical arm with a cabin you sit in and it swings and turns. It moves automatically and the idea is that you look at the big targets ahead, figure out what directional arrow is on them, then hit the appropriate WASD key as you get there. 

 

All good so far, until you learn there are three colors of targets and they require different key-presses. The Pink ones you just press the key, the blue ones you press and hold and the orange ones you hammer the key repeatedly. How you would ever know that if you didn't look it up out of game I have no idea, although maybe it's all in that Tutorial book I never remember to open. I guess someone must have figured it out somehow, or there'd be no guides.

 

Once you know how it works, this one's good value. I could reliably get an A reward although S remains out of my skill range for now. A is 600 Stars for a two-minute ride, though, which is excellent.

 

Fun - C

Efficiency - S

 

 

 

Candy Jar Raid - Another very unintuitive one. You sit in a teacup and go round in a big circle while giant tentacles pretend to attack you. There's no way to get hurt in any of these rides so it's all just for show. In the water around you, you'll see dozens of floating treasure chests and some piles of gold bars. You have a thumping great harpoon. Off you go!

 

First time around I shot at the chests and got nothing. Second time I shot at the giant octopus in the middle. That didn't work either. Third time I accidentally winged one of the tentacles and it took dama ge and popped a health bar so I took the hint and kept shooting at those. That seems to be the idea. You get points for killing them anyway. They take two hits each to kill. Shooting the chests sometimes seemed to give points, sometimes not. Couldn't figure out what made the difference. 

 

I didn't find this one much fun. It took a long time and felt chaotic. I can't remember how many Stars I got but I know it felt like a poor return on time spent. Might be better if i understood exactly what to do but I kinda doubt it.

 

Fun - C

Efficiency - C

 

Dreamland Tea Party - As far as I recall, this is just a ride. Fun if you're five years old or want to pretend you are. No rewards. 

 

Fun - A

Efficiency N/A 

 

 

 

Puka Wonder Wheel - A modern take on the classic Ferris Wheel, with pods that close rather than open cars that swing. Another pure ride that doesn't get you any Stars. As noted by Nimgimli in a comment, the wheel goes sooooooooooooo slooooooooooowly...... 

 

I get that big wheels do turn slowly so people can get a good view but not this slowly. And the view isn't even that great either because the structure of the wheel gets in the way. I tabbed out for most of the ride and caught up on some blogs. Flora was at the door, waiting to jump out the second they opened. If I hadn't needed the full ride for the tour credit, I'd have mapped out long before - assuming you can use the map from the pod.

 

Fun - C

Efficiency - N/A 

 

Pearl Cloud Odyssey - Do not do this directly before or after Puka Wonder Wheel, unless you need a nap urgently. It's not as dull as the wheel but it's not what I'd call a thrill-ride. You get on a boat much the same as the one you can buy and your invisible butler-turned-boatman sculls you around the lake for what seems like forever. There's not a lot to look at and I made the mistake of going at night, which meant there was even less. 

 

Again, I only stuck it out for the whole thing because you have to do it once for the credit.

 

Fun - B

Efficiency - N/A

 

Cloud-Chasing Tour - This is the one where you go up into the stratosphere in a teacup-balloon. I have a whole post coming about it. For the purposes of the Event it's just a simple ride but as an addition to the game in general it's awesome!

 

Fun - S
Efficiency - N/A 

 

 

 

Where Wishes Bloom - I didn't really understand this one. It's a shop where you can go and get them to replay a memory of the firework display, if you missed it. The fireworks happen every night at a set time but apparently you can do this at any time and see them again. I tried it and nothing seemed to happen. I don't think I got credit for it in the Travelogue either. I guess I did it wrong but I don't care enough to find out for sure.

 

Fun - N/A

Efficiency N/A 

 

Pixies Waltz - OMFG! What even is this?! I had not the first clue what was going on from start to finish. I did it three times and it never even began to make sense. 

 

You're in some kind of gondola that goes up a pole. There are arrow keys to press that do... something and then suddenly you fly up into the air and all hell breaks loose and stuff starts flying around you and you shoot at the stuff and then you crash back down and it all starts up again. I hated it. 

 

Then I watched this video on YouTube, which at least gave me a rough idea what I was supposed to be doing. I hadn't even figured out the arrows were fuelling you up until then. Once I knew what I was meant to do, I still couldn't do it and I still hated it.

 

Fun - C

Efficiency - C

 

So much for the rides. On to the sideshows.

 

 

 

Flora Maze - It's a hedge maze. A big one. All you have to do is find the exit. Out of competition, which is where I took the screenshot above or else I wouldn't have been able to climb on top of the hedge, there's a way out in all three sections, which are themed by season - Summer, Autumn, Winter. Once you pay for a ticket and the timer starts, two of those gates are locked. You have to find the one that's still open.

 

You get two minutes but there are power-ups all over the maze in the form of cakes that add seconds to your timer. I managed to stay in there for over ten minutes once and still didn't find the exit. You can't see over the hedges or climb them and none of your esper abilities work so you have to do it properly.

 

All the exits have some bright red bushes on top, though, and you can jump high enough to catch a glimpse of them to see which general direction you need to go. You also get a few seconds at the start when all the hidden features of the maze - exits, cards and NPCs needing to be rescued - light up so you can see their outlines through the foliage. And there's a pair of magic glasses you can use to repeat that, although it knocks a big 12 seconds off your timer every time you use it and it has a cooldown.

 

At first I thought I hated this one. I generally dislike mazes in games and I was finding it frustrating. It had that "one more try" thing going for it, though and I kept at it, mostly just blundering about randomly until one time I fluked my way to the exit and got 900 Stars. That's a huge payoff and it motivated me to keep trying.

 

I watched a video and read some comments and I started to figure it out. After a while, I realised that if I just focused on making sure I knew which Season the door was in, which I could do by carefully watching the reveal at the start, I could pretty much guarantee finding the exit. Eventually. Once I was able to do that, I started enjoying myself and making plenty of Stars.

 

There's also a full set of playing cards scattered around the maze and they don't repeat, so you only have to find each of them once. That kept me interested because I got one on most runs even if I didn't find the exit. I don't know what you get for the full set. I still have two to find. I hope it's something good.

 

I have to say I enjoyed the maze a lot more than I thought I would at the start. I kept doing it long after I found more efficient ways to earn Stars because I found it weirdly compelling. I'll keep at it until I have those last two cards and even after that I might do it some more for fun.

 

Fun - A

Efficiency - A

  

Candy Carousel - Wait, what? What is this? I don't remember it at all.... Okay, I just watched it on YouTube and I've never done it. I don't recall seeing it on the event schedule either. Talk amongst yourselves while I log in and check...

Ok, it's there alright. I just missed it. But I've done it now and I didn't miss much. There's a carousel with large clamshells going round on it. They open and close. You have to toss a round ball into the open ones and a star onto the closed ones. You can change your ammunition from ball to star with the R key. You can also make the carousel revolve the opposite way with Q. You have a limited number of both balls and stars, with a lot more of the former than the latter.

It's fine. I was terrible on my first go but after half a dozen rounds I could get an A rating easily. Couldn't get S though. Of all the games of its kind I'd say it's the least fun but it's still fun enough.

Fun - B 
Efficiency - B

Plushie Shootout - Classic fairground rifle-range. You shoot at two-dimensional targets that are supposed to be plushies as they move across the stage in front of you. They're in several layers from front to back and they move at varying speeds. They hide behind things, too.

I  usually like games like this, both on a screen and at an actual fairground. This isn't a particularly great example but it's fine. The rewards seemed a bit stingy from what I remember but it was one of the first ones I tried and I've forgotten exactly how much I got. Can't have been that much, though, or I'd have gone back  before now.

Fun -A
Efficiency - C 

 Secret Match - There are some cans on a board in front of you. They lift up to reveal some pairs of objects underneath. Then they get covered up again and you have to pick the pairs. As the game goes on the number of objects increases and the cans get moved about like in Find the Lady.

It's a pretty basic version of the old memory game. I'm hopeless at anything that involves remembering anything but even I could do this one. If you're good at pelmanism you'll walk it.

Fun - B
Efficiency - B

 

Star-Struck - Despite the misleading name, this is a darts game. You get five darts and thirty seconds to throw them. You're trying to get the highest score but anything over 150 is S-Class and 100 gets you A so the bar is quite low. 

The way you throw the darts is simple: there's a reticule that moves slowly and erratically about. You control it with WASD and when you have the center over the number you want to hit, you release the dart. Do that five times and you're done.

This was the first game I tried and I loved it. I played it over and over and enjoyed it every time. It took me a long time to realise that where the darts display as having landed on the board isn't where they land as far as scoring is concerned. Once I figured out the only thing that matters is where the central dot on the reticule is when you let the dart go, it got a lot easier.

After a while, I could get S about 80% of the time and A 100% of the time. And I could do it it in under ten seconds. The individual rewards are very small but if you like the game and you can play as fast as that, it becomes very efficient indeed.

Fun - S
Efficiency - S

The Magic Spin- Flat-out gambling. You bet Stars and the wheel spins. You can win double or even ten times your stake or you can get your stake money back, or half of it, or nothing. There's a chance of a 50k jackpot, too. I gave it a few spins, came out even and stopped. If it's anything like the Catzebo, it'll just slowly drain your wallet until you're broke. Best avoided but gambling is fun....

Fun - B
Efficiency - C

 

Whack-a-Puka - I like the way we're supposed to know what a Pukaboo is. Or, for that matter, how Pixies figure into things. I get the strong feeling the real citizens of Hethereau, the ones who were born there and grew up in the city, are as familiar with the Puka mythology as we are with Peter Pan or Winnie the Pooh. 

Of course, Zero aka the Appraiser aka Flora is almost as ignorant of the society she finds herself in as we, the players. It's quite important to remember that while playing. The whole "I woke up not knowing anything about the world I'm in" trope is extremely useful in allowing the player-character to act as an agent on behalf of the player, rather than an independent actor. It's probably the main reason it's so commonly employed. 

In this case, Pukaboos are gophers you hit on the head with a mallet. There are probably some subtleties (Hah!) to Whack-a-Puka that I'm missing, but there was no hope I'd figure any of it out while I was trying to whap the little buggers. I just hit them and hoped. It was about as fun as these things usually are. I kinda like whack-a-mole games myself but I can see why some people don't. I don't remember making all that many Stars, either but it wasn't a waste of time.

Fun - B
Efficiency - B

Pukaboo Stack - By chance, Gemini has left the best 'til last. This can-shoot is a lot of fun and it's also by far the fastest way to get Stars. 

It uses a slightly odd mechanic for a shooting game. In front of you are some very traditional pyramids of cans on platforms. Your goal is knock all of them off. 

When you hit them, they roll about quite convincingly with some pretty good game physics, bumping into each other, spinning round, flipping over... I found it entertaining to watch. There's also an element of strategy involved in that you don't want to leave orphaned cans on the platforms after you remove most of the stacks because you only have six shots (And a time limit, although that never really comes into it.)

So far, so standard for a knock-down-cans game. The part where it gets weird is how you aim and fire. There's some sort of gun that swings slowly across the screen in an arc, back and forth. You can't control its speed or direction but when you hold down the left mouse button, a dotted line rises from the end of the barrel. It looks like you're using a garden hose. When you get the end of that "stream" where you want it, which is in the middle of the stack at the bottom, you just release the mouse button and a ball shoots out of the gun to hit the spot you've targeted.

It's very tactile and weirdly satisfying in the same way aiming a garden hose at something is. That sensation, coupled with the unpredictable ways the cans fall, meant I found it probably the most fun of all the games. It's just sugar on top that it's also extremely rewarding in terms of Stars. After only a little practice, I could guarantee an A result every time and pretty often it was an S. I imagine with more practice I could get it to S about 90% of the time, which makes it as efficient as the dart game but with much bigger payouts.

Fun- S
Efficiency - S

Pukaboo Stack, then, is the clear winner. If I need to farm Stars, that's where you'll find me. But I'm not at all sure I do need to farm Stars any more. Thanks to the massive rewards from the new event, I already have the boat and the plane and several thousand Stars left over. I'm not sure there's anything left in the store that I want.

There is one more game still to come. Currently greyed-out on the event program is Spooky Cookies. That's going to take place in the Haunted House, which is currently closed. When it gets patched into the game I'll try to remember to come back here and add my thoughts about it, just for the sake of completionism.

Until then, I think we're done. Go and have fun! 

Busy Doing Nothing Very Much - Life In Hethereau Goes On

 A lot has happened in Neverness To Everness since I posted about the game last Wednesday and yet nothing has really happened at all. Nothing by way of story or character progression, anyway, those being the twin pillars of the form, supposedly. 

No, everything that happened was decidedly, shall we say, horizontal. Or perhaps it was alternative. One of those ancillary lines of progress that keeps people busy without moving them up the difficulty ladder, anyway. 

Ah, yes. Difficulty. I've been playing, pretty regularly, since launch, we're just coming up to the six-month anniversary and I still have no clear idea how the vertical progression system works.

There seem to be three types of level: Character, Hunter and Appraisal. The level caps are 60 for Hunter, 7 for Appraisal and, as far as I can tell, 80 for character. Flora is currently Character Level 50, Hunter Level 46 and Appraisal Level 5. 

I think that's pretty far behind par for hours played but she was Character Level 40 until I went into the game to check some details for this post and remembered you have to do the leveling up for Character yourself by pressing a button. And she's effectively Appraiser Level 4, too. You can set it to one level lower if you want.  It makes mobs weaker (And rewards inferior...) I did it as soon as she was first allowed to, back at Appraiser Level 3 and the setting carries over every time she levels up, unless I switch it back.

See how confusing it is already? Well, it's way more confusing than that. Every last little thing has to be leveled up or Ascended or some such twaddle. I gave up thinking about it months ago, when it became obvious that none of it mattered. 

If you've been following my posts about the game, you'll have noticed I haven't been complaining much about the fights. Mostly I don't even mention them and when I do it's usually to say there weren't many or that they were quite easy. That is true. Mostly.

It's not always true. There are occasionally fights that I, theoretically, need to win just to work my way up some ladder or other and a couple have been too hard for me. I'm stuck at Tycoon Level 20 because of one of those. 

Oh yes, Tycoon Level... that's another ladder and quite an important one, at least in terms of the rewards it gives. Although I guess it's horizontal, even though it's a ladder, because it doesn't have anything specifically to do with making your character better at killing things. And that's all that really counts, right?

I had just been thinking how I probably ought to do something about getting past that speed-bump, when Hotta, out of the blue, added a direct alternative to Tycoon in the form of the Puka Membership Program. Like Tycoon, there are 45 levels and you can switch tracks between the two options at will but you can only progress one at a time.

I immediately swapped over to the PMP and now I'm Level 3 in that one. Apparently the rewards are very comparable. I imagine most people will have finished Tycoon anyway and be glad to have another 45 rungs to climb. My plan is to stick with Puka until I hit some barrier I can't clamber over and then decide which of the two is going to best reward some actual effort. If any.

While I was fiddling around, trying to figure all of this out, I spotted a few other progression systems I'd been ignoring, some of which I have literally forgotten again already, just a few hours later. I do remember one... 

I had what looked like a few dozen decorative items that I hadn't "Collected" because I'd forgotten you needed to. That had progress bars and rewards because of course it did. I collected them, filled a few bars with whatever weird xp variant it gave and got a bunch of stuff back as rewards that I probably need for some other progression mechanic. 

Also now, presumably, I have a load of furniture I can use. I'll have to go back to my house - one of my houses - or my cafe - one of my cafes - and check how that works.

Speaking of cafes, I figured out how to play the "Serving Customers Yourself" mini-game. I'd been ignoring it because if I find the idea of managing a coffee shop unappealing, you can imagine what I think about serving in one. In the end, though, I wanted the Fons and having read up on all the options it looked like the least-worst.

Sidebar: Given my active antipathy to games where you pretend to be a shopkeeper or a cook or a waiter or any kind of retailer or hospitality functionary or business person at all, really, I find it highly ironic I've ended up doing it it two games at once. At least it's mostly notional in NTE and not that important. In Nivalis it's a lot more work although I believe once you get past a certain stage your businesses mostly run themselves. In both games the part I liked best about running an eatery was going out each day to buy the supplies. It's doing anything with them afterwards that annoys me.

And guess what? Serving customers in my cafe on Moomin Street is actually fun. (It'd be even more fun if we could all dress up like Moomins. Now there's a collab waiting to happen...)

Well, it is now I can do it reliably, anyway. Not so much before I knew what I was meant to be doing. I read a few guides, upgraded the social skills of some of the characters I have working for me (Another form of progression, there.) and practiced for a bit until now I can spend all my City Stamina in about ten minutes. That gets you a million or so Fons and you only have to do it once a week so it's fine. 

At this point I think it's probably becoming obvious that the line between vertical and horizontal progression in NTE is blurred almost beyond recognition. I tend to mark everything that makes combat easier (Or harder for that matter.) as "Vertical" because that's how it used to work in the olden days but I'm not sure it makes sense any more.

For a start, I can't quite see why you need to get any better at fighting at all, now the main story quest has barely any fights and the few it does have are easy. The hard fights I've encountered all seem to have been in content required for progress in some other system, which then filters back to give non-combat rewards. 

For example, if I was able to beat the mob I can't currently manage for Tycoon Level 21, my reward would be access to Personalized License Plates for my vehicles. Since I ride a bicycle now, that's not even anything I want but even if it was, it certainly wouldn't help me kill faster. 

And, in fact, I don't really have any sense in this game that killing mobs is that important anyway. I go hours and hours without killing anything and even when I do it's purely by choice. Combat seems almost like an optional mini-game now.

What I've mostly been doing for the last few sessions is trying to win enough Puka Stars on the sideshows to buy first a boat and then a glider. At least, that's what I was doing until Hotta dumped a whole, new progression system into the game, based around doing everything there is to do in Pukaland and made it give retrospective credit. 

I'd already made enough under my own efforts to buy the boat but just claiming all the new rewards I'd  earned by doing it gave me more than enough Stars for the glider. (It's fricken' huge, by the way!) After that, I went through all the various tick-boxes in the new event and crossed off as many as I could, without actually putting myself out, of course, and that was most of them, so I have even more Stars now.

It reminds me of 999 Nights except it's much faster. Where completion there took me a couple of weeks, Pukaland looks like it might take less than half as long. There are a few pesky "S-Class" wins on some of the sideshows that could be problematic but I'm not sure I'll bother trying to finish the whole thing just for the sake of it. If those don't happen naturally I'll just forget about them.

And now, because I like lists, I'm going to run through all the sideshows and attractions and give my reviews of them, with comments on how easy it is to earn Stars. There are videos all over YouTube doing that but none of the ones I've seen did I find very helpful so I can't do much worse.

It's going to make this post very long if I just go straight into it, though, so I'm going to make it into a post of it's own. It's only fair - that is what I sat down to write about in the first place! 

I might do it right away or I might leave it till tomorrow. 

A cliffhanger ending! How about that?

We'll Always Be Middle Class, We’ll Always Be Floating

Two weeks, two weeks since the last time...

Hmm. That reminds me of a song. What the heck is it? Oh, I know! It's one of mine!

Moving swiftly on...

I seem to have bookmarked more than two dozen songs since last time, most of them new, a few of them covers, one or two older ones I happened upon, one way or another. I'm kind of thinking I might ought to structure these things a little better. Do some themed posts or something. 

Ah, what the hell!

Shall we start with some very justified anger? Why not?

 Heavy Metal - THICK

Yeah, that's not heavy metal. This is. But then you don't generally put the genre in the title, do you? Unless you're Ottowan. 

The lyrics are clear enough but I didn't really hear them the first time. I spent half the video trying to read what was written on one of the tee-shirts. Do people ever think about how distracting something like that is? Or even how distracting videos are? 

No wonder I can never remember the words to anything. It was easier before MTV, when all we had to look at was the record sleeve. Or Disco 45. 

 Lobotomize Me - The Rat Utopia Experiment

But then, you can always put the words in the video. Not that either of these songs need subtitles to get their messages across. They're both admirably annunciated. 

There's a theory, common with people of a certain age, that goes "Once a punk, always a punk". Not that I want bragging rights (Of course I want bragging rights. Everyone wants bragging rights.) but I was a punk when, if you wanted straight jeans, you had to find a store that sold workmen's clothing. Everywhere else was flares. My first pair of straights had a 2x12" pocket down the side for carrying a metal ruler. 

And short hair... don't get me started.

Sorry... where was I? Oh yes. So, as a punk from back in the day, as we didn't say then, I'm always dubious about the whole "Once a punk..." thing. I don't recall anyone extending that kind of respect for tradition and commitment to the bit to the Teds. We just thought they were reactionary throwbacks.

I was a punk from about the summer of '76 to the autumn of '77, after which I was probably post-punk for a while, before slipping off the punk spectrum altogether. You can't be "a post-punk", can you? Not like you can be a Mod or a New Romantic or a Goth. 

I am not a punk any more and haven't been since I swapped my straights for white denim Oxford bags, which is what I wore on stage, mostly to annoy the audience. More than once. 

It did, too. Annoyed the audience. I got taken to task about it a couple of times. Then again, I guess setting out to annoy the audience you're supposed to be entertaining is pretty punk at that. So is dressing how the hell you want, which was a lot more of a tenet of belief at the time than you'd ever know from the historical record. People wore what they wanted to wear for a while, until the media decided everyone ought to have a uniform.

That determination to go your own way is the true punk sensibility, something I do believe in and which can be life-long. It also has fuck all do with the 1970s, or the 1980s, if you want to get all hardcore about it, or even the 1960s, if you're writing one of those supercilious histories of popular music, except that those were the decades that put a name to it. 

Whatever it is and whenever it started, it's still around and always will be. This lot have it. And I like it, particularly like the way Phia Lane almost runs out of breath but just keeps going anyway.

 Underground - Mogwai (Feat. Iggy pop)

If we're talking bragging rights, Iggy has all of them.

Back in the late '90s, when I worked for the online side of the business I'm just about to retire from and we could play music at work, all day, every day, I got introduced to a number of artists I otherwise would never have listened to. God Speed You, Black Emperor was one. Mogwai was another. (Also Coldplay but best gloss over that one.) 

Post-rock was big in that building for a while and I liked it well enough as background but it's mostly instrumentals and instrumentals tend not to stick hard in the memory. I always liked the sound of Mogwai but never enough to pay all that much attention to what they were doing after people stopped putting them on the CD player. I wouldn't have listened to this if it hadn't had Iggy's name attached. 

And there he is, doing his thing. He just keeps doing it, doesn't he? If you had a thing like Iggy's, you'd keep doing it, too, I bet.

 Love Song - Knifeplay

I've been watching My Dress-Up Darling on Netflix (Don't ask...) and there's an episode where Kitagana explains to Gojo what a "slice-of-life" manga is. This is a slice-of-life video and those are my favorite kind.

Knifeplay are allegedly a shoegaze band although they sound shoegaze-emo to me, if that's even a thing. Eli Ennis at Chasing Fridays has a review up of this track in the latest issue and he seems to think they're on the edge of the genre now, after a decade at the heart of the scene. Whatever you want to call it, it's gorgeous.

Louisiana Song - Jess Kerber

If this had a video, it'd be slice-of-life, too. I borrowed a couplet for the title of this post. I think it's over-optimistic, to be honest, but the sentiment goes both ways.

Phoebe - Audrey Hobert

Phoebe is my favorite girl's name. Probably. It might be Rachel. Neither of those preferences comes from Friends, although I do love Friends. The Phoebe in this song is the Phoebe from Friends. Or, as Audrey says, "A Phoebe". It's funny how that happens. But we all know what she means.

So much for the introspection. Let's dance.

07XXXXXXXXX - Lifeloose

That's mesmeric. 

It kind of made me think of CoCo and Clair Clair but someone in the comments called it Slayyytercore which I really hope is going to be a thing now. 

Speaking of which...

 i think he's got a girl - Slayyyter

Oh boy. First time I heard this I thought well, it's a bit slow, isn't it? Then I read Tom Breihan at Stereogum saying "it's so fucking good". I respect Tom's opinion so I listened to it again and he's right. It's so fucking good. 

And it's a grower.

THE ALLIGATOR - Goldie Boutlier

Best thing she's done in a while, I think. Why the title is in ALL CAPS and her name is in regular I cannot explain. These pop stars and their wacky typography...

Want something a little less subtle? I got you.

 

 

c*ntry girl rock - horsegiirl, Dylan Brady

 

That's how it is on her channel so that's how I'm having it here. The pun only works in print. 

 

Horsegiirl is a German DJ. And Dylan Brady is from100 Gecs, of course. They've been quiet a while, now I come to think of it, 100 Gecs.

 

The thing about having a gimmick like horsegiirl has is it gets you attention when you're starting out but if you get somewhere then you're stuck with it, like Angus Young and his school uniform or Kiss and the make-up. 

 

A lot of DJs seem to wear masks, though. The advantage of having a horse's head as your identity is, even if you get to be as famous as Taylor Swift, you can still go to the corner shop for a pint of milk on a Sunday morning and no-one's going to recognize you. 

 

Not that I imagine Taylor Swift goes to the corner store for milk or anything else, not on a Sunday or any other day. Then again, Lana was caught working in that waffle house that one time... 

 

Dancing On Your Grave 

Madeon, MGNA Crrrta - (MGNA Crrrta remix)

 

Madeon is a French DJ. MGNA Crrrta are a duo from NYC. Hyperpop is universal. Obviously.

 

 ALL THE TIME - Femtanyl

 

Again with the typography! I'll stop mentioning it when I stop noticing it, which I hope will be very soon.

 

Another cross-border pairing, although this one's a fixture, not a feature. American-Canadian, which used to sound neighborly. Not so much any more, I guess.

 

Wikipedia says their music is "popular in online spaces, especially among the furry fandom.^" For some reason I find that highly incongruous, although now I think about it, I didn't have any particular pre-existing ideas about what furries would listen to.  

 

I just didn't think it would be that.

 

And finally...Hmm. I seem to have used up all the set closers already.

 

How about...

 

 "for you" - katie dey

 

Brings us full circle, doesn't it? Comes with an epilepsy trigger warning that katie seems quite concerned about so I'll mention it, although it seems to me just about every other damn video these days has some kind of strobing effect. I thought those things went out with the mirror balls and the dry ice machines but nothing ever really goes away, does it?

 

Except me, right now. 

 

Bye! 

Eight Steps On The Path To Sedition

 The pre-expansion event, Paths of Sedition, has started, over in EverQuest II. It turns out it was enough of a draw to bring me back to Norrath for the first time in quite a few weeks. 

EQII has had a rough go from me in the current expansion cycle. I got halfway through the storyline back when Rage of Cthurath came out at the end of 2025. I dropped it in the New Year for Baldur's Gate 3, then came back to finish it. After that I decided it had been too slow and grindy for me to want to take another character through it right away so I dropped it again.

Later in the year I was just starting to work on a plan for leveling another character to the cap, without it making me want to throw the monitor out the window, when my PC decided it hated playing games and began crashing after every session. With ChatGPT's assistance, I eventually got that fixed but by then I'd rediscovered GeForce Now and fallen in love with playing my games on someone else's machines. 

EQII, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, isn't on GeForce Now so that put it at the back of the pack to begin with but worse than that, the second time I played again there was another crash on exit. That put me off. In any case, a bunch of newer, fancier, cooler games were jostling poor old EQII out of the way, so it wasn't likely it would have gotten much of a look in anyway, even if I hadn't been worried playing it would screw up my machine.

I do like to try and keep up with what's going on in Norrath, though, even if it isn't my main gaming home any more. And there have been a few pre-expansion "Preludes" worth playing. Not as many as there probably should have been but some. 

Creating Illustrations for Loading Screens - A Lost Art

I saw the write-up at EQ2 Traders and that got me interested but the tipping point was the mention of no fewer than eight new quests for adventurers. (There are also eight tradeskill quests but I was willing to bet at least half of those would just be standing at a crafting station, banging out hats and boots for some annoying NPC that could easily have done it themselves). 

I didn't think it would require a great time commitment. Naomi Denmother described both questlines as "short". From experience, I can only speak to the adventure option. I guess is short, if you consider it as something that's going to be with us for a couple of months. On the other hand, it took me about an hour and a half, which isn't as short as all that for a story quest. 

I guess what matters is whether it's fun, not how long it takes. And yes, I'd say it's fun. It kept me engaged and interested throughout, at least. And it had two genuine "Whoa!" moments, which is two more than most quests can manage.

I won't precis the storyline in any detail. Anyone reading this who plays EQII is going to do it anyway, if they haven't already, and they won't thank me for spoilers. Everyone else really isn't going to care.

This is one of the big differences between MMORPGs and almost every other kind of RPGish, narrative-driven game I write about. I find it very easy to write, entertainingly I hope, about the kind of storylines that crop up in Wuthering Waves or Neverness To Everness or Nivalis Nights because they tend to be novelistic or cinematic. Granted I might not always make a great job of it but as a journalistic exercise, a retelling of the story of a quest in one of those games ought to be at least as interesting to a general audience as if it were a movie or a TV show.

Who indeed? And more importantly, who cares?

That is very much not the case with MMORPGs. No-one who doesn't already know the politics of Norrath is likely to give a damn whether some troll shaman is claiming to be the new Grozmok or that Neriak has ambitions on Freeport.  And even all of that politics is more accessible than the usual litany of unpronounceable gods and demons and their world-threatening yet somehow still incredibly petty squabbles.

It's not just the subject matter that makes MMORPG quests hard to retell, either. The way they're written too often makes them seem stiff and awkward when taken out of context. It's not that they're badly written, necessarily. Mostly they're solid enough but many, probably most, follow conventions proper only to the games in which they appear. 

When you play those games regularly, you get so used to the way the quests are written, you hardly notice it but they all have a kind of local dialect or accent that's impossible to mistake. WOW, EQII, SW:tOR, ESO, LotRO, GW2, New World, FFXIV... the writing in all of them follows predictable patterns that seem to supercede individual authorship. 

In most, it also leans strongly towards literary tropes and speech patterns usually found mainly in either fantasy or historical, rather than contemporary, fiction. I think about the only MMORPG I can remember that wasn't written this way was The Secret World. It may well have been one of the reasons it was praised so highly for its writing at the time.

Must have the same scriptwriter as Theresa May

Of course, the writing in every game has a tone and a style of its own but for some reason it seems to be much more pronounced in MMORPGs. Or perhaps that's not it at all or at least not all of it. It occurs to me, looking at the list in the previous paragraph, that all of the games except TSW have some kind of fantasy or science-fantasy setting that doesn't much resemble the world in which we live - or any likely extrapolation of it. 

The Secret World, though, is set in this world, our world, with fantastical elements layered over the top. NTE and Nivalis Nights are both closer in conception to TSW than they are to any of the others except, perhaps, SW:tOR. Even Wuthering Waves, which is arguably more fantasy-oriented, is peopled with regular folk doing ordinary jobs in a quasi-contemporary setting. Perhaps it's the familiarity of the characters and the lives they lead that make retelling their stories seem likely to be more accessible to someone who doesn't play the games.

All of which could have been the biggest sidebar in this blog's history. To return to the original topic, there are eight quests in the pre-expansion event for adventurers and I had a good time with all of them. There's a fair amount of running around but for an All Access subscriber, fast map travel makes much of that trivial. 

Most of the quests take place in "new" instances, all of which are rather well-judged. These days, EQII players expect to see repurposed assets from earlier in the game whenever temporary content like this appears but in this case the choice of what to re-use has clearly been made with some thought.

Neck tattoos are in this year. Also, even a dwarf isn't short enough to walk under a pony.

It's always been a puzzlement, why the best-looking zones in the original game, back in 2004, were the catacombs and sewers under the two big cities. It was very noticeable at the time that once you pulled up a grating in the street to descend below Qeynos or Freeport, the fidelity of the graphics went up a notch. The textures always seemed to be more detailed and there'd clearly been a lot of work put into the decoration.

I vaguely remember reading that it was because those were the zones the art team worked on first. Whether it technical issues took over or just the time it took to make the zones look that good wasn't available any more, once they moved above ground, nothing looked quite as fine. With that in mind, I'm always happy to have a reason to revisit the tunnels and caverns beneath the cities and that's what happens here.

The other holdover from the original game that gets to put in a repeat performance in Paths of Sedition is the crafting instance. Back in 2004, if you wanted to craft at all, you had to open a hatch and go down some stairs into an underground workshop. One of the early improvements made to the game, in a desperate hope of keeping people from leaving to go to World of Warcraft, was to put crafting stations above ground so players could at least see what was going on around them as they ground out hundreds of worthless items for skill increases.

A few years later almost no-one was using the underground crafting rooms any more and there was a plan to remove them altogether. Predictably, it caused an outcry. No-one in any MMORPG ever wants to see anything taken away. Whether anyone's actually using it is beside the point. 

Put a bit of carpet down and it'll be lovely.

The tradeskill instances were saved and even now, if you go into one, there's a fair chance you'll find a die-hard veteran down there, hammering away on their own, enjoying the solitude. As far as I know, though, until this event there never was a trapdoor to one of those cellars round the back of the Block and Tackle, one of the overground crafting halls that stands next the docks in South Freeport. There is now.

About the only part of the quest I wasn't all that happy with was the bit where you have to go to a zone of your own level to kill spiders. And that would have been fine if the choice of zones you're given at the level cap didn't all happen to be in Ballads of Zimarra. And if the drop rate had been better. 

Still, it was only a mild irritation in an otherwise enjoyable hour and a half. And there's more to do, of course. Having completed the questline, I'm now free to work on the achievement and then the collection as well as to farm the event currency to spend in the event shop.

Yeah. I probably won't be doing much of any of that. The questline itself gets you a nice familiar that's an upgrade to the free one from the last expansion (And which will, no doubt, itself be replaced by the free familiar from the next expansion in December.) You also get some house items that I'll only use to get them out of my bags.

Hoods and Robes! Bah! I had Hats and Boots in the sweepstake.

The vendor who takes the currency has a huge stock of house items, some of them rather nice, but I already have two enormous homes in Norrath, both bursting at the borders with cruft trophies. Not to mention all the other, less-decorated houses my dozen or so characters own. There's barely a one of them that doesn't own at least a couple of places. There's only so much decorating even I can cope with.

There's also a ground mount. Does anyone use ground mounts any more? And some quite attractive appearance armor. Probably some other stuff. If you want it, you can have it. It won't be hard to raise the funds. I'll leave it, thanks.

I'll probably do the tradeskill questline with someone, just to see it, although I believe it's pretty much identical, as far as story beats and rewards go. Unusually, you can't do both lines on the same character but who in EQII has only one character? Everyone has a stable of alts and half of them would be doing all the quests on all of them anyway. Doesn't stop people moaning about it on the forums though.

While Mordita was running around Freeport, she noticed Nights of the Dead has also started. EQII Traders has an article up about that, too. I may or may not get around to doing at least the new stuff and if I do I may or may not get around to writing a post about it. 

The good news is that my PC didn't give me any problems playing today. If that carries on then I will certainly be visiting Norrath more often. 

Let's hope so. There's an expansion coming! 

The Streets Of Nivalis

 Remember those dog days of summer, when I was complaining I was barely playing any games at all? Yeah, well that's over. Now the problem is trying to fit them all in...

...and at here there used to be several paragraphs about time constraints and game rotations. But when I came to read them back, even I didn't want to hear it. So let's forget all that and get straight to a game, shall we? 

And that game is Nivalis Nights.

As I said in an earlier post, I haven't experienced any of the performance issues that caused the game to be poorly received in some quarters at launch. I put that mostly down to playing on GeForce Now, where I'm guessing the servers are better configured and maintained than the average home PC. Certainly better than any of mine ever have been, at least.

For players who may have had a less pleasurable experience, there's some good news. There have already  been three patches just in the first week, all of them correcting improving or fixing various issues that were slowing the game down or causing it to run poorly; all generally aimed at improving the shaky optimization seen at launch. 

There's also been a host of bug fixes for all kinds of reported issues, everything from serious gameplay setbacks, like NPC store managers not doing their jobs, to cosmetic oversights, like player footprints left in the snow not swapping between left foot and right. There have been so many fixes and tweaks, in fact, it does make me wonder why more of them weren't caught in the testing process. I know releasing a game does suddenly expose it to thousands of highly motivated, unpaid QA people but even so, I'd have thought some of the things that are only now getting attention would have been pretty obvious to anyone play-testing the game, long ago.

Still, as No Man's Sky proves, you can still just about get away with banging it out and fixing it up later if a) you have a really solid game underneath it all and b) you do actually fix it. And Nivalis Nights is a good game already. If  Ion Lands keep working on it the way Hello Games have stuck with NMS, it could one day be a great one.

At the moment, though, the reviews are mostly split between enthusiasts, who've been jonesing for a cyberpunk city they could really live in and professionals, who look at it as a game rather than a virtual city. The former are running around 9 out of 10, the latter closer to 7.5. 

And that's probably fair. As a virtual incarnation of a futuristic, dystopian city, it's superb but as as game, not only does it have those optimization issues and bugs but it's not entirely clear what sort of game it wants to be. I'm not wholly convinced that the really excellent world-building and depth of sociopolitical commentary fit entirely comfortably around the framework of a business sim, let alone one where the business in question is "hospitality".

I was speculating before about whether it would be possible to sidestep the entrepreneurial gameplay and just sink into the city and be there. At some point I definitely want to test that out to see if it can be done. For now, though, my impression is that the game wouldn't stand for it. And even if the game did, CorpSec wouldn't.

CorpSec is what passes for government in Nivalis. Government and law enforcement. The name is a portmanteau of Corporation and Security but don't run away with the idea the corporations are providing security for the citizens. It's the opposite. CorpSec makes sure the corporations remain secure in their dominant position. Everyone else is left to live in the cracks that leaves.

One of the ways stability and compliance is assured is through a law that says any owner of a business is legally required to try to make that business grow. It's the inevitable corollary of the infamous "line must go up" ethos that's wrecking the global economy today. Just giving good service or providing a useful product isn't enough. You have to grow and the unspoken coda is "or die."

In a society operating by that principle, running one small, successful noodle bar might be seen as a criminal offense. Ironically, failing to run one wouldn't. I had an enlightening conversation with a CorpSec official in which I asked what would happen if I failed to grow my business. He told me failure was fine. I was obligated to try but no-one cared whether I succeeded.

The implication is that owners of failing business would be swept away, lost in the undercurrents of Nivalis society. Someone else would take over my business and I'd be on the streets. Perhaps surprisingly, being homeless doesn't appear to be a crime in itself. Just a death sentence.

As yet, I don't know if it's even possible for a player character to become homeless. I got an eviction warning today but the landlord, when questioned, couldn't explain why. Nor did he seem to want to do anything about it. 

Next day, he sent me a memo (A memo!), asking me to come talk to him. When I did, he told me there was a new rule about pets in the building I wasn't compliant with. But I don't have any pets, I told him. No, he said, but the rule now is that you need to get one. 

I was quite excited by that. I didn't know there were pets in the game. Sadly, I don't believe there are. Ava, my Automata, tells me the landlord's a fantasist and I ought just to ignore him. She says he'll forget what he said by tomorrow and even if he doesn't, the last thing he wants is to have to actually do anything about it. 

On that basis, it seems my apartment is secure but even if I did get kicked out, there's a free flop-house in every district that you can use if you get caught out by the curfew. And if all else fails, I can sleep on my boat.

Given that this isn't a survival game and I don't have eat or drink, either, if I did run out of money, I'm not sure anything bad would happen. I do keep getting fines of 50 or 60 Lims for breaking curfew, so I guess there might be some consequences if I couldn't pay those and there's that massive debt I inherited from Thaddeus that I'm supposed to be paying off, from when he gave me the noodle bar but...

I guess what I'm saying is that at this stage, I don't know what a Game Over would look like for Nivalis Nights, or if there even is one. I'm pretty curious to find out, though. Almost curious enough to stop stocking my noodle bar and give up on paying my bills, just to see what happens.

The reason I keep getting fined for being out after curfew, by the way, is because when the lockdown comes I'm usually skulking in the bar down the street, waiting to steal their equipment and drag it back to my place. I was wondering in the last post , whether the way you can just steal furniture from other businesses was a bug or a feature. I can now confirm: it's a feature.

Not only can you do it, you're supposed to do it. Another business-person comes up to you at one point and clues you in on how to go about it and why you should. It's because of another CorpSec law I didn't mention: it's illegal for businesses to co-operate with each other in any way. Business must be competitive and if that includes sabotage and theft then it's all perfectly acceptable. Just don't get caught or they'll fine you about two hours wages.

I stole a coffee-maker the first night and sold it. The next night I stole a refrigerator. I needed one of those so I just put it in my noodle bar and now it's full of food. The bar I stole the fridge from replaced it immediately so the next night I stole that one as well. I didn't need three fridges so I sold it. 

Before I started my one-person crime-wave, I sold the treadmill from my apartment. I was broke when I did it but I got over 3k Lims for it and that kept me going for a few days. I think selling the furniture might be what got me the eviction notice but I just lied about it and it all seemed fine. 

Lying's another thing you're probably meant to do, at least if you want to get ahead. Several times, near the start of the game, various NPCs tell you you'll have to make a choice between being nice to people and clambering over them to get to the top. You can't do both, they tell you. I thought that was rhetoric at first but now I'm pretty sure it's game design. That's tutorial advice, right there.

I haven't made any hard decisions about it yet. I'm just taking each choice as it comes. How that's going to work out for me in the long run is going to be very interesting to see. I suspect it'll end with me going nowhere and the whole game stagnating as I run out of options by hedging my bets. I don't think the game is fond of stasis.

But Nivalis is big. Really big. There might easily be ten thousand stories in this naked city. I'll have time to hear quite a few of them before my indecision drags me under. I'm looking forward to it a lot.