Wuthering Waves Is Dead To Me Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harder than I expected. In fact, impossible. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EverQuest Legends, Stars Reach And Valheim Battle It Out. GW3 Watches From The Sidelines.

There's been a flurry of announcements concerning Games Of Interest of late and I haven't found time to talk about most of them yet. Today's the day! Here's a Grab Bag of upcoming launches and what-not.

EverQuest Legends

Last to be announced, first to market. We're so used to hype cycles lasting years that a four-month arc from the opening announcement to the game going live seems almost indecent. 

To recap, this is the version of EverQuest you can solo. There's more to it but that's the USP. It was clearly inspired by the success of an unsanctioned, rogue EverQuest server by the name of The Heroes Journey whose USP was... ah, you guessed!

That one was so successful it made the mistake of making money so EG7/Daybreak took the developers to court, where a $3.5m settlement was agreed. The THJ devs toddled off to make their own game, Hollowed Oath, without the borrowed IP and assets and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, having pulled in $166k on a Kickstarter .

Meanwhile, Daybreak farmed the idea out to a company called Game Jawn, which I believe is run by some of the people behind the Officially Sanctioned, Not A Rogue Server At All legacy project, Quarm.  With the whole thing neatly formalized and codified under the catchy, if recycled, title EverQuest Legends, everyone who would have liked to play on The Heroes Journey but felt too uncomfortable about the dubious provenance can now feel happy they're giving their money to the right people. 

EQL, as I'm sure we'll end up calling it, is a bit more than just a retro server. Although it will start back in 1999, the devs, who are entirely different people from those currently running and writing for EQ itself, promise "it will evolve separately with its own lore and timeline...have its own spin on classic zones and will also add never-before-seen content.”

 The game will be on Steam and you can have it for an upfront payment of  $19.99, followed by $10 a month in subs. You do, of course, get the first month in that box fee but sadly, since Game Jawn is entirely separate from Daybreak, your All Access sub won't get you in. 

You can give Game Jawn your money right now, if you want. The game goes live on July 28 but you can pre-order. 

That gets you guaranteed access to the beta "on or about July 1", which puzzles me a little. The beta will close on July 21 so pre-ordering gives you just three weeks to try out the game, after which your character and all your progress will be wiped and you'll have to start over from scratch another week later. 

For regular MMORPGs, where there's some form of competitive raid structure, some people find this sort of thing an attractive prospect so they can learn the strats and get ahead of everyone else come launch day. For a game that's selling itself on its solo-friendliness, though, one where "even a solo player can build a character strong enough to take on the toughest challenges and acquire the most epic gear in the game", those three weeks seem like a bit of a waste of time and effort. 

I guess there will be achievements, maybe? World firsts and that sort of thing. Although it won't be very authentically old-school EQ if there are. Still, it's supposed to be a modern take on the old game...

I'm still undecided about whether to bother with EQL. I don't want to play it. I don't have time to play it. I've already seen just about all there is to see in the first half-dozen expansions so until they start adding new, original zones, there wouldn't be a lot of point. 

On the other hand, I feel I ought at least to check it out and so I can write about it a little. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Rather the opposite, in fact, for both the playing and the writing. If I do, it'll be more out of a sense of duty than with any enthusiasm, although duty to what or whom, I couldn't say. 

And I very definitely don't want to pay a sub for it, that's for damn sure. A one-off box price of $20 I can rationalize but an ongoing, monthly subscription? I think not. It'll be one month and out, if at all.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds' sandbox MMORPG set in space is coming to Early Access "this summer". A bit vague, I know, but at least they have a window. They also have a trailer. Want to see it?

It's... alright. Not terrible. The character animations look wonky but it's pretty enough. Doesn't make the game look very exciting, though, does it? Or interesting. Or new. 

It looks as though Early Access will be free to play although you can, of course, buy supporter packs. Or will be able to. Wilhelm has all the details. In fact, he has everything you need to know about the whole thing so I suggest you pop over to his place and get yourself up to speed there, if you need to.

All I'm going to do here is editorialize. I've played some Stars Reach. It's okay if you like that sort of thing although I'm pretty sure there are better options. No Man's Sky gets brought up a lot in conversations but I haven't played that so I can't comment on the similarities.  

What I can say is that Stars Reach is dull. It all works but none of it is much fun. "Worthy" is a word that keeps popping into my head when I try to write about it. "Bored" is the one that pops up when I play. 

There's not much of a game there, that's the biggest problem. It's a fairly pure sandbox so you need to make your own entertainment and the tools for that are limited. It could use some kind of spine like all the crafting/survival games have and it hasn't got one. Without one, it kind of flops around, limply. As it would.

There's been some speculation about why they're going public just now. Money drying up is one obvious possibility but my suspicion is that they just can't get enough people through the doors any other way to maintain a meaningful test population. 

That's not guesswork. HeartlessGamer said in the comments at TAGN that Playable Worlds has admitted as much on reddit. There's numerical evidence, too. The only way you can play the Stars Reach alpha has always been through Steam so we have exact numbers and concurrent population has been in single figures for months. 

The peak player count this year was 32. Average concurrency peaked at 7 in March and now it's less than half that. No-one wants to play any more. Actually, if you look back, hardly anyone ever did. The all-time peak was well below 200 players online at the same time.

I asked yesterday who Neverness To Everness was for. That game had thirty million pre-registrations. Stars Reach has one person online as I write and a 24-hour peak of four. 

Who is Stars Reach for? I guess we'll find out this summer.

Guild Wars 3

Here's an announcement I did find the time to cover. I'm not going over all that again but I will say something about how the news affects the other Guild Wars titles and particularly Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, like Daybreak, is in an interesting and somewhat fortunate position. They've been through this before. They've seen what happens to an existing playerbase when you launch a second title in direct competition with yourself. They each have that experience to draw on, now they come to launch a third. (Or in Daybreak's case a fourth. Never forget EQOA.)

First time around, the two companies took very different tacks. ANet mothballed Guild Wars the moment GW2 arrived. They shunted it straight to maintenance mode and stopped developing it at all. Daybreak (Or SOE as it was at the time, of course.) did the exact opposite, running EQ and EQII in tandem, continuing to develop them both pretty much equally.

ANet now seem to believe that was the better choice, although Colin Johansen inexplicably spins the idea that they're going to support new and old titles as "not the norm" whereas I'd say deciding not to was the exception.They've already begun to take GW1 out of mothballs and they're promising development will continue on GW2 as before. They know they need to get out there and assure the people paying their bills right now that it's worth carrying on for the next couple of years because a lot of them, like Azuriel, will be questioning whether it's likely to be worth it. 

Colin Johanson is suggesting it's just a blip. There'll be a short hiatus in new content as they go back and tidy up all the bugs, then everything will get back to normal, with annual  expansions and whatever else it is they've been doing since I last played a few years ago.

I am, to be polite, skeptical. In the decade I played GW2, one of ANet's defining features was a complete inability to establish either a cadence or a pipeline for supplying content. They kept chopping and changing. They rarely stuck to any of their plans long enough to see if they worked although in most cases it was blindingly obvious they weren't going to, so I suppose they should actually get some credit for dropping them as fast as they did. Just none for coming up with them in the first place.

They frequently floated grandiose frameworks for large-scale changes to the game, changes they then discussed literally for years without implementing any of them, during which time most of the key individuals would move departments or leave the company. If and when any of these plans did finally make it to the game, they'd look nothing like the promises and they'd often wither away and be forgotten almost immediately. World vs World suffered particularly badly in this respect but it hit all parts of the game at times.

And yet, somehow, the game muddled along. It rarely prospered but it didn't fail. GW2 players became inured to frequent content droughts combined with constant churn in all kinds of systems and mechanics and learned to put up with it, albeit very grudgingly. Either that or they left. 

If that's what Colin Johanson means by business as usual (Not the phrase he used but it's the implication.) then I'm willing to believe him. The game was always a shambles when I played. I'm sure it can carry on being a shambles for a bit longer.

The idea that the company that struggled so hard to maintain a steady content flow for a single game will somehow now be able to manage it smoothly and efficiently or three titles is fantasy, though. Unless, I guess, they're planing on hugely expanding the workforce. Are they doing that? And even then, I very much doubt it would help. It'd just be more daft ideas and discussion document than ever.

We'll see how it all pans out in a couple of years time, I guess. My feeling is that if GW3 is a success, GW2 will end up being like GW1 is now, a comfortable niche title that people like enough to feel nostalgic about but mostly don't play. It could still get more content but it might not even need it. GW1 pottered along for a decade and more without any and a few people still played it.

If GW3 bombs or just under-performs, though, we might end up with an EQ/EQII scenario, where the older game holds most of its current audience, while the new one fails to attract another. At that point, I suspect ANet's promises of triple-game development might fall apart quite quickly. 

By then, though, I'll be too old to care. 

Valheim

Valheim is my most-played game on Steam at 385 hours but the last time I logged in was over two years ago. When the game finally leaves Early Access on September 9, will I return? Doubtful.

The further we get from the pandemic, the more certain I am that this was one of the artifacts of that strange time. We all had more hours in the day than we knew what to do with and we weren't always even allowed out of the house. Valheim filled a need.

It also introduced me - and many others, I'm sure - to a whole new genre, the crafting/survival game. I've played a few since and most of them have been better in objective terms than Valheim, which is kind of barebones when you look at it hard.

It was my first, though, and you're always still a little bit in love with your first, aren't you? I'd like to get to the end of Valheim but the the last two biomes were so radically un-enjoyable I don't have much hope for the last one, the Deep North. I imagine it'll be a miserable experience for anyone other than gaming masochists.

At most, I might set all the controls to as easy as possible and have a quick tour around the end zone like I did with the Ashlands. At the moment, though, I can't say I'm even motivated to do that. Valheim was a game of its time and that time has gone.

And that's my bag filled for the day, I think. I have a feeling there may have been some other announcements I was going to attend to (Edit: Like this one.) but I can't remember what they were and I didn't bookmark anything so I think we're done. 

For now. 

Let's All Go Get Ice Cream! Every Day A New Adventure In Neverness To Everness

Here's the question that keeps coming back to me over and over while I'm playing Neverness To Everness: who is this game for? It's a question I often find myself asking, when I read about new games in development or try them out in testing, but for most games, what I'm really thinking is "I can't imagine enough people wanting to play this to make it worth the time and money it took to build it". For NTE I'm thinking something very different.

Neverness To Everness hasn't had any difficulty finding an audience or making money. A staggering 30 million people pre-registered and at launch the Free To Play title generated $14m in revenue on its first day. By any measure, it's a hit.

But who are all those people? Why are they playing? As Toyah would say, it's a mystery.

Well, it's a mystery to me, anyway. The more I play, the more I can't help notice the disparities between what I thought the game was going to be and what it is.

Based on the vibrant, exciting promotional videos and the intriguing lore on the website, I imagined a fast-paced, action-packed cyberpunk experience, where I'd be part of a cool, confident, highly-skilled team of agents, employed by a quasi-governmental organization and tasked with keeping the world safe from bizarre incursions from another reality. I expected a lot of fighting, some car chases and a tense, complex plot.

What I got was an open-ended offer from a woman in an office to settle down in a new city, find a job, make some friends and spend most of my time hanging out with them. Maybe she'd call me if she needed me. Maybe not.

The big crisis I thought I'd be dealing with actually happened forty years ago and it turned out to be not that much of a problem anyway. Anyone under thirty almost certainly likes things better the way they are. No-one's talking about fixing any of it or pushing the incursion back. It's all about managing it safely and integrating the incoming oddities and anomalies into society. If I do get ever to work for these people, I'll basically be some kind of bureaucrat, making sure everyone follows the regulations to the letter and being sure to follow them myself.

Everything about the set up is a little bit vague and hand-wavy anyway, entirely intentionally as far as I can tell. There are government agencies like BAC handling the ongoing situation but there are also private organizations, contractors, corporations and individuals, all working together as part of something called The Circle. 

Where the player character fits into all of this is surprisingly difficult to determine and even harder to rationalize in context of the aforementioned pre-publicity even if, at the start of the game, it all feels like it's going to plan. The game begins with my character, Flora, escaping from some facility or other in a flurry of explosive action. In a rush of set piece fights and dramatic cut scenes she somehow finds herself inducted into one of those cryptic quasi-governmental departments just like I imagined and then...

...next thing I know, she's working in an antique shop owned by a drunk and run by children. How did that happen?

It's an antique shop that somehow also operates as an independent contractor in the handling of "Anomalies" so adventure seems like it could still happen but it's very low-level work for the most part. Instead of being sent to handle major incidents, we wait for clients to turn up and ask for help in sorting out their little problems. Things like a missing child or something stealing from the bins outside a shop. 

It's probably just as well it's nothing big. Most of our operatives are still too young to drive. When Flora goes on a commission it's usually with the instruction to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't get into trouble. The boss can't do it herself; she's too busy drinking.

Flora's official role isn't "babysitter". It's Appraiser, which means she can judge whether anomalies are present, "Anomalies" being the catch-all for extra-dimensional entities. It's not exactly the kind of front-line, car-chasing, gun-slinging, bounty-hunting career I was expecting. More of a support role. It's one step away from administration, let's be honest.

Flora does have a contact in the aforementioned government agency, where there are supposedly some plans to use her talents for something bigger, when she's had a chance to acclimate to her new situation but Mint, who I guess is Flora's handler, is hardly the sophisticated spy you might expect. She's an office worker who keeps fluffing her promotion opportunities because she gets flustered at the very thought of taking an exam.

So far, so peculiar. But it's just the backgrounding being laid down, surely? A solid base for the wild adventure to come. Hmm. I suppose it might be but if so that wild adventure is taking a long time coming. 

Which isn't to say there's nothing happening. That's the really strange part. There's so much happening I can't keep up with it all! It's just that very little of it is what you'd call "adventure". And there's hardly any fighting.

Almost every storyline I've been involved with so far, big or small, has focused heavily on either the social or the commercial. Taygedo and his date. The camera shop losing business. Professional rivalry between Eidon and Sterry. Finding a lost dog. Petty vandalism. Even when we finally get to hear about Daffodil's mysterious upbringing with the ominous "Mother" and her sinister "family", something that looks tlike it might be the actual main story thread, it's far more like a warped family saga than any kind of epic adventure.

Yesterday afternoon, I finished what did feel a lot like like an epic story arc, only it was all about starting a band, learning to play and performing in front of a big crowd for the fist time. Flora, Nanally, Haniel and Akane played Night of Moondog as The Whoots!!!! (Four exclamation marks mandatory.) 

This, for anyone who doesn't know, is the culmination of a long "Spinoff" quest-line, which starts when Haniel invites the Appraiser to go see a band at a cellar club. It's a fine example of the disconnect I was talking about at the start of the post. If this really is some kind of fantasy-adventure game, designed around fighting monsters and saving the world, how come I'm playing the drums in a band started by a couple of teenage girls and we're all acting like coming top in a battle of the bands is the most important thing in the world? And it's the most exciting thing that's happened in the whole game, too!

It's no isolated incident, either. I've done plenty of quests now and they're almost always like this: detailed, complex, layered, nuanced, almost wholly conversational and concerned with anything but fighting monsters or saving the world. Some do have a few fights sprinkled in like seasoning. Some even have a couple of set-piece boss battles. But some don't have any combat at all and a few don't even have any real conflict.

Questing is only one aspect of the game, of course. Arguably, it's not even the central feature. There are many ways to pass the time. You can run a business, play games, go fishing, collect and return lost items, deliver packages... and of course you can explore the huge, sprawling city and its hinterland. 

As you do, you'll meet many of its citizens, all going about their business. Some are happy to talk to you. Some have little problems they'll tell you about. They'd appreciate your help but don't expect much in the way of adventure. You might be making sure the cakes get baked or learning how to take better photographs.

The developers send out regular questionnaires, asking how players are finding the game and gathering information on what they think about it. No doubt they also have extensive metrics, telling them exactly how players are spending their time. Apparently those sources are telling them "players are spending more time exploring the urban world than engaging in combat." That's leading publishers Perfect World to consider "introducing paid city-themed content that includes character skins, clothing, houses, and cars".

The developers are reportedly also planning on "improving gameplay to enhance its appeal and increase player retention." which I guess might have something to do with putting some actual adventure into the game. I can't help wondering if that's in response to customer demand or in an attempt to redirect attention to what was probably intended to be the core of the game, which was surely the fighting since improving your team's combat ability would seem to be the main motivation to spend money.

And here's where I start to have trouble with the whole concept. Maybe this is old thinking but I still tend to envisage a largely male, mostly young audience for games like this.

It's not just the presence and apparent importance of combat in the game that suggests it. Or the illegal street racing and bank-robbing for that matter. There's also that aspect of the anime-flavored, open world gacha genre we tend to dance rather tentatively and uncomfortably around, here in the West: sexualization of the characters. Particularly, although not only, the female characters. It's ever-present in many of the games and it's something that has, in the past, needed to be toned down for a Western audience. 

In most of the gacha games I've played, it's an aspect that's played a fairly low-key role but it's undeniably present to some degree. In NTE, for example, it's noticeable that a disproportionate number of the key characters are female and the dress code in Hethereau is certainly what you might call.. relaxed. 

It's never been remotely unusual for video games, even in the straight-laced West, to use sexuality to grab and hold the attention of what was, for the longest time, deemed to be primarily, if not exclusively, a young, male audience but in more recent times the general audience for video games has expanded to include a much broader range of genders and ages and whole subgenres have grown up around the concept of socializing with imaginary friends or romantic partners. Interactions between players and NPCs are more numerous and varied than they were even a few years ago.

On that basis, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Hethereau is full of attractive, outgoing, friendly NPCs or even that some of the gameplay involves socializing with them rather than fighting monsters. What does surprise me is the nature of some, possibly most, of those interactions.

Yesterday, for example, I helped Mint cram for her exams then later I bumped into Lacrimosa in the street and she invited me over to her house, where we both ended up drinking tomato juice and reading manga with someone she met on Bagel. This was before my stint playing drums behind Nannally, Haniel and Akane. It was all quite odd but at least it made a change from all the child-minding, babysitting and teen drama that often seems to take up the majority of Flora's evenings. 

And it's not like these are isolated incidents. At times, living this kind of heightened version of a normal life seems like it's the main thrust of the game.

It works for me although some of that may be novelty value. I can't remember ever having spent this amount of time doing things so apparently unrelated to the main plot and utterly devoid of physical violence in any other supposedly adventure-oriented game. 

It's all so gosh-darned nice, too. Playing Flora, there's an engagingly innocent, endearing feel to it all. She's like an older sister figure or even a favorite aunt. She keeps an eye out for the kids, makes sure they're safe and having a good time and in doing so, she has a good time herself. She doesn't even mind chatting to Edward on Bagel although god knows he not the most stimulating of conversationalists. And when she does get a minute to herself, she's glad to spend some downtime with her friends, almost all of whom just happen to be women or girls.

I wonder if it mightn't feel a little different, if I was playing as the male version of the Appraiser? A lot of these activities are arguably stereotypically female scenarios. Would a male player character slip into the role as smoothly?

Actually, he probably would, assuming his dialog was the same. The Appraiser always comes across as sober-minded, sensible, responsible and selfless. Unlike many of her friends and colleagues, Flora also dresses demurely by local standards and always behaves impeccably. She's long-suffering, patient, ever-willing to help out, even when the crazy plans she gets drawn into are sure to go wrong. She's the calm voice of reason amid a frenzy of sugared-up hysteria and drunken self-indulgence. 

She's usually the adult in the room, even when there are clearly older people there. I imagine it would be the same with a male Appraiser. I don't think gender comes into it much, if at all. 

Is this what the modern player of a magitech adventure game wants now? To be the designated driver in every situation? The calm voice of reason? The Sensible One?

Maybe it is. Maybe everyone playing NTE really does want to live a vicarious, innocent, work- and family-oriented life, doing their job to the best of their ability, minding the kids who inexplicably work there too, before skipping off down the street with their friend, holding hands, heading off to eat ice-cream, see a movie or just hang out at each other's places after work, where they'll talk mostly about food they like and shows they watch on TV before heading home for a good night's sleep. 

If so, I guess there's hope for the world after all. I mean, it's got to be better than becoming a murder-hobo, hasn't it? 

Maybe it's close to what the target audience already does in real life. Maybe what they enjoy is seeing those lives, interests and concerns reflected in these characters. If so, that would be welcome news from a gaming perspective, if also slightly worrying from a real-life one, given the general level of scattiness, disregard for personal and public safety and the plethora of all-round performative, hyperactive behavior on display. 

Until and unless Hotta or PWG decide to release some hard numbers on the demographics, the way cinemas routinely report on who's going to see which movie, it's all just speculation. For all the critical analysis, I'm no wiser as to who the game is supposed to be for, let alone who's actually playing it. 

Although I do feel pretty safe in saying it wasn't made for pensioners like me. I am definitely not the target audience. I probably should stick to my lane and play Stars Reach or Pantheon with the rest of the geezers. 

Now, doesn't that sound like fun?

I Don't Mind If You Love It Or You Hate It

Well! How time does fly. I was feeling chary about putting up another What I've been Listening To Lately post because it felt like only a few days since the last one but I had a few really good tunes I wanted to share, so I thought I'd just check exactly how long it's been... and it's been two weeks! 

Yes, that long! No, I couldn't believe it, either! Semi-monthly was always my target for this "feature" even though I've barely ever come close so this is totally justified.

Still, there could be a couple of arguments for holding off a little longer. One is the recurring problem I led with last time - repetition and familiarity. (Isn't that two reasons?) I'm afraid it is going to be a lot of the same people again. I have not been doing my due diligence and searching out new stuff so most of what I have bookmarked is new songs from acts I'm already following. 

But they're really good ones! And I don't think it can be such a great idea to favor novelty over quality anyway, can it? Not all the time.

The other argument against is that I don't have quite as many tunes lined up as usual. I have enough though and perhaps a slightly shorter playlist might be a little less off-putting for the casual listener. Or then again, maybe the more there are, the more likely everyone is to find at least one they like. I don't know. I'm not a psychologist.

Anyway, whatever. It is, as the incredibly irritating saying goes, what it is. Or perhaps I should say these are what they are. And they're all great! Enjoy!

 Playboy Bunny - Charli xcx

My favorite song of 2026 so far. Yes, even over Lana's White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter. Although I'm playing that one right now to see if that's really true and maybe they're tied. It's like comparing apples and amphetamines though, isn't it? 

Often - usually, in fact - these posts, supposedly filled with songs I've been listening to lately, are more like lists of songs I've heard once or twice and bookmarked to share. Recursive argument. Playboy Bunny, is not that. Playboy Bunny has been on what passes for hard rotation around here, these days. I've played it on the desktop, on the laptop and on the big Google TV downstairs. Multiple times on all three.

I'd have played it in the car, too, if it was on CD but it's not and for the time being it won't be. Charli does this thing where she releases "B sides" to her singles only on the vinyl singles themselves and on her appropriately-named Instagram account, b-sides. I don't have an Instagram account (Maybe I should...) but fortunately if Charli sneezes it turns up on at least two of my music feeds so I heard about this one right away. 

Oddly, even though it's kind of an Instagram/vinyl exclusive, it's also on YouTube as  an "official video", albeit not on her own channel. Isn't modern life wonderful? Can you understand any of it?

So much for provenance, anyway. What about performance? Just perfection. (Anyone who's thinking  "chef's kiss" or imagining the emoji for it, which I just bet there is one, gets a virtual slap. I don't condone violence (Well, I very much do condone imaginary violence, as I could hardly pretend otherwise, as a gamer...)  but standards must be maintained somehow.) 

Everything about the song and the video (But especially the song.) is perfect, from the abrasive mix to the stuttering images to the drops and the floods. She's a genius. She can do anything. Well, musically. I'm not saying she could re-wire a bungalow or swim the channel...

Lyrically, it's delicious: ironic, astute, self-aware and true. All the lines would look good on a placard, come the revolution. Or on a T-shirt, as she says in the song. Or in the title of this post. 

I'm qfting this couplet, too:

All my music sounds the same
Well, that's because I made it

And the callback

All my music sounds the same
Sometimes I wish didn't make it
So I could be a listener watching for the first time

Preach, sister! 

Brutalist - Kim Petras

Pretty sure this is going to be in my top five for 2026, too. Also on rotation just now. Having ignored her forever, apparently now she's one of my favorites. These things happen.

The lyric is just fascinating. The YouTube comment thread is stuffed full of people affirming or analyzing it as a metaphor for transitioning but I came to it not even knowing Kim was trans so I took it on face value at first. 

And I'm still going with that, mostly. I think she likes brutalist architecture and she was upset that they tore down one of her favorite buildings, as who wouldn't be, especially if the building in question was this one, as one architectural detective in the thread posits? Of course, all the rest of the subtext is there too but subtext doesn't negate text.

I love brutalism. I grew up with it so it's at one and the same time familiar, normal and now nostalgic and bittersweet as it vanishes. And beautiful. let's not forget beautiful. Just because the aesthetic was frequently misapplied, don't make the mistake of believing it was never there. 

When A Good Man Cries - Olivia Rodrigo (CMAT cover)

Oh, it's all the big names again, isn't it? That's how it goes, though. We all know it. People have their moments, when everything they touch turns gold. Leave it a while and they'll fade back out of sight. Or maybe they'll be Madonna. 

This is a great cover of a song I didn't know but I feel like I do. That's maybe because CMAT is such a classical songwriter. Well, she can be. I'm not sure Bacharach and David could have written Jamie Oliver Petrol Station. 

Speaking of which, we never had the official video, the one with the man himself, did we? Click through and treat yourself! In fact, you know what? It's too good to waste on a link.

Jamie Oliver Petrol Station - CMAT

If CMAT reminds me of anyone it's Tracyanne Campbell from Camera Obscura. I'd like to see Olivia cover Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken sometime. Or Jamie Oliver Petrol Station for that matter. 

PARTY - Goldie Boultier

While I'm going over old ground, I left this out last time because, as I said, there was bound to be a video coming and now here it is. I don't exactly like everything Goldie does but I like this, particularly the interpolation. 

That Lesley Gore was a bit of a dark horse, wasn't she? Did you know she co-wrote some of the songs for the movie, Fame? Or that she was in two episodes of the Batman TV show, playing Pussycat, "one of Catwoman's minions"? Her Wikipedia entry is massive and fascinating. I recommend it.

 California Nights - Lesley Gore (As Pussycat)

Oh, heck... why not? This post sure isn't going the way I expected.

Song 2 - The Electric Mayhem (Blur cover)

Believe it or not, I really did have that one bookmarked for the post. There was a news item in the week about some band being removed from the Disney Rock and Roll Rollercoaster. Might have been Van Halen, which would have made William Reid happy, always assuming such a thing is possible.

Ah, no, sorry, it was Aerosmith. I quite like Aerosmith. At least I don't mind hearing them once in a while, like on the radio or something. The ride is now All Muppets All The Time and the Muppet house band, The Electric Mayhem, has pretty good taste. Their set includes Born To Be Wild and Walking On Sunshine, although there's also a Def Leppard number in there, so it's not all good news. 

(Just as an aside, are Blur seen as one-hit-wonders in the States? I know Song 2 was a big deal there but did they have any other hits? I mean, I could look it up but where's the fun in that?)

I'll lay odds here and now that this is the only time Van Halen, Aerosmith and Def Leppard get a name-check in the same post here. It'd be a fair bet that none of them will never be mentioned again. Let's hope so.

 

 

It Could Be Better (But It's Good Enough) 

Aimee Fatale 

Three artists in my subs have new videos out. Goldie Boutlier is one, Tiger le Flor is another and Aimee Fatale is the third. As I said last time, the Tiger le Flor song, Kodachrome, is so authentically sixties I don't actually like it all that much (Although every time I play it, it grows on me a little more...). 

Aimee's new one is a song I've featured here before but only as a live version. The official release is a bit different in that it sounds as though it was recorded underwater until about a minute in, when the band kick in and the volume seems to jump a couple of orders of magnitude. Even then, it sounds woozy and strange. Judge for yourself if it works. I'm still not sure.

 From Down Here - Lola Young

Lola Young's latest single sounds a lot better in this live version from Radio 1's Big Weekend than it does in the actual recording. She's put out three videos for the single, all in different locations - one in the living room, one in the pool and one from the water. They all start off, like the Aimee Fatale video,  sounding as if either she's submerged or we are. Maybe it's a thing now? I really hope not.

 In Heaven - Xiu Xiu

Well, that's a mood-killer. Possibly better known as the "Lady In The Radiator Song", it's yet another cover, this time from David Lynch's Eraserhead, which I still have never seen all the way through. We've had it here before, in a version by Princess Chelsea, which I very much prefer to this one. But I didn't remember that until I came to do the edit and now it's too much trouble to take it out, so here it stays.

Xiu Xiu has a whole album called "Eraserhead" coming. I might pass on that one. But since we're having all the covers today, how about a Xiu Xiu cover? 

Sad Pony Guerilla Girl - Scarlett Sladek (Xiu Xiu cover)

We'll say this is for Pride Month since I haven't done anything else for it so far and that's the dedication Scarlett gave it, this time last year. Although I suppose I could have mentioned it when I was talking about Kim Petras earlier... 

It's yet another one where half the time the vocals are inaudible but the bit where she gets the rosary beads out is stellar. Worth it for that alone.

WAX PAPER - Tierra Whack

Tierra Whack does not like to be constrained. She makes whatever music she wants. But she wants you to know that, for all her versatility and range, she is a still rapper. 

Wonder why I don't rap much
'Cause when I rap, somebody's bound to get wrapped up
They yellin', "Oh, shit" Like my stomach is backed up
I'm so sick, I really think you should mask up.

Now you know. I'm not about to argue with her. Are you?

 Telepathic Butterflies - Spacemoth

Saved this one for last so there'd be a banger at the end. Always end on a high. Is it weird, a moth singing about butterflies? Something to think about.

Until next time, then, when I might even have something new to offer. Although I wouldn't count on it. 

Oh, and look at that! The post ended up as the classic baker's dozen after all. It's like I planned it or something. 

I didn't plan it. 

There's Something In The Water! There, In The Distance! I can Just Make It Out! It's... It's GW3!

There were other things I had in mind for today's post, things I'm a lot more interested in and that I'd certainly enjoy writing about a lot more, but I suppose I have to write about this now. ArenaNet officially announced Guild Wars 3 at this year's Summer Games Fest. There was a pre-event puff that told us they were going to announce something and some people thought that might be GW3. I was not one of those people. 

Then again, I was also not one of those people who cared all that much what they were going to announce. I was mildly curious but I assumed it would be some new thing for one of the two existing Guild Wars games, neither of which I play and neither of which I plan on playing, either now or in the near or distant future. 

I find myself in a very uncomfortable relationship with the Guild Wars franchise these days, particularly GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss and I played both games together and had some good times over a number of years but, while I remember the original fondly enough, the sequel is problematic. 

We played the original Guild Wars for maybe less than two months, back when it was new. We started a few weeks after launch because at first, like a lot of people, we thought it was a pure PvP game. ArenaNet's soon to become familiar misleading marketing making its presence felt, probably, since that was how it was reported until it launched, when players found out there was a massive PvE component, too.

Six or eight weeks was long enough to complete the original campaign, after which there didn't seem much point staying so we left. I've returned to GW1 a few times since, finished another of the campaigns, seen something of the rest and generally disported myself in an increasingly desultory fashion until I finally lost interest altogether. Mrs Bhagpuss has never gone back.

When Guild Wars 2 was announced, name recognition was enough to have both of us sign up and participate in the beta weekends. The game turned out to be radically different from anything else around at the time and it suited us both very well. We ended up playing for about ten years without a break, from launch in 2012 until after the pandemic. It was Mrs. Bhagpuss's only MMORPG and my main one and it formed the bulk of the content here at Inventory Full for many years. There are more than seven hundred posts here labeled "GW2".

Until today, there was only one post labeled "GW3". Now, I suppose, there will be a lot more. And I'm not very happy about it.

 Mrs Bhagpuss stopped playing GW2 a few years a go. It was her last MMORPG. She still plays video games, just not that kind. I gave it a few more weeks but, as I suspected, the only reason I'd been playing GW2 at all by then was because she did. As a game, I'd been done with it for a while.

I come away from most MMORPGs I've played for any length of time with warm feelings and an occasional desire to pop back in, see my old characters and catch up with what's been happening in the game. Not so GW2. I'm not quite the cliche bitter burnout, who wants to badmouth the game they used to love at every opportunity. It's a good game and I had good times in it. I wish it well.

At least, that's my rational, objective reaction. Emotionally, if I think about my time in the game at all, which I rarely do unless prompted by something like yesterday's announcement, it's with the kind of feelings I imagine people who've escaped from cults experience. Relief at being out. Anger at all that time and emotion wasted. A sense of grievance at having been used. And a dread of being somehow sucked back in.

Okay, that's over-dramatizing it. A little. I feel a bit niggled at the way ArenaNet consistently faffed and fudged and promised far more than they could fulfill. The way for years there was always jam tomorrow but never jam today. The countless revamps and revisions to cadence. The endless promises made and broken. The history of the development of the game is a litany of lurches and swerves, a directionless leadership forever searching for a path that leads somewhere and rarely, if ever, finding one.

My biggest complaint is with the story. For a franchise that claims to be built on lore and narrative, the stories were always thin, sparse and fragmented. Delivery was unreliable and sporadic and when we did get something it was never anything much. Even at the time, because I played other MMORPGs, I knew how meager the pickings were but at the time I did at least believe there was some quality there. 

That was mostly ignorance. Being locked as I was inside the MMORPG ecosystem, all my judgments were necessarily relative. The writing in GW2 was pretty decent - for an MMORPG. Unfortunately, what I wasn't entirely aware of was how degraded the genre is compared to others when it comes to storytelling.

Shouldn't I have known? Well, maybe. The thing is, until around about the time of the pandemic or maybe a bit later, I actively disliked getting any story in my MMORPGs. My motivations for playing are very well described in this post of Yeebo's. Narrative is the least of my concerns. 

In fact, it's something I actively tried to avoid whenever possible. One of the early posts about GW2 here on this blog bemoans ANet's insistence of making everything about the story. Especially about my character's "Personal Story". I really didn't like that concept, not in GW2 or Star Wars: the Old Republic or in any MMORPG that tries it on. To this day, with thousands of hours played in GW2, I have only ever completed the Personal Story on one character and that only under duress. 

The Personal Story wasn't the only core aspect of GW2 that meant nothing to me. The whole Legendary system was something I always loathed, too as was 100% map completion. 

In fact, there were probably more things about GW2 that I disliked than that I liked for the whole time I was there. It's a fiddly, nitpicking, pettifogging, mean-spirited game in so many ways, with check-lists that do their damnedest to bleed all the spontaneity out of exploring and systems cynically designed around making things just awkward enough that players will pay for convenience but not quite so irritating that they'll stop playing altogether.

Many people who've bounced off the game make these kinds of accusations. It has a reputation in that regard. But it has always been able to get by on the things it does well; a huge, exciting, vibrant open world that demands and rewards exploration; superb art direction; free and flowing movement in three dimensions; best-in-genre hot-join group combat... 

Things like that make it an exceptionally easy and rewarding game for in-the-moment play. If you go with the flow and don't let the game dictate to you, you can log in and find yourself effortlessly entertained for hours. It's only when you start to look for direction that it all falls apart. GW2 has some of them most unappealing, linear progression I've trudged through and much of that is down to the turgid, tedious story and the way what little of interest there is in it has to be stretched to make it last as long as possible by way of an interminable series of pointless set-piece fights.

Several years of modern, open-world games with all of GW2's benefits and few if any of its disadvantages, boss fights that last a fun couple of minutes instead of a miserable half an hour chief among them, have painfully demonstrated to me just how limited my horizons were while I was playing ANet's game all those years. I neither deny nor regret the many good times I had there, particularly in World Vs World, an area of the game gloriously free of all narrative structure, but the payoff for the effort involved seems poor.

And so to Guild Wars 3, which is coming in about eighteen months. Or rather the beta is. You can sign up for it now. I have, of course. 

That it's beta they're trumpeting and a long time from now is interesting in itself. No pre-alpha sign-ups. No alpha. And, I'll bet, no Early Access, either. Just a good old-fashioned beta, followed, if precedent serves, by a few open beta weekends and then launch. That'll be refreshing, at least. You can wishlist it on Steam, too, which I've also done because if it's on Steam from the get-go, that's where I'm going to play it. 

And yes I suppose I will play it although I'm very far from keen. It would seem churlish not to at least take a look. I'd say unprofessional only no-one's paying me. 

Since it's coming, like it or not, at this point I could go on to talk about the game itself, speculate what it might be like, start that conversation. But I won't, for a couple of reasons.

The first is we don't actually know anything yet. There's one video and some screenshots, all taken from that same video, which is apparently shot using the engine on which the game will run. There's also an extremely generic mission statement that makes it sound like they're making GW2 again only with modern action combat and a bit of parkour movement thrown in. 

This they call "a modern evolution of the genre that blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection." It sounds like the gacha games we're playing now, to me. 

How fresh that'll seem in 2028, probably the earliest GW3 will go live, remains to be seen. It will probably be a shock to many MMORPG players, those who've stayed inside the stockade these last few years, just like GW2 was a shock back in 2012. That game genuinely did feel so different back then that Anet had to jump in quick to fix it up to feel more familiar for the many curious WoW players that were bouncing off it within minutes of poking their heads in to see what this strange new MMO was all about.

The real reason I'm not going to go into speculation mode, though (You can probably sense me trying to stop myself doing it right now.) is that we've got a sodding year and a half of this ahead of us and I don't want to contribute to the feeding frenzy. All that arguing over things no-one knows. All the fantasies and wishes that turn into promises that were broken before they were even made. It's going to be exhausting.

And I'll be very nearly seventy when the damn game comes out! What if it turns out to be good? What If I end up playing it for as long as I played GW2 and then I find out it really wasn't all that good all along but I just didn't realize because playing it blurred my perspective? Then I'd be eighty and I'd have wasted another decade on a game that was pretty good at times but often not very good at all. 

That doesn't sound like the best use of whatever time I have left, now, does it? Do I really want GW3 to be my last chance at a good MMORPG? If so, the omens aren't good. Just look at the record.

But then, I don't imagine ANet is making games with the gray gaming market in mind. Millennials and GenZ are the target, I'd imagine, since GenAlpha famously doesn't play traditional video games at all. Grab your share of the shrinking market while it's there. It's never going to get any bigger.

And now I need to stop because I'm already slipping into the swamp of speculation. There's going to be a Guild Wars 3 but it's not until next Fall so let's all agree to forget about it until then.

Promise? 

Last Year's Movies Today! Superman (2025)

This was going to be a Grab Bag post but the first item ran away with me so now it's just a review of a movie that came out a year ago. And not even a proper review at that. 

It's the Superman movie I'm talking about. I posted about it several times in 2025 but I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts and link them. No-one would click through anyway, so what would be the point? I mean, hell, what are the Labels for, if not for anyone to find stuff, if they're interested? Not to mention the very efficient search function. Anyone ever use that? No. Thought  not.

Ahem. So, Superman...

I said before the movie came out last summer that I'd probably go see it at the cinema. I was hyped for it after the excellent trailers. Well, that didn't happen.

So then I said I'd put the DVD on my Birthday/Christmas wishlist. I did and I got it and I still didn't watch it because apparently owning a movie on DVD is exactly the same, psychologically at least, as watching it. 

Either before or after I got my own hard copy, the movie turned up on one of the streaming services I subscribe to and I didn't even watch it then. Often I do end up streaming things I own on DVD, sometimes things I've owned for years and never gotten around to watching, because it's just easier that way, isn't it? But I didn't stream Superman. 

We got to 2026 and I still hadn't seen it and all the Supergirl trailers started rolling up and they looked even better than the Superman ones and we got closer and closer to the release date (Which is June 26, I just checked. I knew it was this month.) and I made a "firm decision" to go see that one in the cinema, for real this time, which made me think I probably ought to get around to watching the first one, since they kind of fit together somehow.

And I probably still wouldn't have done anything about it, had Redbeard not felt the need to post about the rotunda at the Cincinnati Museum Center and to include in that post a clip of a scene from the Superman movie and that was what finally tipped me over the edge. 

Sidebar: Material to my decision to watch the movie, I should say that, following the  death of my mother earlier this year at the age of 93, we've acquired a very good 4K Sony TV. I was left "the chattels" in my mother's will, one of which this was. "Chattels" means literally everything in the house except the house itself, which has to be sold and the proceeds split 50/50 with my step-brother, although now we're getting into too much detail for a post about the Superman movie, I think. My mother came up with the chattels thing because a few years back, when her sister died at the age of, I think, 91, she left my mother her chattels, none of which my mother wanted or kept, except for a copper bedpan, which is now in our house but which I believe may have come from my aunt originally. Why we have it? That you'd need to ask Mrs Bhagpuss.

I seem to have drifted a long way from the Superman movie. I only mentioned the TV because the arrival of an actually good set in this house for the first time in at least twenty-five years has led directly to me going downstairs and sitting on the sofa for the specific purpose of watching things. (We live almost entirely upstairs for what are, I'm sure, perfectly good reasons, if I could remember them.). That's how I came to watch The Burroughs, the first seven episodes at least, and having watched the final episode on the laptop I can say with certainty that it does, in fact, make a big difference, watching it on a big screen, after all, something I never really believed before.

Not that I watched The Burroughs in in 4K. It was in HD on the TV and the laptop because you have to pay Netflix more money for 4K and I never have yet and don't have any plans to start. HD seems like more than enough detail to me, anyway, at least on a screen as good as this one. Probably on a better laptop than mine it would, too.

And that's eight paragraphs without a single word about the movie itself so here's my tl:dr for the rest of the post in case you're feeling like you've already put in the work:

It was great! I loved it! Four stars (Out of five). Maybe not a classic but definitely a must-see. As good as I was hoping and better than I expected. Best Superman movie I've seen and I haven't seen them all. 

Which is a bit surprising, really, even to me. Why haven't I seen them all?

Let me think. I saw the first, with Christopher Reeve, on release at the cinema. The best thing about it was that it was Superman! In the cinema! Hard to imagine what a total novelty that was at the time. 

I saw the second in the cinema too but the third and fourth only on TV. They went downhill a bit but they were not untrue to some of the comics. Just mostly not true to the good ones. 

Then there was a big gap until Superman Returns, which I'm pretty sure I've never seen anywhere, so I should probably do something about that, and next there was Man of Steel, for which I returned to the cinema to catch it on release although why I thought it was worth the effort escapes me now. Clearly I didn't think enough of it to bother with the follow-up, the awkwardly-titled Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which I may or may not own on DVD ( I genuinely don't know if I do or not.) but have definitely never watched. Is it technically even  a Superman movie, though? I mean Batman's name comes first...

So, I've seen six of the eight Superman movies and the latest one is the best by a wide margin. Best for a DC fan, that is. Maybe not for a general audience. Probably can't beat the first one for that. 

Or maybe you even need to be a long-time fan for this one. I know the Snyder movies were fan favorites with some fans but then I believe there's a cadre with a much deeper belief in Zack Snyder's vision for the franchise than I've ever had. I bet every one of them is at least a couple of decades younger than me, too. 

Apart from having a coherent plot for a change and the acting being excellent throughout, neither of which can be said about all, or even most, of its predecessors, Superman (2025) is the one that feels most like the comics to me. It feels like it was made by a fan for other fans without ever resorting to actual fan service. 

One of the very best things about it is the way James Gunn gets all the backstory out of the way in a few lines of text over the opening sequence. As a lifelong superhero comics reader, I am so fed up of every superhero movie feeling it has to start by explaining who the leads are, how they got their powers, what their powers are - all that basic stuff that surely to God anyone who cared enough to buy a ticket already knows. I mean, if you watch a sports movie, they don't generally begin by telling you how the game got started and explaining all the rules...

If that's good, though, the way the movie pretty much never stops to explain who anyone is is even better. It's just so refreshing. All the nods and winks to the at least half a century of comics' history are there, in profusion, for anyone who wants them but if you don't know, you don't need to know and neither the writers nor the director is going to tell you.

As a longtime fan of the Daily Planet newsroom as much as I am of Superman, I was stoked to see not just Lois, Jimmy and Perry but also Steve Lombard and Cat Grant. And they were just working there, saying things people say when they work in an office together. Just so good to see and hear.

There was one more Planet staffer I didn't pick up on, too, although I thought maybe I remembered him from the Eliot S Maggin days. I just looked him up and it was Ron Troupe, a character who actually wasn't introduced until the early '90s, by when i think Maggin had moved on and just around when I was slowly drifting out of the fandom myself. But I do remember Ron now I'm reminded and I did know I knew him when I watched the movie, even if I couldn't quite remember who he was, so that's exactly the kind of rich textuality I'm talking about.

It's always interesting to watch the various interpretations of Lois and Jimmy. Lois Lane seems to be an almost indestructible character. I've seen more versions of her than I can remember and I can't think of a bad one. She's always well-cast, all the actors who play her look like the woman in the comics and she's almost always written as a competent, skilled, professional with a sharp wit and a fast mind. It must be a popular part to get, I'd think. This Lois, though, also felt likeable, which is by no means one of the character's core traits. Some Loises have been stinkers. I prefer a softer Lois to a harder one but I'd have to admit the hard ones are probably closer to the four-color archetype.

Speaking of colors, what is with it Jimmy's hair? Why is it almost never ginger in the movies the way it always is on the page? I mean, Lois and Clark never go blond, do they? So why does Jimmy so often have nondescript brownish hair on screen? Or at least that's what I was thinking this time, until that scene near the end, when they all run up to the roof of the Planet building so Lois can fly them away in Mr Terrific's ship (Don't ask...) and the sun hits Jimmy's hair and you can clearly see the auburn tint. So he is a redhead after all!

Jimmy doesn't have a big role but he still manages to give a really good impression of the kind of bumptious, chance-taking personality that got him his own comic all those years. He sees trouble and he runs straight at it. And in this case the trouble is Lex Luthor's girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (A great call-back to the first run of movies.) who, impossibly and yet somehow inevitably, turns out to be seeing Jimmy on the side, something that would totally happen in Jimmy's comic, if nowhere else in the universe. 

Gunn appears to know these characters and their history so much better than most Hollywood people who've had the use of them in the past. They said he'd be a safe pair of hands and on this evidence, they were right.

Talking of Lex... this is probably the most evil version I've seen on screen. Usually he has at least one redeeming feature. Sometimes he's positively sympathetic. Not here. Here, he's a sociopathic, sadistic megalomanic with a very, very thin skin and absolutely no tolerance for personal criticism. Putting this Lex up there on screen is making a statement. He's code for... well, we all know what and who he's code for, I'm sure. When Krypto throws him around like a chew-toy at the end, I bet half the audience is cheering. I was laughing too hard or I would have been, too.

Obviously, Krypto is great. He steals every scene he's in. How much of it is dog acting and how much CGI is hard to say and also I could not care less. I just want more of his antics. Looking forward to much more Krypto in Supergirl. As she says in her cameo at the very end, he is her dog, after all. 

And finally, in what appears to have turned into a round-up of the characters rather than an actual review, there's The Justice Gang (Not their real name...) That was an unexpected pleasure, especially since it's three characters I either know little about or wish I didn't.

Hawkgirl is severely underused but she really makes the most of her few scenes. Her deadpan tone and expression are devastatingly effective. The bit where she demonstrates just exactly how much not like Superman she is was sheer joy, even if I knew it was coming from the moment the fool she was carrying opened his mouth to taunt her.

Mr Terrific, a character I've barely even noticed in the comics, was so central to the plot he could have demanded co-star billing. Again, he was deadpan as hell and it worked beautifully. The movie as a whole does a great job of balancing action, pathos and humor, which I guess is James Gunn's super-power. I know it's not going to work for everyone but it's right on the money for me.

And finally, Guy Gardner. I would have said it was impossible to put a version of that character on screen that would both be true to the original but wouldn't alienate most  of the audience - but they did it. Just about. 

They have softened him up some. The movie Guy is a lot less stupid, arrogant and abrasive than the one in the comics I read. He comes across as blunt and abrupt, a bit like Batman probably would if he wasn't so keen on presenting as cool and mysterious although, unlike Batman, he does have a noticeable sense of humor, albeit not a very sophisticated one. On the plus side, this Guy did seem like he was at least competent and willing to compromise, two things no-one ever accused the Guy Gardner in the comics of being.

Anyway, so, I liked it. A lot. And apparently I have nothing meaningful to say about it beyond that. So I'll stop. Let's come back in a few weeks and do this all over again. For Supergirl next time.