Day Twenty-One - Nice

Sleigh Ride
Relient K

Day Twenty-One - Naughty

Slay Ride
H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society

You'll Believe A Dog Can... Run Really Fast?

It's going to be kind of a Grab Bag of TV and Movies today, I think. Hard to be sure. I'm making this up as I go along. Then again, what else do I ever do?

First up, Ted Danson's new Netflix hit show

A Man On The Inside

I straight up would never even have looked at this if it hadn't been for The Good Place. I'd always thought of Danson - assuming I ever thought about him at all, something I certainly wasn't in the habit of doing - largely as an amiable buffoon, someone who got lucky in the 'eighties and was coasting on that luck ever since. This, clearly, is complete nonsense.

Following his excellent comic turn in the afterlife sitcom, Ted appears here in another show from approximately the same team and turns in a subtle, nuanced and very moving performance, playing a recently-retired, recently-widowed professor, now so adrift from any kind of meaningful life he's been reduced to cutting out endless "interesting" articles from newspapers to send to his only daughter, a busy mother of three teenage boys, who has neither the time nor the inclination to read them.

That's how we see him as the series opens, anyway. From there, the extremely unlikely plot has him taking a job with a private detective agency to act as the titular man on the inside. The inside of a retirement home. 

Here's the thing about the plot: it's ludicrous but it's one hundred per cent internally consistent, which means it works. More impressive yet, even though I finished watching the show more than a week ago, I could very easily rehash the entire storyline here and now without having to look anything up. I can even remember the names of most of the characters. Given my memory these days, that's one heck of an endorsement.

The plot isn't the main reason to watch the show, of course. It's more of a sitcom than a mystery. Do we have a portmanteau name for those yet? We should. There are enough of them. Mystcom, maybe? Sittery? Someone workshop that for me...

The show has been very well received by both viewers and critics. About the only bad thing anyone seems to be able to find to say about it is that it may be very heartwarming but it's not that funny. I read a few comments like that before I watched the show for myself so it may be that I'd had my expectations lowered but it made me laugh. Quite a few times. 

As for the heartwarming part, it manages to walk that difficult line between sentimentality and genuine emotion with great facility. Danson himself is just about as good as you could imagine anyone being in the part, which isn't an easy one to play. It requires him to be sympathetic but also slightly annoying, amusing but also kind of sad. He also has to come across as basically competent while also being goofy and out of his depth.

Perhaps the toughest sell of all is his ability to get along with, well, everyone. You have to believe that both old and young people would find his character almost immediately appealing; that they'd want to spend time with him, listen to him, tell him stuff they might not tell anyone else. As an actor he's playing to the audience on the other side of the screen but his character is also playing to an audience on the inside, some of whom have no idea he's acting, some who suspect it and some who know. It requires a complex set of skills and Ted has them all.

Danson is the center and the star but as usual these days there's a whole ensemble of supporting roles, all of which are played well, some very well indeed. I particularly liked the three non-pensionable-age women who orbit around Ted in the roles of his actual daughter (Sometimes pretending to be his niece.) his employer (Sometimes pretending to be his daughter.)and the owner of the residential center where he pretends to have settled, who has the good fortune never to have to pretend to be anything other than the caring, empathic, over-worked professional she is.

It's an unusual show, especially for a hit, in that a lot of the roles are given to actors in their sixties, seventies and eighties. As someone in his mid-sixties, I imagine I'm supposed to find that an added attraction but actually I just found it a bit weird. I'm not entirely convinced old people in general like to watch other old people being old. I know I don't. They all do it very well, though.

The end of the final episode absolutely screams "Give us a a second season!" and I imagine there will be one, given the show's positive reception. One more will probably fly but it's very hard to see how the premise could be parlayed into a long-running series. I mean, just how many cases could there be that need a guy in his seventies, willing to act as a P.I.'s inside man to solve crimes? As many as make Netflix money, I guess.

I'd happily watch another eight episodes, anyway.

The Sticky

For reasons I already forget, I'm back watching Amazon Prime Video again after a months-long lay-off. It's good to leave the streaming services to lie fallow for a while. When you come back you find all kinds of new things have cropped up.

As soon as I came back I found this one being pushed at me in that unsubtle way Prime has, shoving its latest offerings to the front of the queue like a proud stage parent. I glance at the shills and mostly ignore them but this one caught my eye because of the peculiar title. The Sticky? Who the hell calls a show that?

The title, it transpires, refers to maple syrup. It's an odd name for a very odd show. It's a comedy crime romp (Cromedy? No, don't start that again.) inspired by an actual theft known as The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.  The makers of the show are very concerned you know it's Not The True Story. Every episode starts with a disclaimer to that effect.

I'm not sure what they're worried about. Having watched all six episodes I feel safe in saying no-one could possibly mistake anything that happens here for reality. It's a black farce from start to finish. 

Every character, pretty much without exception, is a type and the playing, by and large, is directly to that type. Occasional hints of backstory or personality peep through the facade but mostly everyone sticks firmly to their assigned role, occasionally hamming it up like it's panto season.

That makes it sound shallower than it is. I thought it was pretty good fun all round even if it didn't have a lot of depth. 

I had been hoping it would be a Canadian version of the excellent Australian show Deadloch  and of all the shows I've seen, that is the one it most reminds me of, although it's nowhere near as funny or as dark. Still, the similarities are hard to miss. 

There's the abrasive, big city detective, sent to a small town to sort out a murder for a start. The extremely brief, barely acknowledged, sexual frisson between the incomer and the local cop even seemed as if it could be an intentional parody of the same relationship in Deadloch. Then there's the small-time power-broker, top of the local dung-heap, pushing their influence too far and getting their come-uppance. Plus there's swearing and casual violence and some solid one-liners but every show has those.

Mostly, though, The Sticky feels too odd to be derivitive, what with minor-key elements like one character being in a coma for the entire series and one of the supposedly most sympathetic characters running a mink farm. 

Peak weirdness arrives with the appearance of Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Bo Shea, a hit-person with a limp and a cane, who manages to be both terrifying and hilarious all at the same time. Her bravura turn in Episode 5 does a lot more than just steal the scene. It makes the show.

Curtis also co-produces, along with Jason Blum of Blumhouse and indeed the whole thing has the feel of a personal project, something someone with the power to make it happen thought would be fun to do. I imagine they were right. Jamie Lee certainly looks like she's having one hell of a good time as Bo. Luckily, it was fun to watch, too. I enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud a few times. 

Like A Man On The Inside, The Sticky ends with the clearest possible lead-in to a second series. I hope it gets one.

My Old Ass

From TV to movies. I've watched more movies this year than... well, in quite a while. Still, it hasn't been all that many - maybe half a dozen - but at least I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm. I'm optimistic for next year. I mean, one a month wouldn't be too much to shoot for, would it?

Two of the movies I watched in 2024 starred one of my top three current favorite actors, Aubrey Plaza. She's in the select group of people whose name on a cast list is all the information I require to add it to my watch-list.

In this case that could easily have led to disappointment and possibly anger. Not because there's anything intrinsically wrong with the movie. Just because Aubrey Plaza is hardly in it.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. She's probably present for about a third of the running time. The thing is, I have only ever seen My Old Ass referred to by the various movie and entertainment sites I follow as a movie "starring Aubrey Plaza", a claim that, not unreasonably, led me to believe she would be playing the lead. 

She is not. The lead is played by Maisy Stella and very well she plays it, too. Maisie is Elliot, just turned eighteen, in her last summer at home before leaving for college in the big city. Aubrey Plaza plays the same character at thirty-nine. 

Not to dwell too much on the plot, which once again has complete internal consistency and works perfectly even though objectively it makes literally no sense whatsoever, what happens is that Maisie takes a bunch of shrooms and hallucinates her older self, who proceeds to give her enigmatic advice about her future while bantering with her in a most amusing fashion.

When this happens, the film has already been running for a while. By the time the older Elliot (or her hallucinatory imago) disappear, maybe half an hour has passed and Aubrey Plaza been on screen for about ten minutes of it. 

It was at that point that I began wondering how they were going to keep her in the picture for the rest of the running time. It turns out it wasn't going to be a problem. They weren't.

For most of the rest of the movie, all we hear of Aubrey is her voice on Elliot's mobile phone which, through some form of metaphysical magic, she is able to use to talk to her older self from two decades in the past. Then even that stops and for quite a while there's no Aubrey at all until she makes a brief, visible and possibly physical return right at the end.

As I say, this could have led to my feeling somewhat cheated but fortunately Maisy Stella provides an entirely satisfactory substitute. The supporting cast, for once, is neither extensive nor particularly foregrounded, everyone pretty much sticking to their supporting roles and doing so solidly, without anyone being especially noticeable or memorable.

The exception, at least from my perspective, was Percy Hynes White as Chad, who stood out from the rest mainly because I did not like him at all for most of the time he was on screen. I did, eventually, come around to him but more through the writing than his performance, which I found quite annoying. You'e supposed to think he's a good guy, though, and I guess if you like goofy puppy-dog types, it tracks.

The script is by Megan Park, who also directed, doing a great job in both departments. This is a very high concept coming of age story and the absolute best thing about it is the way no-one ever attempts to explain how any of it is happening. The set-up verges on magical realism and the last thing you need with that is any kind of pseudo-scientific rationale.

At under ninety minutes, My Old Ass is short and bittersweet and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even if I still do kind of feel like I was short-changed on the whole Aubrey Plaza deal.

Superman

Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? No, it's a Trailer!

I don't watch a lot of movies but I do watch a lot of trailers. They're a bit like demos for games, I think; sometimes the trailer's all you need.

That absolutely does not apply to the first trailer for the Superman movie, the one that's coming out next July, directed by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, now heir to the cursed throne of the DC Cinematic Universe. The link popped up in my NME feed yesterday, with the teaser headline "First ‘Superman’ trailer sees Krypto the Superdog make his live-action debut." 

I was more than a little curious to see the non-CGI Dog of Steel so I clicked through right away. And he's sooo cute! I mean, seriously! Krypto has been a lot of things since he first appeared in Adventure Comics #210 nearly seventy years ago but I don't believe "cute" has often been one of them. 

Most of that is down to his signature look. I've never been sure what breed he's meant to be - he looks like some kind of cross between a Staffie and a Labrador - but whatever it is, it doesn't scream cuddly ickle doggy. 

This time, instead of the smooth-haired look he's sported for all those decades, they've gone for a much rougher, tousled, almost-terrier appearance and I am so totally here for it! It's these small changes that sometimes make all the difference and even as a long-time fan, this make-over works for me.

It's not just Krypto, though. For a Superman fan, the whole trailer is just amazing. It hits exactly the right tone and sustains it for entire the 2.17 run time. I quite literally felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck watching this one and the moment it ended I watched it again, at which point I admit to tearing up a little.

If the YouTube comments are anything to go by, I was not alone in my immensely positive response. Superman has been made over so many times it's hard to believ upermae actor there could ever be a version that feels fresh but this promises to be the one. It's certainly going down well with actual DC comic fans, if not with those of former Superman actor Henry Cavill, which should at least make for good pre-release word of mouth.

Whether the finished movie will have any significant appeal beyond that demographic, I guess we'll just have to wait until next summer to find out but I hope so. DC - and super-hero movies in general - could do with a hit..

If there's one thing I really hope for this iteration, though, it's that it isn't just the damn origin story all over again. I appreciate the logic of the Groundhog Day approach: there's a new generation of movie-goers every decade and if the huge majority of the audience is going to be 12-24 every single time, you can't just assume everyone knows who your characters are...

But this Superman ffs! Everyone does know who he is. Just take the origin as read and move on.

Which is just what I'm going to do. Laters!

Day Twenty - Nice

 

 

Werewolves Of Christmas
The WOX

Day Twenty - Naughty

North Pole
(Vampmus 2021 Last Christmas remix)
Playboi Carti

Things Begin To Take Shape In Stars Reach

Playable Worlds is running a fairly extensive round of pre-Christmas testing for Stars Reach. There's a two-hour test every day, Tuesday through Friday this week, with a double helping on Wednesday for some reason. The majority of the tests are in EU-friendly time-slots, too, mostly falling around teatime and extending into the early evening.

I was planning on waiting for the Thursday or Friday tests, when I'd be home all day and wouldn't have to come back from work and jump straight in, but as it happened everything aligned perfectly yesterday for a full, uninterrupted two-hour session. We'd finished eating and Beryl had stuffed herself to the point of collapse so she was flat out on the bed for once, sleeping.

I'd actually forgotten there was a test on but when I sat down at my PC a few minutes after seven and logged into Steam, the first thing I noticed was a 1GB update for Stars Reach. That jogged my memory, so as soon as the patching was done, I logged in.

The server was up and completely stable. All the disconnection issues and lag of the early tests seem to be over. There are also no wipes going on at the moment so my character was available and where I'd left her. Which would have been good if I'd had any idea where that was.

I seemed to be on the side of a hill, somewhere on the edge of the map. I imagine I got interrupted and logged out wherever I happened to be at the time. Not that it makes a lot of difference at the moment. I don't know where anything is in relation to anything else anyway.

The three available planets are all pretty small, maybe the size of something like The Feerrott or possibly Rathe Mountains in EverQuest, although with a great deal more verticality. If there was a map it would be very easy to find your way around but as it is you have to rely on landmarks, a dubious process in a world subject to terraforming and strip-mining at every turn.

I am just now beginning to recognize a few semi-permanent features, like the high plateau with the weird, ghost-trees or the big lava lake, but I'm a little hazy yet even about which planet I'm on. I can tell if I'm on the Desert planet right away but the Temperate and the Jungle look very much alike in certain areas so I find it quite easy to confuse them.

This time I was on the Jungle planet when I woke up. I think. I'm basing that mostly on an observation I made later, after I'd been into space and swapped planets. I remembered Wilhelm talking about a co-operative attempt to build a city using the new construction tools, something that was happening on the original, temperate planet so, when I came down from orbit to see a grid-like pattern of new buildings, I guessed that must be where I'd landed.

Traveling through space to get from one world to another was a first for me. Or rather, it was the first time I'd gone into space with the deliberate intention of using it as a transit station. I've been space-mining before and ended up back on a different planet from where I started but that was by accident. 

This time, I wanted to go to a different "zone" so I looked for the blue beam of light that spears into the sky to let you know where the spaceport is, gravity-hopped across the map to get to it, then took the space-lift to the asteroid belt. Once there, I went outside the docking bay, looked around for another blue laser beam, found one, engaged my jet-pack and flew across to it so I could go back down to earth.

As a means of getting from one zone to another, it's a very odd process if you stop and think about it. I have to assume it's purely for the pre-alpha and forms no part of the eventual plans for travel in the live game. Also, if there's a way of telling which portal goes to which planet, I don't know what it might be. Making the beams of light a different color for each would be a start.

This sort of transport system is exactly the kind of thing that's great fun to discover and come to terms with when it's new but which quickly turns into a complete pain when you have to do it every time you want to get anywhere. It's something many developers have had to come to terms with as players lose patience with the exact, same mechanics that once enthralled and enchanted them. Never has the old saw about familiarity breeding contempt had greater currency than in the life-cycle of an MMORPG.

The reasons I wanted to travel to another planet were twofold: firstly, I'd finally achieved my longstanding goal of mapping all sixty-four out of sixty-four Survey Points. Only took me about half a dozen attempts. And I didn't even use the mapping tool, mostly because I was too mean to spend 400 xp points on it when I only had a handful of points to find.

The second reason I wanted to go somewhere new was to see if anyone was dancing. Stars Reach has a bizarre means of health and stamina recovery, something Raph has carried over from Star Wars Galaxies, where it was both popular and made at least some sort of sense. In Stars Reach it's still popular with ex-SWG players, of whom there are many in the testing program, but to anyone who hasn't drunk from that particular jug of Kool-Aid, it makes absolutely no sense at all.

As I understand it, the way it works is that you stand near another player while they're dancing and that somehow heals you and restores your stamina. In SWG it would have happened in a Cantina or some kind of bar or club and the healing would have been done by a character of the Entertainer class, which definitely has a kind of logic to it. I can imagine someone, getting back to town after a long day of murder-hoboing, kicking back with a beer while watching a little pole-dancing to de-stress and unwind.

In Stars Reach, though, it's just standing next to some random guy in a camp, jigging about on his own. How that's supposed to lighten anyone's load I'm not really sure. Still, whatever gets your HP back, right?

Hit points and stamina recover on their own but only up to the max, which falls every time you die or do other things I'm not entirely clear on. I believe the cap does go back up on its own as well, albeit very slowly, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure about that. The new tutorial was trying to explain it to me when I foolishly closed it to do something else and then found I couldn't open it back up again. I sent a bug report about that because I do think you ought to be able to pause a tutorial at will, not just have the one shot at it.

I needed to go stand next to someone doing the space rhumba for a while because I'd knocked a lot off my health and especially my stamina with all the running away I'd had to do while I was map-making. The change to leashing has very much made running away the preferred means of dealing with unwanted attention from aggressive wildlife. I only died twice this time and both were when I stayed to fight.

You may die less often that way but bouncing across the increasingly rugged landscape like a runaway spacehopper does lead to a certain amount of unavoidable physical trauma all on its own. By the time I got my last Survey Point I was battered, bruised and bleeding but, having covered the entire map, I was also aware there was hardly anyone else there and of the people who were, no-one was holding an impromptu dance party.

I didn't have any more luck on the next planet. There were more people around, for sure, but they all seemed very busy, doing whatever it was they were doing. This building-focused phase of testing seems to be making everyone a lot more intent on leaving their mark on the world, although most of the marks in question seem to come in the form of huge, gaping, jagged holes it's all too easy to fall down. I did that. Several times.

As yet, I haven't made any serious attempts of my own to get to grips with building. I did, by sheer chance, manage to find my Homestead again, the one I placed last time then promptly lost. It was satisfying to find it was still there, a small sign of permanence in a very impermanent world.

I'd also put it in a really stupid place so the moment I found it I tore it down. I haven't found a new place to put it yet. I'm going to have to give that a lot more thought before I go in for any serious home-making.

So far, there's precious little evidence I can see of any major architectural projects in progress. Unlike Landmark in even its very earliest public incarnation, when vastly impressive structures sprouted from the ground almost immediately, construction in Stars Reach seems more a proof-of-concept than a system anyone's going to spend a lot of time with purely for creative reasons. Then again, that might say as much about the current cadre of testers as it does the tools they've been given.

What I did run into, once again, was one of those odd, shrine-like affairs with small, golden statues of animals. I think those are part of the infrastructure, not anything players can make or place, but what they're intended to suggest is beyond me. It's nice to find them, all the same. Evidence of any sort of non-player-made lore or civilization is thin on the ground at this stage of development.

Even though I had no interruptions this time around, I still ended up logging out ten minutes before the server came down. As a player, I felt I'd achieved quite a lot, having mapped one planet and half of a second and used the accrued xp points to fill out quite a large chunk of the skill matrix. I also sent in a few bug reports so I was reasonably comfortable I'd fulfilled my responsibilities as a tester.

Speaking of testing Stars Reach, as opposed to just playing it, the testing process for me seems like it's reaching a kind of plateau. I'm vaguely familiar with the controls, I have reasonable facility with their usage and I'm not running into that many bugs. I suspect the part of the game I'm still entrenched in has been fairly thouroughly tested by now. I'd need to move on to new things to start running into problems.

As a player, I'm in two minds over what to do next. I've explored most of the three planets. I can get around with an approximation of efficiency and do much of what I want to do at the basic survival and exploration level without too much difficulty. That's all good.

To progress further is going to require actual effort and I'm not sure how I feel about that. As I wrote in a previous post, Stars Reach seems to start with a presumption that players (And therefore testers.) will want to create goals for themselves and find much of their motivation and pleasure in working towards achieving them - with the emphasis on the work part. 

That really isn't me or not any more. I don't much like the buckle down and grind it out approach in live games, where there's full persistence and progression, so the appeal of doing it in a testing environment where wipes are frequent isn't at all clear. 

Housing is a great example of my problem. I love building homes in games but once I've done it I tend to enjoy living in them. Otherwise, what was ther point? Even when I run out of space to build or decorate, I'm still more likely to learn to put up with an overstuffed, chaotic home than tear it down and start over. 

The exception to that would be Valheim, where building a base was an integral part of the fast-transit system. That did motivate me sling a string of shacks across the landscape and once I had the walls up, I couldn't leave well alone. It's why I have literally dozens of half-built homes there and also why I logged twice as many hours in the Viking afterlife sim than any other non-MMO I've ever played.

Maybe when Stars Reach goes live in a few years, I'll do the same there. For now, though, while I'd love to explore how the building tools work, I don't have the energy or the commitment to put hours into it, knowing I'll have to start over again in a week or a month or whenever it is the next build lands. 

Similarly, I enjoyed mapping one planet but I can't say I'm getting anything like the same satisfaction out of mapping a second. Things that are fun to do once or twice don't always stay fun forever.

I'm aware this is a test not a game and that having fun isn't the point. Some degree of fun is, however, necessary if I'm going to want to do it at all. At the moment I am still enjoying myself and being able to write posts like this is motivation enough but I'm close to the point of having said most of what I have to say about what there is of the game so far, or at least about the part of it I'm willing to take the time to discover.

That was apparent this time, when I decided to stop before I had to. It won't put me off playing again. I just need to think ahead a bit and have some prepared goals in mind. Paradoxically, while I know I'd have more fun if the servers were up all day, so long as they're only up for a couple of hours, that couple of hours can feel too long, especially when I have no particular purpose in mind.

There are quite a few more things I'd like to fiddle around with other than housing. I'd like to see if filling out the combat tree makes standing my gorund a viable option, for a start. It'd be nice not to have to run away every time.

I'd like to look at the crafting options more closely too, not least because there is an alternative to watching people dance I ought to be making more use of. You can make plasters out of bananas that restore a large amount of health. If I could figure out how to make those it would be a big help. Maybe there's a recipe that restores stamina, too. It's not that I want to be anti-social but you can't always find a dancer when you need one.

So there. Seems like I do have a few attainable goals after all. When's the next test?

Day Nineteen - Nice

Christmas In Suburbia
The Wynotte Sisters

Day Nineteen - Naughty

Christmas On The M62
Wreckless Eric

Day Eighteen - Nice

I Want An Allosaurus For Christmas
Parry Gripp

Day Eighteen - Naughty

Tyrannosaurus Rex For Christmas
The Lovely Eggs

Day Seventeen - Nice

Holly Leaves And Christmas Trees
Elvis Presley

Day Seventeen - Naughty

Blue Christmas
Los Colorados

An Extravagant Journey To Nowhere?

If you'd asked me this time last year if I was interested in paying $40 for a couple of years unrestricted access to Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, I'd have answered "Hell, yeah!". I've said a number of times in various comments here and there over the decade or so since the game was first announced that I'd be willing to pay the same for access to the test builds as I paid for Landmark and that cost me a lot more than forty dollars

I bought in to Landmark at the earliest opportunity, the paid alpha that started at the beginning of February, nearly eleven years ago. From memory, I think it cost around a hundred dollars for the Founder's Pack. I bought one for me and another for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present; a couple of hundred dollars in total. 

As I said in that very first post after the NDA dropped, something that happened almost immediately, presumably because SOE didn't fancy trying to police the whole thing for a moment longer than they had to, "That officially makes my Founder's Pack purchase worthwhile right there."

I was referring to the blogging possibilities but in the end, I very much felt I got my money's worth out of Landmark from the gameplay as well as a source of material for posts. I spent a great number of happy hours there over the three years the game lasted.

Two of those years were in testing; just one as a live game. As a commercial product, Landmark was an abject failure, surviving barely a year after its launch in 2016. I'm sure there were multiple reasons why the game closed down but the main one was because no-one was playing it.

In common with most games developed by Sony Online Entertainment, Landmark had an in-game chat command that let you see how many other people were playing. I was in the habit of checking it every time I played. How many were online when I was? Almost literally no-one. Every time.

These days, there's a positively nauseating amount of faux nostalgia for the game with people praising it to the skies for all kinds of things it never was. If those people loved it so much, I have to wonder, why were none of them playing it at the end? Or pretty much the entire time the game was "live"?

The most irritating part of the whole self-serving love-fest is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Back in 2017, when the closure date was announced, the infinitesimally small part of the internet that gave a damn at all was outraged! Not because of the closure per se but for Landmark's supposed role in the already-announced abandonment of the shibboleth,that was EQNext.

I was no more convinced by that anger then than I am by the suppposed affection now. I spent much of the post I wrote about it at the time railing at "the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark", all of whom were falling over themselves to pour vitriol on Daybreak, whose only real error had been to let the game struggle on as long as it did.

I quoted Tyler F. M. Edwards extensively, along with Feldon at EQ2Wire, as they ripped into both the MMO community and the former SOE management for the endless self-delusion and gaslighting that led to such over-inflated, unachievable expectations in the first place. It's curious that both those links still work. Gaming blogs lasting longer than the games they cover - who'd have imagined?

Landmark, of course, was supposed to be the creative pipeline for John Smedley and Dave Georgeson's surreal and wholly unconvincing EQNext project, a bizarre and from this distant perspective positively deranged plan to have players build the infrastructure of one game while playing another while getting paid for doing it, presumably at pennies on the dollar compared to what it would cost to employ professional artists. 

Thinking about it now, it's like some weird, twisted pre-echo of the crypto/NFT Pay2Earn model, where somehow playing a game earns you money while you have fun, a virtuous circle of back-scratchers, all sitting on each others' laps and taking in each others' washing so no-one needs to buy chairs or do their own laundry ever again. Or something like that.

EQNext, lest we forget, was the pipe-dream successor to EverQuest although, awkwardly, EverQuest already had a successor, EverQuest II, something no-one seemed willing to acknowledge back then. Or now, for that matter.

Even more awkwardly, EQ had already received a much more convincing sequel in the form of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, a game which, for all its well-remarked and rehearsed flaws, very clearly iterated and expanded on the original EverQuest formula, something it was well-placed to do, considering it had at its head the prime visionary responsible for the franchise itself, Brad McQuaid.

For a short while Vanguard fared rather better, commercially, than Landmark but also suffered badly from being pressed upon an eager and receptive public in a painfully unfinished and, for some, wholly unplayable state. As happened with Landmark to a lesser degree, most of those shortcomings were addressed and overcome in live development but by then the damage had been done. There was no-one left to see how much better the games were becoming.

Once again, I bought into Vanguard at my earliest opportunity. I applied for testing and got in a few months before launch, when I found the game would barely run on my PC, something that happened to many testers and later to paying customers. Instead of giving up on the whole thing I did some research on what was needed to get the game to run comfortably. Buy a new PC was the solution.

There was a lot of helpful information on the beta forums concerning which graphics cards and CPUs handled the game most effectively, so before the game launched, I had new PCs built for myself and Mrs Bhagpuss, using components chosen specifically with the aim of running Vanguard reliably. This they did extremely well, meaning that while other players were raging and rage-quitting over the inability of their state-of-the-art rigs to run the game at all, we were both playing quite happily on mid-range PCs with as much facility as we'd ever played any other MMORPG.

I point all of this out to mark the contrast between what I was willing to do ten or fifteen years ago in order to play an MMORPG that really appealed to me and what I'm willing to do today. Back then, not only was I ready to pay a couple of hundred dollars just to get into an alpha, I was willing to spend a couple of thousand dollars buying new PCs to play a new game.

Today it appears I won't even stump up $40 for a game I've been waiting to play for almost a decade. So what changed?

A few things. I'm not going to claim that, like Wilhelm, I've fallen off the MMO path, but I am certainly no longer pounding down that trail, ignoring every turning. I still enjoy MMORPGs. I still play them. But nowadays I play a lot of other games as well and I enjoy them just as much. Maybe more.

At the moment, though, I'm not spending all that much time playing video games at all. Maybe a couple of hours, most days. Often not even that. Sometimes I go a whole day without logging into any games at all! I'm not making any grand claims about being over gaming or anything silly like that. It's just that I seem to have a lot of demands on my time just now and something has to give. Games are an easy place to make the cull.

Still, I absolutely will make time for something that interests or intrigues me. Play-testing Stars Reach, for example, has been quite awkward but I've made the effort and intend to continue. 

Tellingly, in some ways Stars Reach, whose development team includes one Dave Georgeson, is very much the spiritual successor to the game EQNext was supposed to be, only this time it's being developed without most of the hubris and bluster with a far more grounded idea of the time and effort involved. And, of course, with the benefit of another decade of technological development, which I suspect is where the magic sauce that seems to be making the whole thing work this time has come from.

Pantheon Early Access, being available 24/7, is immeasurably more convenient for me to play than Stars Reach with its two-hour tests so, especially given I've been itching to play it for years, what's holding me back? Surely it can't just be that $40 tag? It is a bit steep for an EA game, true, but given that VR, until very recently, was planning not only on charging for the game itself but also piling a monthly subscription on top, $40 for at least two years play seems like a decent deal.

(The subscription, by the way, is no longer a certainty. The notes on the EA launch on the game's Steam page include the following fudge: "originally, we contemplated on following a sub model, but are still evaluating our options and will be using the Early Access phase to open that dialogue with players."  The ground is clearly being softened for a more accessible payment model.)

No, it's neither lack of time nor lack of money that's keeping me from playing Pantheon right away. It's experience. Personal experience. Granted, there was only about an hour of it but it was more than enough. 

I was very eager to get a hands-on with the game when Visionary Realms somewhat unexpectedly opened the doors briefly for any interested parties to wander in and take a look. There was - and presumably still is - an NDA on that, so I'm not going into any detail, but I don't think any NDA can reasonably prevent me saying how I felt while I was playing . I can sum it up in a word: bored.

I can forgive games in development a great deal. They can be buggy, glitched, laggy and nowhere even close to being finished and I'll still happily spend time with them and give them good word of mouth, so long as I'm engaged, interested, amused or entertained. Boring me, though? That's unforgivable.

And I'm quite hard to bore. I'm very easily pleased. I can and do play through the starting areas of countless MMORPGs with pleasure, even when I have no intention of carrying on. I love early-game play and I particularly love diku-MUD-inspired leveling. For a game with that heritage to fail to grip me even for as long as it takes to get out of the starting zone is almost unheard of but Pantheon managed it.

Obviously, without being able to discuss the reasons for that in any shape or form, my boredom stands entirely as a description of my state of mind. It tells you nothing about the game itself, other than that I didn't manage to become engaged, let alone enthralled by it.

I didn't, for whatever reason, which is why I'm loathe to drop forty dollars to see if it gets better, later. Maybe it does. It would certainly need to.

It would also seem that I'm no longer willing to spend real-life money just to have something new to write about. For that, I don't even need to enjoy the game. Negatively critical posts are often easier to write than positive ones and they can be more entertaining to read, too, provided you get the tone right. The problem is, I'd still have find something to do in the game that wasn't as boring to read about as it was to do and I'm not sure what that might be.

For the time being, then, a combination of factors prevents me from adding Pantheon to my Steam account. It's a bit pricey for what they're offering and I find it hard to imagine wanting to play it or write about it rather than any of my many other options. I mean, it's hard enough right now to get myself to log into games I like. Honestly, if I can't persuade myself to spend time with games I'm enjoying, what chance is there for a game that makes me feel bored just thinking about it?

And yet, for all of that, I almost certainly will buy into Pantheon's Early Access, eventually. Probably sooner rather than later, too. The New Year should see a substantial drop in demands on my time and very likely there'll also be a significant deterioration in the weather, both of which should mean more time to play video games. I don't expect to be able to resist the temptation to "just take a look" for too much longer.

If and when I do, you can be sure I'll give some account of what I find. There's no NDA on Early Access, although I'm sure someone will try it one day. Let's just hope I can summon up enough enthusiasm to get out of the starting area next time.

Day Sixteen - Nice

 

Santa Pick Up The Phone

Walk Off The Earth

Day Sixteen - Naughty

Christmas By The Phone

Good Charlotte

Day Fifteen - Nice

 

Snoopy's Christmas 

Royal Guardsmen

Day Fifteen - Naughty

 

Christmas Time Is Here

Khruangbin

Day Fourteen - Nice

 

 

He Doesn't Have Christmas

Team YeYe

Day Fourteen - Naughty

 

 

K, I already have money to play the AIA roller coaster, so when do you come back

Salty Chick & I Still Believe In You

Yet Another Grab Bag Because I Am All Out Of Original Ideas Again

Am I imagining it or did End of Year lists not used to come out at the end of the year? Not any more. I've been peppered with the blasted things since the beginning of December. I love lists but I wasn't ready, dammit!

I was planning on doing my own Best Of 2024 in 2025 but now I worry it'll be old news by then. I'm working on it, anyway. It's a bit top-heavy. I haven't posted a What Have I Been Listening To... since mid-October and it looks like that's going to be the last of the year, so there's almost a quarter of the year missing.

As for games and TV, which I guess would be the other two categories, both of those have tailed right off, too. Makes me wonder what I've been doing with my time. Also, why it is that the less I work and the more spare time I have, the more it seems like I never have time to get anything done?

But I digress. Which just means I'm awake. Let's get on.

Star Quality

One of the nailed-on certainties for my Best Music On Inventory Full 2024 Edition list (I'll firm that title up, don't fret.) has to be DC Fontaines' Starburster. I largely ignored the first few years of the Irish fashion-disasters' career but their sudden swerve into nuanced, layered, textural soundscapes took me by happy surprise.

It seems I wasn't the only one to notice. Someone in Gearbox Software's marketing department appears to be a fan. The new trailer for Borderlands 4 is cut to the aforementioned Starburster.

When I saw the news I was intrigued but unconvinced and having watched the trailer I'm even less convinced than that. It's a nice idea but, while someone's taken great care to try and sync the animations to the ryhthm and even to make the lyrics sorta-kinda fit, the visuals are just far too lightweight to match the music. 

DC Fontaines' sound is thick. It's a blend of post-punk and grunge, the sharp clarity of the former infused with the sonic density of the latter. Borderland is a cartoon. I'm not sure if the idea is to buy back some gravitas after the disaster that was the Borderlands movie (Still haven't seen it; still want to.) but if so, I don't think this is going to do it.

As for whether the game will be any good, I have no idea. Ask someone who plays.

And A Nightingale In A Pear Tree

Is the week before Christmas an odd time to release a major update? I'm not sure. It is the holiday season so people will have some spare time, I guess. But won't most of those people be busy doing holiday stuff? 

End of November/beginning of December, that slot I get. It falls neatly into the "Anticipating Fun" window, while avoiding the "This Is Just Too Much Now" frenzy of the latter half of the month. In the olden days, when you could actually go to a store and buy a game in a box, it made plenty of commercial sense to put new product on shelves for people to buy and I suppose that could still work in this digital age for people who think sending a code counts as gift-giving but this a free update. 

Wouldn't it be better after the holidays, when people still have some down-time and might be looking for something to carry them through the dark, dismal days of the empty year ahead? Not to mention that it's an update and it will go wrong. Do the devs really want to have to come in Christmas week to fix what they broke? Or, worse, will they just go home for the festivities and leave it to later?

I guess if the game is Nightingale, which it is, and only about five hundred people still play, on a good day, it's something of a moot point. The real surprise is that there are any updates at all. How long can it go on?

As to what's in this one, it's a little vague but here's a list because lists are great.

1. NPC Automation
2. Building UI Updates
3. New Tileset (Fae-themed Obsidian)
4. Winter Holiday Event including pets, seasonal outfits, furniture and snow.
   
5. "Listen Server" - lets players talk to each other without having to be in multiplayer mode.

I might have to log in just to see the new snow. I do love snow. 

Otherwise, I think I might just be over Nightingale now, at least until the update that adds Nightingale City itself. That I would love to see. Doubtful it will ever happen but as the devs point out in the video, while the overall rating on Steam is mixed, the Recent Review rating is Very Positive so things are at least going in the right direction.

An Epic Early New Year's Resolution

I just referred to Nightingale's Steam player count as I frequently do with games I play on Steam. It is, of course, important to remember that, with a few exceptions, most games, particularly MMOs and MMOlikes, are available on other platforms as well.

Some of those are proprietory logins for individual games or Publisher Portals like NetEase's Loading Bay but Steam does have a direct competitor in the shape of Epic Games. Nightingale is on that so maybe more people play it there.

I have an Epic Games account. I just never remember to use it. Or that it exists. I do add things to it every once in a while via Prime Gaming but that's now so nicely automated I don't have to leave Prime to do it, which means I just click the freebies onto my EG account and promptly forget I have them.

I was moved to make the effort and actually log into my Epic account yesterday by a welcome PSA from Tobold, who posted to let everyone know that The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is free on Epic Games this week. Thaniks, Tobold!

It wasn't a game I had on my radar but Tobold's description ("a procedurally generated "open world" survival crafting game") and advice ("if you like survival crafting games like Valheim, this is certainly worth checking out") caught my interest, so I logged in to grab it. And I'm glad I did.

Not because of the Moria game itself. I haven't tried it yet. What pleased me was finding another game, Infinity Nikki, one I'm a lot more interested in playing, is also available for free from the Epic Game store. 

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was about to play this one when I found I didn't have enough drive space to install it. I still don't although I will do after Christmas, when I'll either have received a new SDD as a gift or have bought one for myself if not. I already have the standalone installer downloaded but it would be much neater to have the game available from a platform I'm already using (Or could be using, if I was more organized, which is where that New Year's resolution comes in.)

While I was logged in, I also noticed a bunch of other games I own there that I probably ought at least to take a look at, like some of the Borderland titles, BioShock and Frostpunk. I also notice that, like Tobold, I have notifications set to inform me of all the games Epic gives away for free. Unfortunately, because notifications annoy me, I have Desktop Notifications switched off so I never see them. I wonder if there's a way to get those by email?

Surely He Can't Have MORE Music?

Ohhh yes he can! I'd start an actual music blog if I thought anyone would see it. Maybe I should seriously think about that for the New Year...

Meanwhile, as I was saying earlier, I've fallen completely behind in posting my current listening habits. Partly that's because of all the Christmas music but it's also largely down to a change in viewing habits. I'm doing most of my musical investigations on the laptop late at night and I've been very lax in transferring that data to my PC, where it needs to be before I'm likely to do anything with it. 

I have got a few things bookmarked over here, though, so I think I can find something. How about this?

Today's "Naughty" Christmas number is a tune by Advance Base. Advance Base is actually one guy called Owen Ashworth, who also works under the better-known (For a given definition of "known".) name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

I was familiar with that band name but I'd never bothered to listen to anything by them. It reminded me of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and I imagined they'd be part of that noughties, New York, post-twee scene, of which I have probably heard as much as I care to by now. 

I was wrong. It's not that. It's something arguably more interesting, much as I love my tweepop. Ashworth specialises in slice-of-life narratives, delivered in a sort of lo-fi, indie electronica fashion that verges on outsider art. He has a new album out under the Advance Base name which Stereogum just made its Album of the Week. 

They describe it as "a haunting, minimalist collection of story-songs set in the same fictional town where only bad things happen". It's called Horrible Occurences and here's a track from it.

And we're done.

Day Thirteen - Nice

 

Americana Christmas 

The Bell And The Hammer

Day Thirteen - Naughty

Christmas In Nightmare City

Advance Base

Seasonal Drift

Meaningful posts are likely to be thin on the ground around here for a while (So what's new?) thanks to seasonal factors but I like to keep to the schedule all the same. In that vein, here's an extremely brief observation on Once Human, which I logged into for the first time in around a month today.

The Season thing really isn't working for me. I've given it a fair shot but it's just too jumpy for comfort. Partly, that's down to the scenarios as much as the process. 

I really enjoyed The Way of Winter for the first three phases. I played for something like forty hours across the first four weeks. Then Phase Four arrived and made my playstyle mostly untenable. I couldn't even log in and get the heating on in my house before the cold killed me.

That led to me dropping out of the game entirely. I could have moved my house to somewhere less directly affected by the Chaosweaver blizzards but it wasn't directly within one of the danger areas anyway, so how much difference that would have made seemed uncertain.

The upside, from my perspective, was that I immediately forgot all about the game. Even though it's probably my favorite MMORPG of the year and certainly the one that got most of my votes in the Steam poll and even though it had been my main game for several weeks, I found it remarkably easy to stop playing.

Partly, that's down to the repetitive nature of the Seasonal structure. The Way of Winter was very different but prior to that I had a long run in beta and then two Seasons, all of which were basically the same. Mostly, though, it's down to lack of continuity, which is very much a double-edged sword in terms of retention.

The negative effect is it makes me feel nothing really has any permanence so there's no point making much of an effort. Eternaland is nice for what it is but it feels completely separate from the "real" game. It's more like a place I store my stuff when I'm not playing than an actively playable alternative.

The impermanence obviously makes it a lot easier to drop the game and play something else instead. Everything I've done is going to be wiped at the end of the Season anyway. No point getting too attached.

On the other hand, the cyclical nature of the Seasons means it's easy to come back any time I feel like another run. Better yet, every time there's a new Season I can take a look at the scenario and if it sounds interesting I basically have a brand new game to play.

My server is now in the wind-down phase. The moment I logged in I got a prompt telling me to consider my options for next Season. The problem with that is, as far as I can tell there's no new scenario in prospect just yet. Another Season is going to be the same as one I've already played.

I don't think there's much chance of me signing up for another tour. I'll have a look but I imagine I'll sit it out in Eternaland until there's some actual, new content. Then I'll most likely come back and play the heck out of it for half the Season before drifting away again.

It's not a bad deal from my perspective. A lot better than, say, Valheim, where the devs' main goal with every update seems to be to make the game no fun to play at all . How well it will work for Starry, commercially in the long run, I'm not so sure. I can't help feeling a more traditional MMORPG format with a good deal more permanence would have locked in more people for longer but who knows?

Certainly, numbers have fallen a long way. As I write, there are just over 21,000 playing, which is pretty good as it goes but still a 90% drop from the peak last summer. 

That said, these days, a hold of ten per cent after six months is solid.  Steam charts show the game's population trending very consistently downwards as the Season comes to its conclusion but it will most likely trend back up as soon as there's something new to do. When that will be, though, is anyone's guess.

Day Twelve - Nice

 

One Christmas Catalogue

 Captain Sensible