A Plague On Both Their Houses (It's What They Would Have Wanted)

In recognition of the season, Mrs Bhagpuss, far spookier than I, has been re-watching the Addams Family movies along with the Wednesday TV show, which was presumably why she came into the kitchen as I was sitting there, eating toast the other morning and asked, a propos of nothing, "Munsters or Addams Family?".

Clearly there could only ever be one correct answer to this question, an answer which I duly gave without hesitation. That evening, though, as I was trawling YouTube for even more obscure and ludicrous Christmas songs for the 2024 Inventory Full Advent Calendar (Oh yes, it's coming...) I found myself wondering if there were any covers of the theme tunes to either of those shows.

Of course there are. Fricken' hundreds of them. There were so many, I gave up scrolling after a while. It was like one of those spiral staircases that keep going down and down and down until you scent the faint reek of brimstone wafting up to meet you...

I guess it's not surpising so many people have felt entitled to take a tilt at these two. They're both insanely catchy, as was the way of TV themes once upon a time, most especially in the 1960s, when subliminal advertising was an actual thing and the goal of most TV theme tunes seemed to be to embed a short, musical phrase so deeply into the viewer's brain it could never be dislodged even by years of therapy. 

Advertising of the time worked on the same principle, which is why anyone over fifty can sing you the jingles written to sell several dozen products and services that ceased to be a commercial proposition before you, my little angel, were ever born.

No, the question wasn't so much would there be any covers. It was would any of them be any good?

And the answer? 

Not really. 

I listened to far too many of them. Or, rather, I listened to fragments. Most of them I couldn't stick for more than the time it took to register how dull they were. Here's the thing with theme tunes of the era. They're really short and yet far too long and for good reason. 

Back in the days of broadcast TV, when it was be there or miss out, the theme needed to be highly distinctive so that everyone in the house, no matter where they were, could prick up their ears at the opening bars, put down whatever they were doing, dry their hands or adjust their clothing and have time to get to the lounge or the living room or wherever the one TV set in the house was casting flickering black and white shadows across the floral wallpaper, in time to get settled down on the sofa for the start of the actual show.

At the same time, the theme had to be short enough not to wear out the patience of anyone already watching when it began, so as to minimise the chances of their switching to another channel. A delicate balancing act, especially when the music also needed to be supported by something to watch while you were waiting for the damn show to start.

None of which really leans into the strengths of three minute pop songs, which is what theme tunes turn into when musicians get their claws into them. Even if you cut that three minutes in half it seems long. Most covers of The Addams Family theme clock in around 1.45 and it still drags.

The Munsters theme benefits from having no words. It's easier to listen to an instrumental that overstays its welcome because it's easier to tune it out. Which isn't much of a compliment, now I think about it. 

The odd thing about that is that the Munsters theme actually does have lyrics. They just aren't used in the opening to the show. You can hear them on an L.P. (That's a kind of vinyl record they used to have in the olden days before the Beatles invented The Album.) It was called "At Home With The Munsters" and it came out in 1964, which seems surprisingly early, although I imagine in the UK we got the show several years late.

Being an instrumental also fits the Munsters theme very well for the kind of bands who seem keenest to take a crack at it. Given the macabre theme, you might expect it would be goths but I imagine most goths wouldn't be willing to acknowledge the comedic influence even of the genuinely macabre Addams Family, much less the cartoonish slapstick of the Munsters. 

Surf bands, though... they freakin' love this kind of stuff. And the theme itself is kinda surfy already so it's not a long reach. The early sixties was the heyday of surf rock so the synergies are clear. The Munsters theme does work as a surf tune, even at three minutes plus. I found it far easier to listen to a few of those all the way through than to hear all that finger-clicking and herky-jerky, stop-start performance art from the folks who like to dress up as Wednesday and Fester.

Because oh yes, you have to drag up if you're going to cover the Addams Family. It's the law. I mean. quite a few of the guys doing the Munsters theme give a nod to Fred Gwynne's goofy take on Frankenstein but it's so much easier to put on a black frock and white socks and do your hair up in pigtails than it is to get a bolt through your neck...

Anyway, that's enough pre-amble. Let's have some of the more listenable examples I found. Somewhere in the Addams Family's sub-basement there's a helpless fan who stopped by to get an autograph and just happened to mention they loved the theme tune, who's now trapped there, doomed to watch every cover version ever recorded on a loop. Forever.

Sorry. That was The Good Place bleeding over I think. Which is kind of appropriate. That show is turning out to be a lot spookier than I was expecting...

First up, I think we should remind ourselves of the originals.

There's a version someone hand-colorised, too, if you're into that.

Good job! As Miss Rachel would say. Up against this, though...

Class will out, as the saying goes.

And now, the covers. I think three of each ought to be more than enough. Let's have them take it in turns, like it's some kind of competition.

That's Surfquake. The sound's a bit muddy but bonus points for working a little Led Zeppelin in towards the end there.

From the aptly-named "Covers No-One Asked For" channel, this stands out for being what a good cover should be, namely recognizable but also very different from the original. Bonus points for doing Morticia and Gomez not Wednesday and Fester.

At this point you should have just watched a video credited only to "4 sisters". It's four sisters. In their house. And a fifth sister who runs in and out of shot at the beginning and the end. Unfortunately, they turn out to be on one of those irritating channels that blocks playback anywhere other than YouTube so you'll have to go there to watch it. It's worth the trip. The concentration on display could fuel a mission to Mars. Bonus points for no-one dressing up as Wednesday. Not like any of them needed to...

Anyway, I had to substitute, so what better than fourteen (By my count.) kids playing the spooktacular theme outdoors on a blazingly sunny day? They're Miramonte's Modern Band because nothing says "modern" like a cover of a sixty year-old TV theme. Bonus points for there being so many of them and not one of them looking like they ever saw the show.

I don't know about you but I'm always saying how there just aren't enough washboard covers on YouTube. Worth watching all the way through. The ending is really weird. Bonus points for dressing up as Wednesday and getting it right, for once.

I'll see your washboard and raise you a harpsichord, a tuba and an accordion. Bonus points for keeping it really short.

And finally, a Blues Rock band from Lyon France because who doesn't want to hear that? Especially with guest vocals from a woman who sounds like Violet Elizabeth Bott on helium. The band is called Midnight Burst, which doesn't sound very french to me and the singer is Astrid Gaspari, "singer of B-Odd, Fancy Hell and Back to the Seventies", all of whom I'm going to check out immediately I finish this post. Bonus points for... well, everything.

That's it. I'm done. Happy Halloween!

#14 - Shonki - Born 13 April 2003 - 49 days 4 hours

Shonki may have fewer played hours than some of my other characters but he racked up nearly all of those in groups. He's without doubt my most-grouped character, the time I spent with him marking the apogee of my social career in EverQuest, which was, for a time, all-consuming.

Before I played him, I already knew I liked healing for groups. I'd done a fair bit of it with Rachel. Main-healing at max level as a Cleric for a static group in EQ in the early years, though... that was a lot different to playing a Druid, healing for mid-20s pick-up groups at back door behind the Sarnak Fort in Lake of Ill Omen.

I was a purist back then. It was okay for a Druid, being something of a Jill of All Trades, to be doing other things between heals but a Cleric had one job and one job only: to keep everyone alive. 

I was pretty good at it, too. I ought to have been. I sure took it seriously. I took a dim view of Clerics who didn't. The kind who thought it was okay to get a few licks in with the hammer now and then or cast the odd Smite. I hated it when one of those narcissists turned up in any group I was tanking for, so I made sure never to be That Guy in any group I joined as a Cleric.

Not that everyone appreciated such thoughtfulness. There was a term in use at the time - Sit-and-Heal Cleric. It sounds now as though it might have been an insult and it was, on occasion. If the group was cruising, sometimes resentment could attach itself to the poor old Cleric, just sitting there at the back with his spell-book in his lap and his mind on God, raking in the xp and doing sod all.

My semi-static group didn't feel like that, fortnately. We had maybe fifteen or twenty regulars from whome we permed groups most evenings and all of them were more than happy to have me as main healer, even if I did meditate the day away. They all knew the value of a trustworthy, reliable Cleric one who wasn't going to run out of mana on a bad pull. 

A lot of PUGs were also happy to get a true Sit-and-Heal Cleric. Someone who could be relied on not to have blown all their mana when it came time to bring the heals because they'd used it all up nuking. Someone who wouldn't be caught round the side of a mob, flailing away with a hammer for next to no damage, while not even noticing an add had arrived. 

Someone who could be trusted to do the damn job they'd be invited into the group for in the first place in other words. That was me.

For a while I was damn near religious about it. I used to rate my performance and the performance of the group as a whole on how little I'd had to do. A perfect two-hour session would involve me sitting on my backside at full mana for maybe an hour and fifty minutes. I'd pride myself on having done absolutely nothing apart from standing up occasionally, casting a perfectly-timed Complete Heal, then sitting down again.

That was the dream but there weren't too many sessions that went that way. I imagine if there had been we'd all have gotten pretty bored and if there was one thing I never suffered from as a Cleric in EverQuest in those days it was boredom. Anxiety, stress, blind panic - sure. Every night and twice on a Sunday. Boredom, rarely.

What generally happened was that the session would start with some tense moments just getting to the pull spot, followed by some more adreniline rushes as we got it cleared. Then we'd settle into a ryhthm and start chatting, between and even during pulls, until we'd all relax and slip into a false sense of security.

At which point whoever was pulling would stumble back, close to dead with an add or several on their tail or the group down the corridor would get into trouble and run, leaving us to deal with their train or some careless twonk would break mez or aggro a passing mob that ought to have kept walking and it would be Deal With It Or Die time. Again.

That was when I'd have to jump up and start throwing the heals. It was a bit like being a museum guard. Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens but you daren't fall asleep because when it does you have to be the one to stop it. 

I loved the quiet but I also loved those moments of chaos and although I would certainly have taken a peaceful session over a chaotic one, it was the frenzied, desperate battle to survive our own or someone else's mistakes that created the memories that lasted, some of them until this day a couple of decades later. Blurry, sure, but still recognizeable.

As time went on and the game changed around us, the need for Clerics to do nothing but sit and heal diminished and my personal commitment to the abastract purity of the calling began to fade, too. Eventually even I used to cast that hammer that hit things without needing me to hold it, because why not? I even threw in the occasional nuke here and there. And when the all-instance Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion arrived in September 2003 I added pulling to my clerical duties. 

I'd done some pulling as Druid and I loved the role. Druids and Rangers get a spell called Harmony. It's an AE, it's unresistable and it causes mobs that would usually come to the assistance of their nearby colleagues to just stand there, oblivious, ignoring their best pals as they scream for help. It's ridiculously overpowered outdoors but it doesn't work at all in a dungeon. 

I'd used Harmony with Rachel, acting as puller for groups at the Sarnak Fort and especially outside the Tower of Frozen Shadows, so I knew how to pull, which at the time was a very particular and specialised role in any group. Clerics get a line of spells that does much the same thing, except it's nowhere near as good, being both single target and resistable. 

It does, however, work in dungeons and when LDoN led to Mrs Bhagpuss and I spending almost every evening for six months doing nothing but instanced dungeons with our semi-static group, I became the puller on the nights we didn't have a Bard, Bards being the undisputed kings and queens of dungeon-pulling. Or they were back then, anyway, just as Rangers held that title out of doors.

Clericking suited me. I loved pulling, I loved healing and quite liked buffing, too, which was something else Clerics became increasingly valued for. There was a time when no-one would even leave Plane of Knowledge without Virtue or Temperance, whichever would stick at their level. You could get rich, casting those for a fee or a donation.

Buffing your own group cost money, though, which is why a lot of Clerics got grumpy about being asked to do it for free. I was lucky. Playing mainly with people I knew, I'd get handed Peridots to replace the expensive gems I was using as reagents, sometimes so many I'd come away with a small profit.

As must be obvious, I really loved being the main healer in groups. Indeed, it was many years before I stopped thinking of myself as that in every MMORPG I played, despite there being precious little evidence to support the claim. 

I drew the line at healing raids, though. I did try it a couple of times, in open raids, which were a thing for a while. Someone with more patience than a rock would spend an hour or two recruiting players in chat to come join a raid on some fairly accessible boss. Then they'd try to manage the ensuing chaos so that not everyone died.

At the time raiding generally required multiple clerics just to keep the Main Tank alive, a task they achieved only by means of something called a Complete Heal Chain, which was like playing Russian Roulette with the gun pointed at sombody else's head. A bunch of Clerics would all be given a number. They'd have the tank targeted and when the fight started they'd count off until it was their turn to cast Complete Heal. Then they carry on counting until their turn came around again and that was the raid as far as they were concerned.

At one point Complete Heal literally healed the target to full health, no matter how many hit points that took, but later it was given a fixed, very large total. Either way, it was the biggest heal available. And the slowest. 

Complete Heal takes ten full seconds to cast.  I got to be very good at timing its use in a group, where I was in full control of when to start. In a Complete Heal Chain, all autonomy is stripped away. You count the seconds between the first cast and your turn and god forbid you be the one who fucks up. No pressure, then...

It's one of those gaming experiences I'm happy to be able to say I did but which I did not enjoy at the time and never wanted to do again. Although I did do it a couple of times so it can't have been that traumatic.

I did know my limits, though, and raid healing was outside of them. So, as it turned out, was main-healing bleeding-edge, at-cap content in the infamous Gates of Discord expansion. One of the last things Shonki did before Mrs Bhagpuss and I decamped for EQII was to join a PUG going into one of the early GoD zones. 

This was a good while after the expansion had landed, by which time pretty much everyone I knew was already refusing to set foot in it again. I was still curious to see more, though, so I answered a LFM call for Clerics from someone wanting to do something or other in one of the instanced zones, one I'd never seen.

The group turned out to be just two people, a couple of high-end raiders who wanted a healbot. They told me what to cast and when to cast it and I did exactly as I was told. A bit of a change from my regular groups, where it was me calling all the shots as often as not and always me grunting "FFS!" angrily, whenever anything didn't go exactly the way I thought it should.

I still marvel at the fact we all didn't die on the first pull. In fact, the three of us managed to do whatever it was they went there to do and got out in one piece. It was one of the most stressful groups I ever had in any game and it pretty much decided me I was done healing in GoD for good.

Maybe Omens of War, the next expansion, woulfd have set things right. It ddid for some people. By then, though, I was ready for something new. Off to EQII I went, along with half the people I knew.

And that was more or less the last I saw of Shonki. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I returned to EQ, it was to play different characters on a different server. I did briefly try soloing Shonki with a mercenary when they were added to the game but that really was boring. I retired him after that and in retirement is where he remains.

I realise now I haven't explained why I called him Shonki in the first place. There's a reason for that. I didn't. Mrs Bhagpus did. He was her character, at least to begin with.

Shonki had a very odd start in life. Mrs Bhagpuss created him and named him that because she liked the sound of the word, which means something like "dodgy" or "shifty" in Yiddish. She then proceeded to play him in a way that entirely lived up to that name, especially when spelled with an "i", the way a stripper would spell it.

Okay, let's be honest. Shonki was once, as Mark Knopfler put it in the song he wrote and later gave to Tina Turner,  a privated dancer, a dancer for money. He did what you wanted him to do. And got well paid for it.

At that time in EQ, guard-killing was an established if controversial method of soloing. Later, the devs made many guards virtually unkillable but in 2003 most of them were still (un)fair game and there would usually be a couple of Dark Elves or an Ogre or two outside the gates of East Freeport, pulling the gate guards and slaughtering them as fast as they spawned.

As I mentioned when I was giving Timblewoot's backstory, there were some corrupt guards whose helmets you could hand in for a decent cash reward and some very good faction and xp. The bad guys killing guards at the gate didn't care about any of that. They just wanted the xp for killing them.

For a few weeks, Shonki, with Mrs Bhagpuss's help and encouragement, ran a small business servicing these reprobates. They couldn't go into Freeport for food and drink or whatever else they needed so she Shonki would go and get it for them. 

That wouldn't have been so bad but she'd also dressed him all in leather armor, which for some reason displayed on a Gnome like a shiny, wet-look gimp suit, which may be why she also had him dance for them, a sight some of the evil crew found highly amusing.

In return for Shonki's self-inflicted humiliation, they tipped him well and also let him loot the helmets, which he handed in to level himself up. That's how he got as far as Level 9. He certainly never healed anyone.

Eventually the appeal of this wore off for both sides and Mrs Bhagpuss was about to reward Shonki with the gift of eternal oblivion, when I stepped in to offer him both a home and moral redemption. I returned the little pervert to the one, true path, following his god...

...actually, I can't remember who his god was. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Church in Norrath back then. 

Probably just as well he retired.

Fun And Games

There was no post today for two reasons:

1. I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to talk about. 

Obviously, I could have come up with something but

2. I spent pretty much the whole day playing Once Human and I did not want to stop.

Probably the most hours I've played one game for months. Many months.

Very pleased with my progress so far.

Absolutely delighted with my new look.

Less happy about where two of the four sceenshots I took for this post have gone. Nowhere I can see.

Normal service may be resumed tomorrow.

Or it may not.

I may play Once Human all day again. 

Five more levels and I can start working on T5 gear.

Kickstarters, Early Access, Free Stuff And Existential Despair.

Last Friday I sat down to do a grab-bag post, then ended up writing about some TV shows I'd been watching instead. I guess that means that, at the time, I must have had several things I wanted to talk about but now, just a few days later, I have no idea what they might have been. 

I haven't thought of anything new worth posting about since then, either. I've got nothing. Still, that never stopped me before. 

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is barely a month away from going into Early Access. Visionary Realms released a forty-seven minute Q&A video that's literally a black screen with a woman in the bottom left corner and a man's head floating over her right shoulder like some kind of ghost-balloon.

I have not watched this video. It is not a thing you watch. 

I did try listening to it instead, leaving it on in the background while I did other things, but I found it impossible to remember anything either of them said even thirty seconds after they'd said it so I gave up. Here it is if you want to try.

Fortunately, some unfortunate staffer at MMOBomb somehow managed to get through the whole thing to pick out the salient points for the uncommitted. They are few. Perhaps the only really interesting note is that there will be an announcement about a Steam version of the game sometime next week, which is now this week, so I look forward to that.

I was very unimpressed by the little I saw of the game in the open weekend a while back but even so I'm still willing to pay a small sum for what will most likely end up being a couple of years of non-subscription access during the EA period. I'm waiting for details of the specific EA packages and confirmation of the cost involved, something I would like to know before the current Pledges go away.

As it stands, you can still pledge, which automatically gets you full EA access. The lowest cost Pledge is $50. It's hard to imagine the basic EA access will be more than that but it could be less. Also, if there are going to be separate clients/logins for the Visionary Realms client and the Steam client, I would probably want to play through Steam so I'm doing nothing until I hear more about how that's going to work. 

Noiramore Academy's Kickstarter has reached 50% funding with ten days still to go. Developer Ink Rose was kind enough to leave a comment here a few days ago, the second time a dev has dropped by to comment on a Next Fest post this time around, the other being Mendoka, creator of Spire Horizon Online. And they say no-one reads blogs any more!

If anyone's on the fence about whether to give Noiramore Academy a look, something I highly recommend because it's a very classy piece of work indeed, the demo is still available. Spire Horizon Online's isn't but the MMORPG is set to release in early December and the single-player version is out already.

Ink Rose also has a series of devlogs on YouTube, detailing the ups and downs of game development along with a lot of technical info about the making of Noiramore Academy itself. I think these would be of interest to anyone who finds the process of game development intriguing, mysterious or both. She certainly has a better idea how to make a video enjoyable to watch than Visionary Realms, that's for sure. 

Once Human, like a lot of free-to-play games, gives out quite a few codes for free stuff. Starry, the developer, already throws a ton of freebies my way through the in-game mail but while I was looking something up the other day, I happened upon this website, which handily collates the out-of-game codes in a simple and straightforward table with expiry dates.

I cut&pasted the October codes into the relevant field in the UI last night and they all worked pefectly so I pass this on to anyone playing the game as a public service. There are some useful consumbales to be had but mostly what I wanted were the Butterfly's Emissary Crates, aka lockboxes.

As I've said many times, I freakin' love lockboxes, provided I don't have to pay for them. The codes got me four and I already had a couple from inside the game and last night I opened them all, which was great fun. 

It would not have been such great fun if I'd had to pay for them. I did get that excellent pair of sunglasses from one of the in-game crates, which is why it counts as a drop in my vocabulary, but the rest of them were total duds. I do not consider one grenade or one molotov cocktail to be much of a prize. Or indeed any kind of prize, unless it was booby. 

You can buy these crates for in-game currency too and you'd think if I like them so much I'd be doing that but the chances of getting something good (The odds are visible if you care to look for them.) aren't good enough to make me want to spend even my imaginary money on them. Then again, I haven't spent it on anything else either so maybe I should just get some crates and have a little crate-opening party. That's always a fun session.

In other Once Human news, I dinged 30 today so now the hunt for T4 mats begins in earnest. In the last Season I found a few really excellent, safe scavenging spots that let me gear up into T5 pretty much without having to fight anything but in this season, the extreme heat in the third Map, where all the mats I need are hiding, is such that I can't stay there long enough to get much foraging done. 

I looked it up and apparently I need to go slaughter some alligators in the Wish Land zoo to make gear with bonuses to heat resistance. And right after I spent a whole session finding and culling seals to make the best cold resistance kit, too. Reminds me of the old days, when you needed two backpacks just carry all your resist gear.

Scary Bear Soundtrack is a Canadian indie-pop band, originally out of Nunavut and now based in Ottowa. I first came across them maybe a decade ago and I check in on them periodically to see a) if they're still going and b) if they've put out anything new.

They are and they have. A little while ago they released what Bandcamp calls a "Digital Album" but which I would call an E.P. (It has four tracks.). It's called Everything Is Falling Apart, which seems to be a common sentiment these days, albeit not one I necessarily share. 

They seem to have gone a bit prog, not necessarily a bad thing. I may well include a track from that in a future music post but for now I want to point up something I found quite curious about one of their earlier releases, the 2019 album Boomerang Kids.

There's a track on it called Investment Plan, which I just found out is an evolution of a 2013 demo called We Had A Plan. I heard the demo first and even though it's rough as all get-out and sounds like it was recorded through a sock from the house next door, I prefer it. I mean, I like Investment Plan a lot, but We Had A Plan has a bleak, heartfelt feel to it that the relatively slick studio take can't quite match. 

It reminds me of the "Better in Beta" mantra. I do think it also applies to demos, at least sometimes.

Here they both are. Decide for yourself. 

Also have a read of the lyrics, which are reproduced in full in the YouTube description. They're very good, if deeply depressing. I have a thing about songs like this, of which there are quite a few. Both the way it's structured and what it's about. It reminds me quite strongly of Lloyd Cole's harrowing Hey Rusty, one of my favorite songs of all time. Then again, he's never happy.

That's it. I'm done.

Back On The Bus - or - Once Again Human

I've been going on and on lately about new games and expansions and updates, gushing about how much choice there is and how hard it it is to decide what to play when everything looks so tempting and shiny and fresh. And it's all true. There are far more new, interesting games than there's time to play and the old ones are getting updated faster than ever, with more and better content. 

I do lose patience sometimes, when I read jaded vets claiming otherwise, but I'm not here today to call anyone out or make a big thing about it. We all have our issues - days or weeks or months when it's harder than we'd like to find the good in anything, let alone everything, the way annoying polyannas and panglosses like me seem to do. I know I've felt that way at times. Just not right now.

It's all very well, though, handing out bouquets in all directions for great work done but the real question is what am I actually playing? How am I voting with my feet or my wallet or, most importantly, my mouse?

Going into this month I had quite a list of options for new, revamped or updated games I said I wanted to play:

• Throne and Liberty
• Once Human
  
• New World Aeternum
• Wuthering Waves
• Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt
  

Then there were the old favorites I was intending to carry on with or revisit:

• EverQuest II
• Star Wars the Old Republic

And there were a couple of new-to-me games I'd bought, meaning to play right away:

• X-Com 
• X-Com 2

There were plenty more but those were the ones I specifically mentioned expecting to play in October. How did that go?

Taking them in order, I was playing Throne and Liberty every day until suddenly I wasn't. Two weeks since I logged in, now. New World Aeternum I played on the day it launched and not one time since. Wuthering Waves I haven't played for a while. Maybe not even this month. Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt I played a lot for a week or two then dropped completely. Haven't even patched it up for the new Halloween content. EQII I don't believe I've logged into in October. Ditto SW:tOR. 

As for those X-Com games, that purchase has not been a success, to put it mildly. I probably ought to do a post about that sometime.

So what have I been playing? What's missing from that run-down?

Once Human. That's what I've been playing. Once Human and pretty much nothing else. Well, and all those demos for and around Next Fest, of course, but playing demos is to playing MMORPGs as leafing through a slim volume of short stories is to embarking on a full read of A Dance To The Music Of Time. 

I've played at least one session of the new scenario in Once Human, The Way of Winter, every day since it arrived. Steam tells me I've played for more than 24 hours over the last ten days. Cumulatively, OH is now my fifth most-played game on Steam and as of the next time I play it will pass Dawnlands to move into fourth place. 

I really like Once Human. It's a great game. I understand it has all kinds of issues with monetization that affect people who want to be either The Best or The Best They Can Be but since I'm not competing with anyone, even myself, none of that has any impact. All I see is a beautifully rendered, fascinating, quirky world laid out for me to explore, a world that has literally doubled in size with the release of what, in a game of an earlier era, would have been classed as a full expansion.

The Way of Winter scenario adds three huge maps to the immediate north of the area we saw in the opening Season. One of those didn't open for play until the end of the first week, which is how the seasonal structure works, but even if it had been available from the start, I wouldn't have gotten to see much of it yet. I've probably explored less than half of the first two maps and in doing so completed far less than half of the available content there.

In terms of scale, the new season isn't just the equivalent of an expansion, it's the equivalent of one of those super-old-school expansions that tacked a whole new game onto the old one, like Ruins of Kunark did for EverQuest. Granted, those old MMORPGs had vastly more replayability and also took far longer to get through than a modern game like Once Human but the fact remains that this literally doubles the amount of content that was already available.

It also matches or exceeds the quality of the existing material. The new maps are visually as detailed, there are as many quests, the storyline is as well fleshed-out, the voice acting is as complete and polished... 

It's basically the same game again only picked up and put down somewhere else and having to restart from Level 1 makes it feel like an actual new game, maybe a sequel. It's weird but it's good weird. I very much do not believe Starry can keep this up although it would be very interesting if they did. It'd be like when Sony Online Entertainment pumped out two expansions a year for EQ.

But no, that's not going to happen. I imagine future seasons will mostly be rules tweaks and changes to events, things that don't require the construction of multiple new maps or lengthy new plotlines. Maybe we'll get one or two big content drops like this a year. Even that would be a lot.

Why speculate about the future when you can enjoy the present, though? I've been having just the best time, building my new house on the coast or tooling around the mouintain highways on my motorcycle. Just those two activities alone probably account for more than half of the 24 hours I've racked up so far.

Speaking of the bike, I was surprised and delighted to find I already had one. They're easy enough to make but when I hit the point in the Journey where it suggests you do that, I hit "G" and one appeared. It also has a skin, "Ghost of the Wasteland" which I have no memory of obtaining and about which Google is willing to tell me almost nothing.

This is one of the many reasons I find Once Human such an amenable game. Yes, there's a cash shop full of highly desirable cosmetics and yes there are gacha mechanics and lockboxes but none of it matters when there also plenty of freebies and giveaways and, most importantly, drops.

I do not like games that think drops are old-fashioned and unnecessary. It's all very well having points systems and tokens and quest rewards and all the rest of it but nothing beats the dopamine hit of looting a mob or opening a chest and seeing something you really wanted flash up on the screen.

In Once Human that can be formulas for crafting or actual items. In the past week I've found a couple of guns, a pair of boots and a whole load of housing items as well as formulas and recipes to craft all kinds of useful things. You can find cosmetics, too. I found a great pair of sunglasses last night.

It's probably better to find formulas because, once learned, not only do you keep them forever but the items you make from them can be repaired. Dropped gear cannot and thus passes through your hands like a particularly impressive and long-lasting consumable. Drops, though, do have the advantage of being equippable immediately rather than requiring a trip to the crafting station and quite possibly a scavenger hunt to find the necessary mats.

I believe I've written before about what an excellently structured game Once Human is in terms of both progression and exploration but I feel I ought to repeat myself at least a little just to add some emphasis. There's a plot you can follow, with key stages at which you become more powerful and gain access to better gear and more abilities, but you can ignore it entirely if you want in favor of wrecking around the countryside like the star of a seventies TV show. I've been roaming the map, turning up in every town and hamlet, offering my services in the cause of righteousness, taking on random adventures out of sequence with no regard to my fitness or capability to do what's being asked of me.

The game totally supports this in both lore and mechanics. The player character is recognized everywhere as a representative of an itinerant clan of do-gooders, capable of just about anything. I take on all requests, meaning I now have tasks in my Journal tagged anything from Level 3 to Level 40 even though I'm currently Level 26. 

Better yet, I have a fair chance of succeeding at any of them and all of them will give both experience and loot worth having. Last night I took the opportunity to see a little of the new map, Ember Strand, and ended up doing a quest some seven levels above me. It required some careful pulling and a little thought but it was entirely manageable and a whole lot of fun.

I did that quest while still wearing T2 gear suitable for characters in their teens, which was fine because I'd upgraded it all, making it there or thereabouts as good as T3 stuff that hadn't been calibrated and modded. I'm choosing to skip T3 altogether since T4 becomes available at Level 30 and, due to another really excellent piece of design, it's entirely feasible to acquire T4 crafting mats by looting chests and abandoned vehicles without ever needing to fight anything, which is what I'm doing right now.

It might not be everyone's idea of a good time but I find it hard to think of much I've ever done in an MMORPG that's more fun than cruising along wide-open, deserted highways on a motorbike with the wide blue sky above and the snow-capped mountains ahead, listening to some fine tunes on the radio, jumping off every so often to rifle through the contents of abandoned vehicles. I'm living the post-apocalyptic dream.

Speaking of the radio, the new season added another 45 songs to the playlist across the half-dozen stations, which also all got their own unique DJs. The stations all now feature interviews with various NPCs and even with some of the more coherent Deviations. 

These are great to listen to the first time, although I think there probably ought to be an option to skip the interviews once you've heard them, leaving the radio to just play music again, like it used to. That said, I listen to Radio 4 Extra in real life, a speech-only station with a six-hour repeating program that I sometimes hear several times a day, so I don't really know why I'm complaining.

The new cold/heat survival mechanic is a net positive although it has its moments. Most crafted gear has enough cold protection to stop you dropping dead of hypothermia even at night unless you enter one of the areas where some kind of event is happening. I have died of the cold a few times, but mostly through my own fault. I do tend to ignoring warnings just so I can loot that one, last chest over there...

I also don't prepare properly. There are several better options for cold protection available in terms of warming food, carriable items or gear with higher thermal protection but I mostly don't bother with them for normal play. Regardlss of the risks, I do find having to pay attention to the temperature adds to my enjoyoment rather than detracts from it, which once again is a payoff for good design.

The way things are going, I feel I'll probably be playing Once Human pretty heavily for another two or three weeks, by which time I'll most likely be at or near the level cap with all my gear as highly calibrated and modded as it's ever likely to be. My house will be looking pretty much how I want it to look, accomodating as many Deviations as it can realistically hold and I'll be driving around on four wheels instead of two. 

At which point, once again, I'll probably feel like I'm done with the game until something new turns up. I suppose I might get into animal breeding or farming but neither really appeals. As for the storyline, I'll pursue it as long as it's fun to do and then stop. I can't actually remember now whether I ever finished the MSQ in Season 1 so it's clearly not a big issue for me either way.

How many times it's going to feel this satisfying to start over from scratch is quite hard to judge. My feeling is that I'd probably have about as much fun every time if there was this much new content. It's quite literally like starting a new game except it's also the same game. Everything I'm doing in this season mirrors what I did in the last, almost like an alternate timeline. It occasionaly feels strange but somehow it works. 

The two seasons fit together so perfectly I did wonder if it might be possible to slide from one into the other. I knew you couldn't engage with the content from both seasons on the same server but the new areas are contiguous with the old, as you can see on the in-game map, so I thought just maybe the geography might still be accessible even if the content wasn't.

It's not. If you try to follow the highway across the invisible border, the screen goes all psychedelic and Mitsuko's voice appears out of the ether, literally begging you to stop. If you ignore her increasingly hysterical warnings, you die. The last thing you hear is her stifled sob. 

They could so easily just have put up an invisible barrier or a visible force wall or just warped you back to the part of the map you were supposed to be in but no. Someone wrote a script, had the voice actor record it, had someone else come up with some visual effects and the whole lot got melded into an immersive and emotionally affecting whole, for absolutely no reason other than it makes the game better.

That's what I call good design and that's why I'm playing Once Human, even when I could be playing so many other games.

It's Not Over 'Til It's Over

There was a whole introduction here, where I explained I didn't have enough to say about the shows I've been watching to make a post and how I was going to have to stuff what I did have into a grab-bag alongside a bunch of other odds and ends to pad it out. Then I started writing and the TV part alone came to almost two thousand words, which seemed like it might be enough after all. So that's what this post is now.

And even then it's only two shows. I was going to cover three because I thought that's what I'd watched all the way through to the end but it turns out I hadn't after all because one of them hasn't actually finished yet. It still has three episodes to go. That's what happens when Prime decides to switch things up and drop three episodes at a time. I'm not used to the cadence. It throws me off.

Nine did seem like a curious number of episodes for a full season but the last one, which obviously I know now wasn't the last at all, really did feel like a season-ending cliffhanger to me. I took it that way quite happily. I was only mildly disturbed it seemed to end on such a downbeat note. I thought it was quite brave, if anything.

I'd still be thinking of it like that if I hadn't just now decided to fact-check, ahead of writing this post, just to make absolutely sure there weren't any more coming. Only to find out that, yes, there were. Three more as of last night, in fact.

I'll hold off on that one, then, until I've watched those. Looks like the story might end differently to how I'd imagined. Now there's time for a happy ending, although I kind of hope that's not where it's heading, which sounds a bit mean but art can be unkind. 

I suppose I also ought to say what show it is. It's Vox Machina.

Another show I definitely have finished and will not be watching any more of is Kaos. Not because I didn't enjoy it. I liked it quite a lot. Because it's already been dropped by Netflix, who seem to have the attention span of a six week old kitten these days. 

Kaos is a mildly surreal, slightly disconcerting take on Greek myth starring Jeff Goldblum and an excellent supporting cast, including David Thewlis, who I have to admit I thought had died years ago. Must be confusing him with someone else. 

The eight episode first season very clearly sets up a second that's never going to happen unless someone else picks it up, which seems unlikely. There seems to be no obvious explanation for the decision, either, except that it didn't meet whatever criteria for success Netflix set. 

It was fairly successful in terms of viewer numbers and critical reception was fairly good but middling success doesn't seem to cut it with the streaming services any more. They do all need plenty of filler but they can buy those shows in from around the world much more cheaply than it costs to make their own. Kaos looks like it would have been expensive and expensive needs to be a big hit, not just to chart.

It ws also a hardish show to place, which probably didn't help. It was funny and scary and supernatural and romantic. More like a very long movie than a TV show. It's main strength was the acting, which was top-notch throughout. Jeff Goldblum was predictably mesmerising, shifting from affable bonhomie to chilling anomie with a deeply disturbing facility. He wasn't particularly likeable, though, and neither were several others in the main cast. That can't have helped, either. 

I liked just about everyone in it, as characters, but I found several of them uncomfortable to spend time with. It was never a comfortable watch. Unsettling, I think, is the word for it.

As well as a fairly large central cast, there were a lot of minor but significant characters too, all of them well-played. I could have used a little more of some, not least Suzy Eddie Izzard as the Fate Lachesis (Lachy if you prefer.) If I had to pick a favorite, though, it would be Thewlis's Hades, so underplayed he was barely there. A masterclass in subtlety.

The writing was mostly good, particularly the dialog, much of which sparkled. The plot seemed a little wayward at times. I'm not sure how much sense it would make if I watched it again, paying more attention. It seemed to be caroming along on impetus some of the time. Nothing wrong with that, though.

Visually, Kaos was sumptuous but also very distracting, for me anyway. I spent a considerable amount of time in the early epiodes not paying full attention to the story (Which might explain some of my issues with the plotting.) because I was trying to figure out if the Theban palace scenes had actually been filmed at Plaza de Espana in the Parque de Maria Luisa in Sevilla, a location I know very well.

It was indeed shot there. It could hardly be anywhere else. The place is nothing if not distinctive. In fact, pretty much the entire series was shot in Spain, much of it in other places I've spent time, although I can't pretend I spotted any other specific locations.

It's always distracting to see places you know turn up in fictional shows, especially when they're being used as stand-ins for somewhere else. I ought to be used to it, living as I do in a city where film crews closing off the streets for something or other is a near-constant disruption to daily life but I tend not to watch the kinds of costume dramas they're working on. 

In this case, though, the main effect the familiar setting had on me was to make me want to go back to Sevilla. It's been a while. It was good to visit again, even vicariously. Another reason to regret the untimely curtailment of what was a very enjoyable show.

In absolutely no danger of being canned after one season is another new Netflix show I've just finished: Nobody Wants This. If ever a show was named with unintentional irony, this has to be it.

Everybody Wants This would be a more appropriate title. As I write, it's sitting at 95% critical, 85% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, five stars on IMDB and #3 on the Netflix global chart after more than a month. Season 2 has already been commissioned.

It absolutely deserves all that praise and success. It's as close to flawless as anyone could possibly expect a sitcom about an agnostic podcaster who falls in love with a rabbi ever to be. 

I mean, come on! Look at that set-up. It stinks, doesn't it? Would you watch it? I wouldn't and I'm a huge sitcom fan.

So why did I watch it? Same reason everyone else did, I imagine. Kristen Bell.

Kristen Bell is a name I trust. I've yet to see her in anything that wasn't good or where she wasn't the best thing in it. She's a superb comic actor with a great deal more range than just that, as if just that wouldn't be enough. 

I'm currently watching another of her successes, The Good Place, several years after everyone else. I would have watched it sooner but for two reasons: the premise creeps me out and I had somehow managed to remain oblivious to her presence in the show, which must have taken some doing seeing she's the lead. It was only when Netflix helpfully recommended it to me as the next show I might want to watch after Nobody Wants This finished that I realised Kristen Bell was in it at all.

NWT Season 1 is ten episodes long and every one is a gem. Many of them would almost work as short stand-alone playlets, which is how sitcoms used to be before they turned into soap operas with gags. One of these days I might write something on situation comedy as a genre, in which case this show is going to be a case study. Is it a sitcom? Is there actually a definable situation here?

I asked myself that question a few times as I watched the series. It seemed much more like that misbegotten, bastard genre we blushingly call dramedy at times, especially when the seasonal arc seemed to be heading straight to the altar (Or wherever it is Jewish wedding ceremonies take place.) I was stumped, trying to figure out how a show based on the opposites attract trope could be expected to run for the six-to-eight seasons a hit sitcom requires, if the opposites turned out to be so very congruent by the middle of Season 1.

Turns out the writers had an answer for that, one which I won't reveal for reasons of spoilage. It's hard to imagine anyone hasn't already watched the show because why the hell wouldn't you but then I just admitted I'm five years late on The Good Place so go figure. It's always too soon for spoilers.

NWT is yet another show where the sheer quality of the acting is overwhelming. I swear, the older I get, the better actors become, most especially on TV. It's across the board, pretty much, too, domestic and international, broadcast and streaming. 

If I look back at shows I loved in the sixties, seventies, eighties and even the nineties I feel I have to make allowances for the time they were made. Individual performances match current quality standards and so do certain shows but the mean average bears no comparison. Actors are just better now. A lot better, many of them.

Or maybe directors are or writers or showrunners, a job that didn't even exist back then... Who knows? Maybe don't look for explanations. Just take the win.

The entire cast of Nobody Wants This shines throughout. Kristen Bell is exemplary as ever but so is everyone else. Structurally, the show manages somehow to be a star vehicle, a two-hander and an ensemble piece all at the same time. Adam Brody, who gets almost as much screen time as Bell, is consistently funny as rabbi Noah Roklov but his brother, Sasha, played by Timothy Simons, is funnier still.

But they're all funny. It's one of those shows where no-one is ever the straight guy and yet it very much isn't one of those shows where every other line is a zinger and it feels like the writers' room is right there on screen. I mean, I love those shows but they're one step away from stand-up. This is one step away from straight drama. And it's a small step.

It would be pointless to call out all of the cast members I particularly enjoyed because I particularly enjoyed just about all of them. I will say, though, that I hope the sisters' agent, Ashley, played with deliciously irritable elan by the surely-not-her-real-name Sherry Cola, gets more to do in the second season.

Other than to go on and on about how great it is, I don't have much more to say about this one so I'll leave it there. If you haven't seen it, rectify that immediately.

So that's television done. It turns out three shows, one of which I didn't even write about, was enough for a post after all. Who'd have guessed? Anyone who's been here before, I imagine.

It feels like the post is still missing a big finish, though. We need a tune and what could be better or more apt than Blondshell doing Veronica Mars? 

Yes, it may well be the third or fourth time the same song has appeared here. What of it? It won't be the last, either, I'll promise you that.

There are plenty of live versions on YouTube, not all of them with the greatest sound and few that can  replicate the emotionally evocative guitar squall of the studio ending. This one, from an Icelandic radio broadcast, comes as close as any and Sabrina just kills it. Best enjoyed very loud.

Little Red Corvette - Emphasis on "Little"

I believe I may have mentioned a couple of times in passing that I'd been given access to a playtest for an in-development MMO, whose name I hadn't revealed because I was unclear on whether or not there it was under some kind of NDA. I'm still no clearer on that but until today the point was decidedly moot since I hadn't been able to get the game to run.

That changed this morning, when I decided to be a bit more patient. Previously I'd gotten fed up of staring at a black screen after a couple of minutes and closed the client but today I tabbed out and looked at some other stuff until finally the blackness cleared to reveal an image of what looked uncannily like a Scotsman in a kilt, staring at a UFO.

After a considerably longer period, during which I had to go make an account and then wait for the game to sort itself out some more, I eventually arrived at character creation, where I spent a much shorter time making a character I thought I wouldn't mind looking at for the few minutes I imagined I'd be spending there. 

Two and a half hours later I logged out. I'd probably be there still, if I hadn't had real life stuff to do. I still don't know whether there's an NDA but on the grounds that there are a handful of videos about the test up on YouTube and because I always figure no-one is really going to get too upset if you're saying nice things, I thought I'd share a few pictures and chat a little about what I did.

This isn't going to be a review or even a First impressions piece. I'm mostly going to talk about the sole reason I applied to join the playtest in the first place: AI Text-to-3D Asset Generation. That's what the developers call it. It means you can type a description of anything you'd like to have into a field in the UI and the game will generate it for you.

It works, too. After a fashion. But we'll get to that. First, I probably ought to remind you why the name Dreamworld might sound familiar. There was a big hoo-hah about it a couple of years back, when a bunch of high profile streamers and vloggers including Asmongold and Josh Strife Hayes did pieces about it being a scam. 

I'm not going to go over that or even link to any of the discussions or accusations. It's all there in the public record if you're interested. I'm not, particularly. I only vaguely remember the fuss and I don't have any desire to go dig up whatever passed for facts back then. All I can say is the game exists, it's on Steam, you can play it for free if you ask for an invite and it's quite interesting when you get to see it in action.

It's not much to look at and it lurches and lags on my system, which meets the minimum specs, but it does run and in two and a half hours I didn't encounter any bugs, nor did I get disconnected, which doesn't seem too shabby for an alpha. 

The game offers the option of using controls that feel "Like Minecraft" or "Like Valheim" so obviously I chose the latter. The action begins yet another of those "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space" scenarios, where you fall through a void and eventually land in front of what turns out to be the starting city.

From there on it's a typical tutorial and quite a good one, too. It goes through all kinds of things at a steady pace, in a comprehensible fashion. with clear explanations and solid documentation. After talking to several NPCs and doing their tasks I knew how to build, craft, fight, farm and travel.

Of course, what I really wanted to do was play with the item generator but that comes later. Although not that much later, fortunately. Somewhere about the time one of the NPCs gives you a quest to go kill goblins in a burrow and warns you you to take some friends, in fact. Because, yes, in case you'd forgotten, which had, this is a full-on MMORPG or wants to be.

I think I might have had some problems finding a group, had I actually wanted to go check out those goblin burrows. I saw plenty of evidence that other people had been playing - holes dug in the ground, houses half-built - but I didn't see another player in my time there. 

I did a good deal of building myself. The building tools are impressive. They're comfortable and reasonably intuitive and the snap-together is about as good as I've seen. I had little trouble getting things to fit although putting the "window fillers" in the frames was a bit hit and miss. 

I assume this is purely an alpha thing but at the moment you can make just about everything with wood, even stone buildings. While that may be unrealistically it's also extremely convenient, meaning all I had to do was keep chopping down trees to make anything I wanted.

And you can make a lot, even before you start petitioning an LLM to design you new stuff. There are plenty of recipes, some of which you start with and some which just seem to pop up in your Asset Catalog as you do other things, like gather flowers or loot chests. 

I spent far longer than I should have, constructing a country cottage. I don't believe you can even stay for long on the tutorial island (Which would explain why I didn't see anyone there, I guess.) so there's not much point putting a lot of time and effort into building your dream home. But building is just such fun...

As soon as I had the roof on (The forge needs cover to operate.) I placed my Dreamforge, the crafting station that makes your dreams come true, provided your dreams are limited to static objects that can be succinctly summed-up in a few descriptive phrases, that is. Then I had to think of something to make.

You know how it is, when someone asks you what you want for your birthday and you suddenly can't think of anything at all? It was like that. I played AD&D with someone once who, when he was offered a Limited Wish by a powerful entity, could only think of "a fur coat". Which is what he got. I asked for a magic weapon suitable for a ranger and I got a +2 flaming longsword that served me well for the rest of the campaign. Just saying.

Where was I? Oh yes. Trying to come up with something to have the Dreamforge make for me. For some reason I asked for a pergola with roses and butterflies. The things that come into your head, eh?

The forge receives your instructions then tells you it'll take a while and to come back later. I wasn't sure if that meant five minutes or tomorrow but it turned out not to take long at all.

Unfortunately, it still wasn't worth the wait. The "pergola", when it appeared, was a bitter disappointment. Tiny, malformed, nothing at all like I imagined. I placed it outside my house where it looked like a log with some pustulent fungus clinging to it. 

Currently you're limited to five generations per day. I had four left and I wasn't expecting much from any of them but my cynicism was to be overturned on my very next attempt, when I decided to stop trying to think of something appropriate and just go with what was on my mind. Lana del Rey, obviously. It always is.

I asked the forge to make me "A large, framed painting of Lana del Rey" to hang on the wall of my cottage. And it bloody did it! 

As you can see, it doesn't hang well on the plaster and lathe wall I had up at the time. It hangs much better on the stone walls, now I've rebuilt, but I didn't take a screenshot of that, unfortunately. It's also a bas relief, which I didn't ask for but which I very much like. 

Following that success I thought I'd go for something bigger - like a car. I have a T-shirt with a cartoon Lana driving an open top sports car, which is almost certainly why my next thought was "A full-size red Corvette convertible".  

I don't know enough about cars to say whether or not what I got was a corvette but I sure as hell can tell you it ain't full size. It might just about fit a toddler, I guess. 

It looks great though - for a scale-model. I ought to get the forge to make me a pedestal. It'd make a great talking point for the den, when I build one.

Of course, even if the car had been life-size, I still couldn't have driven anywhere in it. The forge just makes furniture, basically. So since that's what it's good at I asked it to make me a rug. I asked for a large, shag-pile tiger skin rug and I got... a doormat. One thing the forge does not seem to be good at is dimensions.

That left me with just one generation for the day. What does every home need? That's right. A dog!

Remember when I said the forge doesn't do well with sizes? So far, that's meant big things coming out too small but it works the other way, too. I asked for a small black and white dog wearing a red bandana around its neck. I got everything but small.

But I like him. Hes kinda scary but cute with it.

I don't really know where the people behind Dreamworld think they're going with the game. It's clunky and awkward and clearly a lot of people haven't had much confidence in the project up to now. Like Story Crafter that I talked about yesterday, though, it's not hard to see the potential. 

Whether small, indie teams like these are going to have the resources to realize that potential seems to me to be quite unlikely. But someone will. Count on it.

Until that happens, Dreamworld is a lot of fun to play around with. I don't know how much longer the current test is set to run but I hope to get some more time with it before it disappears behind the curtain again.