Like A Finger Pointing At The Sky

Playable Worlds surprised us this week with a post-Christmas weekend testing schedule for the Stars Reach pre-alpha that packed a potential sixteen hours of uptime into a couple of days. It came in the form of four, four-hour playtests, two on Saturday and two on Sunday. 

That's a much better set of options for me, equating to afternoon and late evening-early morning in the U.K. If it becomes a regular event, I ought to be able to get some serious hours in. 

Unfortunately, for this particular weekend, I already had commitments for most of the slots. I was working on Sunday, so that knocked out one whole afternoon and also meant I couldn't stay up late for the Saturday evening either, plus I had things already planned for Saturday before I found out the tests were happening.

Even so, I managed to get about three and a half hours in altogether. Once again things turned out to be fairly productive. Well, in the second session, anyway.

The first session, late on Saturday evening, was a bit of a bust although I can't say I didn't enjoy myself. I logged in with the intention of working on my Civic Engineering so I could start building myself a home but I couldn't remember what I needed to do. It had been a while since last time and I'd comppletely forgotten everything I'd learned.

Next time: less mining, more building!

I spent a while reading the in-game guides but they weren't as helpful as I thought they would be. There's a lot of information there but it seems a little vague at times. mostly, I wanted to know what buttons to press and the guide didn't always want to tell me. Or possibly the information was there but I was too tired to take it in. It was past my bedtime, after all.

Either way, I couldn't find what I needed to know so I decided to go do some prospecting instead. It seemed like a good choice since I knew I was going to need a lot of mats, even if I wasn't sure which ones. Metal and stone seemed like a likely bet so I set off to look for some. I didn't get far.

Wherever it was that I'd logged out at the end of the previous test (I rarely remember.) it seemed to be positively infested with vicious killer wildlife. As soon as I'd dug a few holes, a pack of Owldeer galloped up and started jostling me. I believe Owldeer may have been made less aggressive than they used to be but they're still ready for a fight when they can find one so I had to go on the defensive.

I swapped to the electric arc gun, the Omniblaster, and started blasting away, all the while backpedalling, which seems to be the preferred method. I wasn't doing too well until a couple of the deer fell into one of the holes I'd dug and couldn't get out.

Can't Climb. Can't Jump. Can run a little.

This amused the hell out of me, I can tell you. It also opened up hilarious possibilities for future gameplay, something I fully intend to explore when I have the leisure. I happily electrocuted the trapped deer and looted the corpses. Then I picked off the rest of the herd from the safety of the far side of some more rough terrain, leading the creatures into holes whenever I could get them to go the right way.

That was fun. Since combat was going so well and I was feeling bloodthirsty, I abandoned my mining plans and set about murdering as much of the wildlife as I could. I wanted to try using the FPS-mode central reticule to see if it made things any easier, anyway, so I thought it seemed like a good time. 

It took me a while to figure out how to swap between the reticule and the cursor. It's Tab. Everything is Tab, as I know now. That was a bit of a game-changer for me. It only took me, what, half a dozen sessions and over six hours to figure it out, too! I'm fairly sure most people worked it out in a matter of minutes. I wish I had. It does make quite a difference.

Not to combat, though, or not for me, anyway. Once I'd swapped to the reticule, I didn't find it much of an improvement. I found it hard to tell the difference, in fact, so I swapped back to using the cursor, which at least had the benefit of familiarity.

After about half an hour of steady slaughter, I'd accrued enough Combat xp to buy everything that was left on the Combat tree. I already had most of it from all the fighting I'd been forced to do in earlier tests. Again, most of it hasn't improved things any so far.

That largely because most of what you get for your points are crafting recipes. A few options, like the triple-attack, take immediate effect but mostly they just give you recipes for things you have to make. And there it's the same old story: I never have quite the right mats.

Nighttime. Better get to bed. Sun'll be up in five minutes.

Realising that, I decided I'd had enough for that session. As I said, I was too tired to concentrate and I knew I had to be up early for work the next morning, so even though Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were asleep and the test had a couple more hours to run, I gave up and logged out.

The next night, Sunday, I was ready the moment the servers came up at 10pm my time. I logged in and the game crashed. I've had more crashes these past two tests than in the ones before Christmas but it was still only a handful and I was always able to get back in immediately, so not really much of a problem.

I wanted to go back to my original plan of getting to grips with the new Homesteading systems, which once again meant first reading the manual to try and remember what I was supposed to be doing. This time I had better luck, possibly because I was awake. 

I worked out, after some trial and error, that I needed specific, hard, rocky materials like Gneiss or Marble to make the blocks the Instaformer requires. Using the Instaformer is what gives you Civic Engineering xp but it's taken me all this time to figure out how to use it. 

I didn't have enough of any of the right rocks to make even a single block so it was off to the mines again. At least this time I knew what I was looking for. Sadly, I didn't know where to look for it.

My first thought was to go look in space because that's where I found all the good stuff before. Space, however, does not seem to be the go-to place for rock. I came away with a lot of metal and a few gems but none of the rocks I needed. On the positive side, I didn't run into a single space monster so it was quite peaceful while I was looking.

I don't know what it is but I don't like the look of it.

Back planetside, I decided just to wander around and keep my eyes open for anything that looked promising, like a cliff face or a big boulder. That has to be where the rocks are, doesn't it? Before I got started on that, though, I remembered that in a previous test I'd bought the option to survey the environment for minerals. That sounded like just what I needed. Might as well give it a try.

It turned out to be avery good decision, if not at all in the way I'd imagined. Trying to figure out how to use mt surveying and assessing skills led to a series of discoveries that, frankly, I should have made back in the second or third test. Things that are pretty much essential for playing the game buit which I've been doing without this whole time.

For example, anyone who's been reading Wilhelm's Stars Reach write-ups will have noticed he regularly talks about people freezing stuff or setting it on fire. I have been wondering how to do that ever since I started. Well, now I know.

I'm not going to tell you though because if you're in the test program you already know (I have to be the last person there to work it out, surely...) and if you're not it would just be a bunch of meaningless, technical detail. The important part is that I can now freeze lakes and set forests on fire along with the rest of them and boy, is it fun! No wonder people keep on doing it.

I can also turn back time, allegedly, although I think a couple of pages in the manual might have been stuck together when I read it. When I point the Suitcase Bomb (Not the actual name.) at a patch of land, the ground turns into lava and bubbles, then mostly cools down into the same thing it was before. 

Wouldn't want to be the guy who lives at the bottom of the hill.

I thought it was supposed to turn into something else. I expect I'm doing it wrong. Once again, though, it's such fun to do, I don't really care. This game is made for vandals and nihilists as much as it is for creators and collectivists, as far as I can tell. There are going to be some sparks flying between the two camps when it gets into the hands of players more interested in making either mischief or their mark than the current crop of testers, I'm fairly sure of that.

If this report sounds random and chaotic, it's because that's what the whole of my near-two-hour session was like. I kept discovering new things the tools could do, trying them out, finding out it was spectacularly destructive and carrying on just for the hell of it. 

I did so much Prospecting (Aka destroying the environment.) I earned more than enough points to fill out the entire Mineralogy Tree. I hugely increased the size of my Hopper (Don't. Please. We're all adults here.) as well as the yeild and the efficiency with which rocks melt. Then I used my newfound skills to  turn everything around me into a barren, pitted, smouldering wasteland.

So that was fun. And also surprisingly productive. I found the ability to Assess things to see what mats they contain, along with the skill that supposedly allows you to survey the area to find what you're looking for, both very little help but just blasting everything in sight with a firehose of purple energy bolts was fantastically effective. 

I stood well back and played the stream across any and every surface indiscriminately until I spotted something boiling out of the plasma that looked like it might be useful. That's how I discovered Coal and Marble and a few other materials I'd never found before.

Nothing worth having down here. Leave it for some other sucker to fill in.

Once I hit something I wanted, like Marble, I went after it like a rabid pit-bull. I ripped up the landscape and spewed the debris back onto the ground like it was Eastern Europe in the 1930s. It was glorious. Also wholly unforgiveable. Stars Reach is going to set the worst possible environmental example if it doesn't rein some of this in before launch. It's a good thing playing video games doesn't affect anyone's behavior or attitude in the real world...

After half an hour of that I had enough Marble to make a couple of blocks with the Lathe. It was also about then that I was thinking of giving up. If it took that long just to make two blocks...

Luckily, one block from the Lathe equates to twenty blocks from the Instaformer. Once I realised that, I was able to lay down enough marble to give me about forty points of xp in Civic Engineering. It seems you earn roughly a point per block extruded.

That was the good news. The bad news is that it takes a hundred points to buy anything on the CE Tree and two hundred to buy anything good. Back to the mines for more Marble!

In the end, I managed to dig out enough to get me 120 xp. Eighty more and I can buy the recipe for the Fabricator, the tool I need to start building an actual house. I think. I hope...

Meanwhile, without really meaning to, I seem to have stored up enough xp in most of the other skills to come close to maxing out their respective Trees. Again, that frequently just means acquiring recipes that need to be crafted but I'm slowly beginning to come to terms with how that works.

Ever hear the expression "One banana short of a plaster"?

For example, I now know that I was right when I said, last time, that I thought I remembered seeing some kind of cooking station in a camp. There is indeed something called a Stove that apppears in your camp, whenever you set it up. How I couldn't find one in my camp, when I looked for it then, I have no idea. I found it this time with no trouble at all.

Still couldn't make anything on it, of course. Didn't have the mats. It takes a suprising amount of bananas to make a banana plaster. Or maybe, like blocks, they come in packs of twenty. When I get a few more I'll hit the Stove and find out.

Meanwhile, other people are clearly making far more progress than I am. That dinky little hamlet people were calling a city last time (So cute!) is now genuinely quite impressive. It's still more of a small town or a large village than a city but it's starting to look quite sophisticated.

A hell of a lot more sophisticated than my pathetic attempt at a Homestead, that's for sure. All I have is a lot of holes and a weird marble abstract that looks like some pre-schoolers tried to make a Henry Moore out of half-chewed Mentos. In a toxic waste dump.

The good thing about it (The only good thing, really.) is that I ought to be able to find it again next time. I even put up a flagpole so I can see it from far away. Don't have a flag yet but the pole is big enough to be seen from space. (Not literally from space. From space you literally can't even see the planet.)

Want to know what's keeping it up? A vitriolic hatred of all that's decent and good!

 It's my third Homestead, by which I don't mean the third I've made but the third of the three I currently own. The other two are... well, if you find them, I'd be very grateful if you could give me a hint as to where they are. I put them down, went off to do something, then couldn't find them again.

You can put down map markers to tell you where points of interest, like your house, might be but the flaw with that is that you have to remember to do it while you still know where they are. By the time I remember, it's always too late. I do think we at least ought to get a permanent "You Live Here" sign in the UI. And some way of abandoning homesteads remotely.

Fortunately for me, by the time I realized I was never going to be able to find my way home, I still had one deed left so I was able to start over, yet again. At least this time I've left a permanent marker in the world to show me where I live. 

If there isn't a wipe, when the next test comes, I'll carry on from where I left off. This time I'll see if I can't at least get some walls up. Maybe even a roof but let's not get too fancy.

2024 Went That Way >>>

And so we come to that time in the blogging year once again, the moment when everyone flips through their back pages to pick out the highlights. I don't have the patience to fill this post with a forest of links to old posts but I did find the time to take a look at all the music that appeared here in 2024.

I went through everything tagged "Music" so as to be sure not to miss anything. (Not the Advent Calendar. I think we've all had more than enough Christmas music for one year.) It was a chastening experience. It always is. Song after song I couldn't remember. Name after name I didn't recognize. 

There wasn't time to listen to all of them again even though I'd have liked to, just to be sure I wasn't missing any future classics. For the purposes of this post, though, it wasn't necessary. This is a Pick of the Year post and the picks pretty much picked themselves. I only allowed tracks I remembered immediately because I'd listened to them often, either back when they were new (Or at least new to me.) or since. If I needed a reminder I moved straight past.

It seemed fair. The main music feature here is called "What I've Been Listening To Lately", after all. The Pick Of The Year has to be music I did, in fact, listen to, not just stuff I found, got momentarily excited about and wanted to share. For the WIBLTL feature my focus is always on novelty and discovery not staying power but the tunes I've chosen here are all built to last.

That got me a shortlist of twenty-one songs. I culled it seventeen. Why seventeen? No reason.

Ok, there was a reason but it doesn't have much to do with the post. I wanted to make a playlist of the final choices to go on my YouTube channel, even though no-one ever watches it or listens to it or whatever it is people do with YouTube playlists. I like making them, anyway. I made a huge one for Christmas and now I've made one for this.

As I was making it I decided it ought to flow like a playlist should, rather than just thrash about, twitching and spasming the way it would if I just slapped everything up there in the order it came to me. In doing that, I came across three tracks that just didn't fit anywhere, so I dropped them. 

Those songs were:

Starburster by DC Fontaines - a lot slower than I remembered it but also far too aggressive to fit in with the other slow ones, plus the video starts with a whole load of nonsense that really breaks the mood. 

Yoo Hoo by Maty Noyes - Ditto with the long spoken intro to the video. Very disruptive. Yes, I could have used the audio-only version but the video was one of the main reasons I liked it in the first place.

In Aeternum Vivae by George Houston - Ditto again on both the time the video takes to get going and how much the video has to do with me liking it to begin with. If you take out the ruined church, the dog collars, all the business with the cigarettes none of them really know what to do with and the fact that George looks about twelve but sounds like he's forty-six, the song on its own doesn't have nearly the same impact.

And then there was Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. I do genuinely love this and I have listened to it all the way through several times but it's over two hours long and comes as one continuous stream. There are individual tracks but snipping them out loses a lot of the effect. You really need to hear the whole thing or not bother.

Which left seventeen. They're all on the playlist. I recommend listening to it as it comes. I think it flows quite nicely. It comes in fast and hard, holds for long enough to tire you out then slows down and gets all introspective before gearing up for an upbeat, uplifting close-out. 

Okay, maybe only it's just Charli and Lorde together at the very end that feels truly uplifting. I don't actually know what the two tracks right before that are about although I suspect it's nothing good. Still, they sound cheery enough.

That just leaves me with a final decision. Should I embed all seventeen here or just use maybe five and anchor the rest as links? I'm going to go have a bath and think about it...

... also take Beryl for a long walk and have lunch, as it turns out. But now I'm back and I've made up my mind. I can't resist going through the lot and giving notes so buckle up. This could take a while.

Homie Don't Shake - Fcukers

Getting lumped in with the Indie Sleaze revival somehow hasn't hurt their profile. I just think it's joyous. Can't hear it too many times. Can't hear it loud enough.

Guess - Charli xcx feat. Billie Eilish

There are three tracks from Brat/Brat but... on this list. There could have been more. Absolutely no question that Brat is the album of the year. It would be my album of the year, too, if I was being strict and keeping to albums that came out in 2024. My album of the year came out in 2023. We'll get to it. Meanwhile, this is by no means the best track on either Brat but it's one of the three or four I've listened to the most. I just love Billie's deadpan delivery.

Tokyo Calling - Atarashii Gakko!

A defining feature of my listening habits this year was falling down rabbit holes of both genre and geography. I fell down a Japanese hole a couple of time, maybe three. There's an insane amount to find down there but this was right at the top, poking out. A real highlight, especially that live performance on Kimmel.

Von Dutch - Charli xcx

First, I am painfully aware I'm picking the least-cool tracks from Brat. Not that any of them are uncool but everything is relative. I just love the video for this one. Plus it fucking slaps!

Second, I cannot believe I literally only just noticed this minute that the xcx in Charli's name isn't capitalized. I think I've always rendered it XCX. I'll stop that right away.

That Sedative - Bad Waitress

Up to now we've been squarely in my wheelhouse but this is slightly askew of my usual tastes. It's very rock. It's what I hear as a clean rock sound though, with the treble up high and a lot of chant. I can do that. Plus that bit where it all goes murky and the vocals are treated lift it out of the rock trap a little. And as I said at the time, it reminds me of Fluffy and Fluffy can do no wrong.

Love Your Money - Daisy Chainsaw

I did say not everything on this list came out in 2024. This is from 1992! One of the weirdest things to appear on the blog this year was an entire post about Katie Jane Garside. I mean, why? I can't explain it. The fact remains that it happened and I did listen to this track pretty much on hard repeat for about two weeks so it has to go in.

Molecules - Daisy Dreams

This has everything I love about a certain stripe of clever, musicianly indie-rock - chiming guitar tones, chugging riffs, crisp, unfussy drumming, overlapping bass/guitar melodies, nagging, insistent female vocals, repetition, repetition, repetition. It even has a semi-spoken middle eight. I must have listened to this twenty or thirty times at least now. I've listened to it four times in the last twenty-four hours. I wish the rest of their songs were as good.

Docket - Blondshell (feat. Bully)

If they were, they'd be Blondshell. There are no mediocre Blondshell songs. Every one is wonderful. Her self-titled album is my album of 2024 although it actually came out in the summer of '23. I didn't get a hard copy until November this year so it counts. 

I actually prefer the version of this that Bully doesn't sing on but this is the one I posted before so we'll stick with it for this post. Here she is doing it at Glastonbury. It just happens to be the one song the BBC chose to leave us when they closeted the rest of the set. Boy, did that make me mad!

Unless something radical happens, you can expect to hear Blondshell here about as often as you hear Lana del Rey, which is whenever there's anything new to share. Her band is great, too. They could do with more credit.

Favourite - Fontaines DC

Best opening riff of anything I heard this year, I think. I got the album for Christmas. I watched the full set from Glastonbury on TV, live in real time, and it gave me chills. I even got singer Grian Chatten's solo album. And yet a couple of years ago I wouldn't give them the time of day. Funny how things change.

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl - Yeule

There was a week where I barely listened to anything but covers of this song. And the original, which I'd never heard or even heard of before. I really need to watch I Saw The TV Glow now.

wanna go to the gas station? - Martha Sin Del 

I only realized last night what this song is about. I'm not sure if it changes my mind on anything but I guess it's not quite as mellow as I thought it was. I had it down more as a kind of slacker thing, harking back to when slacker was a lifestyle choice not an insult. That's what I get for reading the damn lyrics, I guess. Sometimes it's better not to know.

Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild 

 Merce Lemon

Maybe I should find out what this about, too. Maybe I should find out what all the songs I like are about. I am not as careful with a lyric as I probably should be. As attentive, I mean. I'm more of a title, first line and chorus kind of guy, if I'm honest...

Football - Youth Lagoon

Of course, knowing what the lyrics are doesn't always help as much as you'd think. Not with the stuff I tend to end up listening to the most, anyway. There's always a lot of ellipsis, metaphor and allusion going on. Biographical detail no-one but the songwriter gets. Stuff like that.

I dunno. Maybe I am the person who caught the football. I caught this one, for sure.

Fade Into You - American Football

Perhaps the biggest surprise of my musical year was how much emo I found myself listening to. And enjoying. Particularly mid-western emo. I don't know why, really. I ought not to like it by most counts but I just do. There's something worn-down and weary but not yet defeated about it that sounds especially poignant coming from people in their teens and twenties, although it needs to be said that emo has been around in its many forms for a long time and people in some of the best-known bands would have to be pushing fifty by now. 

Don't you wonder how it must feel to be fifty and still making your living singing songs about how bad it felt being nineteen? Someone ought to write a song about that.

Bunny Goes 2 Business School  idialedyournumber

I may like emo but I draw the line at screamo. Except, apparently, I don't. Not any more. What is happening to me?

Morfina - Kiddie Gang

Kiddie Gang are from Mexico. Monterrey, specifically. You learn something new every day. Or you do if you know how to use Google search. And can read Spanish. Which I sort of can, sometimes. Generally, I try to avoid finding out too much about anyone I listen to these days. It almost never adds to the experience. Sometimes curiosity can't be contained, though.

This one has over 7m views on YouTube so I'm guessing they're quite successful. In Mexico. Probably not anywhere else. Shame.

Blu - Girl Ultra

Also from Mexico. Another rabbit hole I tripped into. And will be falling down again, I'm sure. Many times. It goes deep.

Girl, So Confusing - Charli XCX feat. Lorde 

I find myself whistling this all the time at work. Or humming it. I bet you wished you worked with me. 

A generation-defining moment and here I am, talking about it like it was the theme to a sitcom. No wonder they hate us. I would, too.

And with that we are done for another year. It's been yet another corker for music but then they all are. Good music never stops coming. Great music is a little rarer but there's still a million times more of it than any of us will ever get to hear.

As for 2025, I already have so much stuff backed up after the long slog through Christmas it's going to take several posts just to clear the backlog. So there's that to look forward to. 

If you thought this selection was a little outre, Charli always excepted, I would direct you to Kieran Press Reynolds choices, some thirty tracks altogether, almost all of which will be by people you never heard of and who, if you listen to them, you'll most likely wish you never had.

A few of those will be cropping up here next year so my advice is to go there and inoculate yourself ahead of time.

The Dream Is Over

What did you do after lunch on Christmas Day? I played video games! 

Well, one video game: Wuthering Waves. I managed to get in a longish session, right after we finished Christmas lunch and Mrs Bhagpuss and Beryl were both comatose with food exhaustion. We'd done all our socialising before the big day so it was just the three of us, which is how we like it. 

We'd opened all our (Many!) presents, taken Beryl for a walk, cooked and eaten lunch and done everything except pull the crackers which, once again, we forgot. Seriously, we've had the same box - a dozen Moomin-themed crackers - for at least three years now and I think we've maybe pulled four of them. I even said on Christmas Eve that we mustn't forget again. And then we forgot!

Anyhoo... getting back to the point and without any more uneccesary biographical detail, what happened was I sat down in front of the PC, wondering what to play and decided it ought to be Wuthering Waves. There was an event I wanted to do.

It's called Depths of Illusive Realm and it's been running for weeks. I mentioned it in the last post I wrote about the game, which was all the way back in November, when I said I'd done the first chapter. Back then, it seemed like there'd be more than enough time to get it all done but time has an unfortunate habit of passing and it was dawning on me that there might not be all that much of it left, at least where this particular event was concerned.

The "Caution- Wet Surface" sign's a nice touch - but shouldn't it be on the ceiling?

Even though it's there or thereabouts my favorite game of the year (There may be a post on Favorites of the Year if I can get it together to collate the lists and write it.) I hadn't really played much Wuthering Waves since mid-November. I did get in a couple of unreported sessions, taking me well into The Black Shores, but as I keep mentioning, my game-playing is at an historic low in the lifetime of the blog just now. My spotty attendance record is no reflection on Wuthering Waves itself, just more evidence of a general decline in gaming activity (Whatever Steam says to the contrary.)

Even so, my attitude to Wuthering Waves is puzzling. I've been pondering on exactly why it might be that I play the game in such a sporadic fashion, given it's supposed to be my gaming crush of the moment.  I think I've figured it out (And I know I've said it before.). It's because it doesn't actually feel like playing a game at all. It's more like watching a movie.

Every time I play I have a really great time but most of it is watching cut scenes and enjoying the story. There's a fair amount of button-pressing to keep the dialog moving and there are always a few fights sprinkled in, along with some puzzles to solve, all of which tends to be quick and easy enough not to interrupt the narrative flow. Once in a while there's a Big Boss Fight, which can put a bit of a damper on things from my perspective but even those generally aren't too off-putting. I could do without them, personally, but I've experienced far worse in lots of other games.

In a two or three hour session, though, it feels like at least two-thirds of the time is spent watching other characters do stuff and listening to other characters talk to each other. That makes it feel distinctly like watching an anime TV show or a movie, albeit with interactive elements.

Not for the first time, I sense someone's personal experience leeching into the plot.

The sensation is enhanced by the enigmatic portrayal of the player-character. The developers went for a peculiar design aesthetic: a weird see-sawing between a silent protagonist and an almost omniscient narrator. 

At times, my character just nods, makes gestures and looks vague. At others, she has full, voice-acted dialog. When she does speak, it's often in voice-over, revealing her private thoughts and giving her interpretations on what's happening. It feels like the actor's commentary in the extras on a DVD.

The overall effect is that if I get stuck into the storyline and finish a standalone section, like a chapter or even a whole event, I come away feeling more like I watched a movie than played a game. It's satisfying but it take a while before I feel like doing it again.

Alternatively, if I just potter around, doing shorter side quests and dailies or just exploring the gorgeous world, then it feels much more like playing a game. That's fun but it doesn't progress my character anything like as much as the main storyline quest would. It's a bit of the old Catch 22.

All of which is really much more my problem than anything the game is doing wrong. I'm also aware that I'm not approaching the whole enterprise in the way the developers would expect. I think I'm supposed to press on through the story tothe end and then do a lot of repeititive "content", like in every other live service game. I just never seem to get the hang of it.

They do keep an eye on this sort of thing, fortunately. There are frequent surveys and questionaires you can opt in to complete and many of the questions revolve around playstyles and preferences. I get the feeling they're doing what they can to accomodate everyone.

Suure... until you murder me!

I'm veery happy to give my input. I completed a survey just recently that had multiple questions concerning how much combat there should be in story quests, how hard it should be and so on. Naturally I expressed a preference for the minimum possible interruption to the story but I fear it may be a minority opinion. 

Based on past experience with multiple games, my impression is that the more hardcore players think they are, the more they complain and those who make the most noise are likeliest to have an influence on how the game develops. In-game surveys at least make some attempt to garner a range of opinions although there's still a strong element of self-selection.

With that in mind I always expect things to get more annoying rather than less as a game ages but after my time with the current event on Christmas Day I'm mildly optimistic my fears may prove to be unfounded, at least in this case. I was able to finish the whole of the event storyline, which is substantial, in a couple of sessions, mainly because it turned out it had been tuned to make it impossible to lose any of the significant fights, even the big finish with the final boss.

It took me a while to figure that out. A while back, I did some very necessary work on upgrading my combat capabilities and it paid off to some extent. Even so, I'm still extremely bad at this kind of action combat so having better gear is only ever going to get me so far.

Nevertheless, I was winning all my fights quite handily - until I ran into one opponent who seemed to be determined to give me a really good thrashing. I kept expecting to die but somehow I never quite did and when the victory finally came, it was by the slimmest conceivable margin - my character had just a single hit point left.

It all happens so fast , it's only in the screenshots I get to see who we were fighting.

I was so surprised, I took a screenshot to prove it, although I can't find it now. It just wasn't, as I thought, amazing good luck. It was because, as I eventually figured out, the event has been designed to make it literally impossible to lose. 

In the finale, you have to battle the main villain, who summons several boss mobs from earlier in the game, resulting a string of explosive, confusing and spectacular fights. I spent some considerable time in a couple of rounds hanging on by just a single hit point. But I never died. As far as I can tell, the player character can't die.

If I've gotten that right it's a very welcome design choice. It meant that I was able to enjoy the fights for once, instead of constantly worrying about having to start over. I don't mind relatively long boss fights so long as I'm certain I only have to do them once. 

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story or gameplay in the outgoing event, save to say that I found it all excellent. The dialog was well-written, the voice acting was convincing, the plot was intriguing and the action was enjoyable. 

The story revolves around an attempted incursion of the Somnoire dreamworld into reality. Either that or it's a stare-down between a two cats. One or the other. Over several chapters we get to see the dreams of some established characters as well as those of a couple of newcomers, both of whom seem like fine additions to the ever-growing cast. As each dream is resolved (They all feature anxiety issues or something similar.) that character takes a place in the deserted railway cariage until finally there's a full team, ready to go take on the villain behind the whole thing.

Camellya: Rover's flirty frenemy, the one who ends every fight dangling from some kind of sex-swing. Or that's what it looks like. Maybe it's just me...

It's an excellent conceit and structuraly I found it very satisfying. Who doesn't enjoy getting the team back together? 

I had a lot of fun. It made for a highly entertaining Christmas afternoon and a first-class alternative to watching The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which is what I'd have been doing if we'd followed our usual pattern and slumped on the sofa in front of whatever animated movie the BBC had programmed for a stupified nation to sleep through after Christmas lunch

I'm not sure if the Illusive Realm narrative content will disappear from the game entirely, when the event comes to an end a few days, or whether it's just the ancillary content that will go. I hope it stays. It's much too good to waste on a one-off apppearance.

Coming after is something much bigger than a mere event. According to the official Wuthering Waves website, 2 January sees the launch of Wuthering Waves Version 2.0.

I'm still a bit vague on exactly what that entails. I'm hoping it's just a hyperbolic way of saying the game is getting even bigger, not that the current game is going to change. In my opinion it doesn't need to be mucked about with. It's more than fine as it is.

Having watched the trailer and skimmed the promotional material, it seems we'll be getting a new continent, Rinascita, along with something called the Echo Fiesta and something else called All Silent Souls Can Sing. The website is so much style over content, though, I can't be sure what any of it  means.

Whatever it turns out to be, I'll most likely get to it in a separate post, nearer the time. For now, I'm just reporting that I'm done with Depths of Illusive Realm. It was great and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Can't ask for more than that.

Wishing You All A Very...

First of all

Merry Christmas!

Second of all, I just happened to be on Amazon this Christmas Day morning, buying a gift card to send to someone by email because, when I tried to do it earlier in the week, it all went horribly wrong. 

Amazon Customer Service was excellent but even they couldn't fix my mistake so I had to put an "I.O.U. 1 (One.) Amazon Gift Card to be delivered on Christmas Day" note inside the card and, rather than having it go horribly wrong a second time through me messing up the delivery timer, as would almost invitably have happened, I chose to do it in real time instead. 

Which was when I happened to notice an entirely unexpected animated Gift Card option. It was this:

I don't know why you would want to but if you feel like sending someone an animated New World-themed Amazon gift card, now you can! I mean, it's not a very good one but at least it shows Amazon Corporate is really behind the game now, right? Or that's one interpretation.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the good news to all New World fans on this Christmas Day. I guess there must be some, still. Somewhere.

Also, there would have been a New World Winter Convergence screenshot at the top of the post but updating the game made my PC cry and I had to unplug the external drive New World is on before it would even boot up again, so Nightingale it is.

Christmas Day

Christmas Day
The Beach Boys

Christmas Day
Dido

December 25

25th Of December
Tracey Thorn

Single On The 25th
Lauren Spencer Smith

Day Twenty-Four - Nice

24 Decembre 12月24日
Pizzicato 5

Day Twenty-Four - Naughty

Christmas Eve Can Kill You
Dawn McCarthy & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Snow, What's New?

I'm barely managing to keep all my games updated just now, let alone actually play any of them, but yesterday I did somehow contrive not only to patch Nightingale but to spend an hour or so in the game, checking out the latest build. It includes several significant changes but the main thing I wanted to see was the snow.

The update, snappily entitled "Winter Update", adds something I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to see - the ability to run the game on "Player-hosted Servers". I'll skip that part, since it has no use or meaning for me, but for anyone that cares, there's the skinny on how it works to your left. You'll need a magnifying glass.

Considerably more interesting, to me, anyway, is the new ability to recruit NPC "Survivors" to work as slave labor unpaid volunteers on your Estate. Interesting but not necessarily welcome.

Frankly, even the use of the term "Estate" for what I had previously thought of as my character's home creeps me out a little. If I have an Estate, I must either be the Lord of the Manor or the Estate Manager, neither of which really appeals. Having a bunch of silent serfs scuttling around picking up logs and growing crops makes it feel too much like feudalism for comfort.

This, unfortunately, seems to be a growing trend. I'd like to blame Palworld, which was where I first encounterted this ethically challenging mechanic, but I know it was preceded by a far, far worse iteration in Conan Exiles. There's a version in Enshrouded, too, I believe. Indentured labor seems to be the fashion everywhere, these days.

For my mental and emotional peace of mind, I'd be glad if developers put a stop this sort of thing before it goes any further. I don't play fantasy adventure games so I can spend even a portion of my time role-playing an Overseer or a Feudal Lord or some kind of animal-abusing zoo-keeper. Even playing a fair and equitable Estate Manager smacks of tedium. What next? Fantasy chartered accountant?

Still, I had to take a look the new mechanic for the sake of science and I can say that so far, the part I've seen feels half-baked and lacking any polish. Coming back to Nightingale after a lay-off really points up just how much of an Early Access title it is, something I found very easy to overlook in the white heat of discovery a few months ago.

I was able to recruit several workers through the uninspiring process of speaking to each of them individually and running through the exact same dialog every time to get their "Calling Card", which I then had to add manually to my Cairn, the device that marks the area of land you've claimed for your Estate. That's as far as I've taken it because to set them to work you need the upgraded Cairn Mk. II and I haven't yet found the time to make one.

I didn't want to get side-tracked on that because my main reason for logging in was to check out the (Once again.) unimpressively-named "Winter Event". Seriously, couldn't someone have come up with something a little less generic? I mean, I'm not asking for the Winter Convergence Festival but at least we could have had Festive Frolics or It's Snow Time!

The Winter Event includes all the usual holiday tropes: snowballs, outfits you wouldn't be seen dead in any other time of the year, festive food (Although wouldn't Pumpkin Pie be more appropriate for Halloween?) and, of course lots of snow. 

There's also a pet (Pets aren't just for Winter Event, remember!) and decorations for your home Estate. I have yet to obtain any of those.

The first thing I did was get the snow falling. For that you have to find the thingamajig that sets the rules for the zone you're in and slap a new, minor card into it. 

There are three of them: Cosy Winter, Winter Wonderland and Naughty and Nice List. The first just changes the weather to snowy, the second makes the ground slippery with ice and also makes you move faster so you can fall over more easily (Probably...), while the third changes the local loot table so it includes coal and presents.

You have to make your own cards, something that took me a moment to remember how to do. Since I wanted snow, I made Cosy Winter and I'd like a word with whoever came up with the name. In my book, "Cosy" does not imply any kind of low temperature debuff. I'd just about had enough of those with Once Human's Way of Winter so I was not best pleased to see the little snowflake icon pop up when the weather changed.

Luckily, whatever the debuff does, it seems to be very feeble so I was largely able to ignore it as I figured out what I needed to make the new outfits. When I found out, I wasn't best pleased. It reminded me of another annoying mechanic in another game I've been playing, or rather play-testing, namely Stars Reach.

Here's another irritating trend I'd like to see the back of: having to go kill stuff just so you can craft things. 

I don't mean to get materials. That makes sense. You want a bearskin rug, you have to kill a bear, I get that.

If you want to learn how to sew a Jolly Dress, however, I cannot for the life of me see why you need to kill a random creature with a snowball first. Or why making a wooden push-along horse needs you to hit the same creature ten times in a row with a snowball before you can figure out how to do it. Maybe it's just me, but I really would prefer to see some faint semblance of a logical connection between action and consequence, even in the Fey Realms.

You have to do what you have to do, though, so I made some snowballs. Far, far too many snowballs. I didn't realise the recipe produced them in batches of 20. Now I have hundreds. I had to pile them up in storage chests just to make space in my backpack. 

I needed a few, though. Killing a creature with a snowball means exactly what it says. No throwing a snowball to get its attention then swapping to your axe and hacking it to death. Since the snowballs don't do a lot of damage, that means pelting something that won't run away with snowball after snowball until one finally takes the last few remaining hit points.

After a couple of failed attempts (Deer: ran away; Bear: wandered off while I was working out what key to press to "throw".) I found a boar that was willing to play. While my assistant kept the pig occupied, I piked about a dozen snowballs into it until eventually it keeled over. Voila! Three free recipes - Jolly Coat, Boots and Hat.

If that doesn't sound ridiculous then I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I've been playing these games too long but I feel like I've come full circle. When I started playing EverQuest in 1999 it used to infuriate me that wolves dropped rusty weapons. I got over it after a while but I feel the same sense of outrage creeping back.

I'll skip over the next part, the bit where I filch around in my chests for old bits and pieces to make Augmentations to enhance my crafting stations. I didn't have to do it but I felt I ought. The devs have done a lot of work on that aspect of the game, making it much easier to see and understand what effect these things have. It's good but it also makes it less acceptable simply to ignore the mechanic altogether, as I mostly hasd been doing. It's a bit of a mixed blessing, now I come to think about it. 

Once I had that finished (Or barely started, if I'm honest. A lot of work still to do there...) I made myself a set of the red holiday gear. There's also a blue set but that requires an entirely different and more arduous combat-based achievement, one I may or may not be able to bring myself to complete. The blue does look better though, at least in the pictures.

It would pretty much have to because the red is hideous. Most outfits in Nightingale are unpleasant to look at so I shouldn't have been disappointed but I was, a little. And then there was the issue of the stats.

You have a choice in Nightingale: you can wear clothes with the stats you want and put up with looking like the Before on an extreme makeover show or you can Glamor them to look like something halfway tolerable. I have the Glamor Station to do the glamoring with but it costs tokens every time you use it and they aren't that easy to come by. I only have nine so far.

If you decide to change the look of something, the receiving piece retains its own stats, so I could glam my good gear to look like the horrible Jolly set, something I'd consider doing just for the season if I could then glam it back to the original look. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I can't. Glamming it will destroy the original appearance for ever and it just happens to be one of the few looks I have that I actually like.

There may be ways around this or I may be misunderstanding how it works but until I find out for sure I am not minded to risk it. For now, I'm just wearing the low-level Jolly gear for the purpose of taking screenshots then swapping back to my good gear when I want to do anything else. It's annoying but it'll have to do.

There's still plenty in the Winter Event I want to try. I'm not sure how long it runs for but I imagine it will stretch into the New Year. I'll try to fnd time to get the rest done and report back.

If anyone cares.

Day Twenty-Three - Nice

Riu Chiu
The Monkees

Day Twenty-Three - Naughty

Feliz Navidad
Dr Phunk, F4ST

The Numbers Don't Lie

It began with denial that turned into resistance only when the truth could no longer be ignored. Next came grudging acceptance and finally complete capitulation. I have been assimilated. I am no longer an individual. I am now part of the hive mind.

If proof is required, I refer you to the image above. Three hundred and eighty-two sessions in just three games, all played through Steam. It's clearly now my gaming portal of choice and I find myself mildly resenting any game I play that doesn't feature natively there. 

The session number is interesting. Apparently I played more sessions, in just those three games, than there are days in a year. 

And that's just the base of the iceberg. According to Replay, all my engagement stats are up on 2023. I played six more games, beat my best '23 streak by six days and picked up a bunch more Achievements.  Altogether, I played twenty other games on top of the Big Three and twenty-two demos on top of that again, plus a few playtests for giggles. Even if we assumed I only played all of them only once, which would be a significant under-estimate, it comes to well over four hundred sessions in less than a calendar year.

It gives a lie to the impression I'd formed of of my gaming habits in 2024, which I would have said had been in steep decline. If you consider that the Steam tally doesn't include two of the games I played most frequently this year, EverQuest II and Wuthering Waves, or anything I played through Amazon Prime Gaming, any argument that my interest and involvement with video games has waned in recent times becomes difficult to sustain.

I'm sure I have played less this year but any decline has to be considered in relative terms. I may not play video games as much as I used to but that's because I used to play a hell of a lot. By any reckoning, I still play more than most people. And thanks to Steam, now I can prove it.

The Achievement stat is misleading. The availabilty of Achievements is wildly inconsistent between games so it really depends much more on what someone plays rather than how many hours they put in or even whether they care about gaining Achievements at all. 

I would usually claim I have no interest in Achievements and it's certainly true I have zero interest in them in their own right. I consider them meaningless at best, at worst verging on insulting, the trigger points needed to acquire them often appearing trivial, fatuous or downright stupid.

Steam Achievements, though, are very useful in gauging my progress against that of the general population of a given game, something that does interest me a little. They also offer considerable insight into the story behind the top-line Steam Chart numbers. 

If, for example, there's an Achievement for an unavoidable step in progression, as there is in many games, it's very instructive to see how many people have hit it. If a half a million people have bought a game but a week later only seven percent have played it long enough to reach the end of the Tutorial, it tells you a lot about how successful that game has really been.

The other two stats  - Games Played and Longest Streak - do say something specific both about my engagement with the hobby this year and also about my particular style of gaming. I don't think twenty-three sounds like a lot of games to play in twelve months and, as I said, I actually played a good few more than that. Apparently I'm wrong there. Replay tells me I'm way ahead of the norm.

Steam players seemingly manage to restrict themselves to an average of one game every three months. I don't believe I ever played that few games, not even fifteen years or twenty years ago, when supposedly all I played was MMORPGs. Even then I'd most likely have played a dozen different MMOs in a year and a few other genres once in a while, too.

As for the Streak, that makes it look as though other people generally take a day off from gaming at least once a week, whereas I can barely tear myself away from the screen for a whole month. Fair.

The stat on new vs old looks a lot more representative of my current state of mind. As must be obvious to anyone who's been reading this blog for a while, the older I get, the more I crave novelty. I used to be very content with playing mostly the same games month in, month out and writing about them too. Now I'm always on the look-out for something fresh both to play and write about.

If the numbers are to be believed, that is very far from being a common point of view. With all the talk we hear of FOMO, you'd think everyone would be playing new games all the time but it seems the huge majority of Steam customers are very happy to stick with their old favorites. I was, once. Not so much any more.

I feel this feeds directly into something I regard as a major problem with popular culture in general, a strong preference for the familiar. People are constantly berating producers of games, movies, music and all forms of entertainment for their lack of originality and for sticking to a formula but the sad fact is that as we age, we tend to stop liking new things and cleave to the familiar. Genuinely fresh takes are rarely commercially successful with any demographic but the young.

There's research to that effect concerning music but it almost certainly applies to other activities and interests just as much. It's what drives both the tedious nostalgia cycle and the relentless insistence that whatever decade you were in High School and College marked some kind of Golden Age for popular culture. It really ticks me off and I'm very happy my Steam stats suggest I'm still moving forward, culturally, not always looking back.

The final stat from this year's Replay I'm going to consider is the highly suspect spider graph that supposedly tells me what kind of games I played in 2024. I am not at all convinced by the accuracy of this one, not least because it doesn't explain its methodology.

Steam tends to festoon games with all kinds of descriptive tags relating to gameplay, subject matter, genre and so forth. I have never found those to be any kind of reliable guide to what the games are actually like so, presuming that's where this information is coming from, it's flawed from the start.

In this case, I think it's accurate to say a lot of my playing time has been spent in RPGs or MMORPGs but I'm very surprised to see Open World Survival/Craft apparently less strongly represented. How that squares with the statistic from the same report that 63% of my total Steam hours have been spent in two Open World Survival Crafting games alone (Nightingale and Once Human) I cannot fathom, except of course that both of those are also tagged "MMORPG" on Steam (And Once Human even is!)

Looking at "Western", I played only one game in that genre this year as far as I can recall, Hard West, and my total played time in it so far comes to just seventy minutes. Why does Western even merit a mention at all? As for "Top-Down Shooter", I'm not even sure I know what one of those is, let alone which demo I played would have qualified.

Other than that, the report gives me a whole lot of detailed information on which games I played in which months, something that's already all too clear from the posts I wrote about those games at the time. I don't think we need to rehash any of that again.

Looking to next year, I already have several games in my basket from the Steam Winter Sale although I haven't made any final decisions on what  to buy. I try and restrict myself to games I'll actually play sooner rather than later (Let alone never.) so I had been wondering if it was worth buying any new games at all, given my supposed waning interest. Having read my stats I guess I should stock up while they're going cheap. 

Apparently I am still a gamer, after all.