Am I imagining it or did End of Year lists not used to come out at the end of the year? Not any more. I've been peppered with the blasted things since the beginning of December. I love lists but I wasn't ready, dammit!
I was planning on doing my own Best Of 2024 in 2025 but now I worry it'll be
old news by then. I'm working on it, anyway. It's a bit top-heavy. I
haven't posted a What Have I Been Listening To... since mid-October and
it looks like that's going to be the last of the year, so there's almost a
quarter of the year missing.
As for games and TV, which I guess would be the other two categories, both of those have tailed right off, too. Makes me wonder what I've been doing with my time. Also, why it is that the less I work and the more spare time I have, the more it seems like I never have time to get anything done?
But I digress. Which just means I'm awake. Let's get on.
Star Quality
One of the nailed-on certainties for my Best Music On Inventory Full 2024 Edition list (I'll firm that title up, don't fret.) has to be DC Fontaines' Starburster. I largely ignored the first few years of the Irish fashion-disasters' career but their sudden swerve into nuanced, layered, textural soundscapes took me by happy surprise.
It seems I wasn't the only one to notice. Someone in Gearbox Software's marketing department appears to be a fan. The new trailer for Borderlands 4 is cut to the aforementioned Starburster.
When I saw the news I was intrigued but unconvinced and having watched the trailer I'm even less convinced than that. It's a nice idea but, while someone's taken great care to try and sync the animations to the ryhthm and even to make the lyrics sorta-kinda fit, the visuals are just far too lightweight to match the music.
DC Fontaines' sound is thick. It's a blend of post-punk and grunge, the sharp clarity of the former infused with the sonic density of the latter. Borderland is a cartoon. I'm not sure if the idea is to buy back some gravitas after the disaster that was the Borderlands movie (Still haven't seen it; still want to.) but if so, I don't think this is going to do it.
As for whether the game will be any good, I have no idea. Ask someone who plays.
And A Nightingale In A Pear Tree
Is the week before Christmas an odd time to release a major update? I'm not sure. It is the holiday season so people will have some spare time, I guess. But won't most of those people be busy doing holiday stuff?
End of November/beginning of December, that slot I get. It falls neatly into the "Anticipating Fun" window, while avoiding the "This Is Just Too Much Now" frenzy of the latter half of the month. In the olden days, when you could actually go to a store and buy a game in a box, it made plenty of commercial sense to put new product on shelves for people to buy and I suppose that could still work in this digital age for people who think sending a code counts as gift-giving but this a free update.
Wouldn't it be better after the holidays, when people still have some down-time and might be looking for something to carry them through the dark, dismal days of the empty year ahead? Not to mention that it's an update and it will go wrong. Do the devs really want to have to come in Christmas week to fix what they broke? Or, worse, will they just go home for the festivities and leave it to later?
I guess if the game is Nightingale, which it is, and only about five hundred people still play, on a good day, it's something of a moot point. The real surprise is that there are any updates at all. How long can it go on?
As to what's in this one, it's a little vague but here's a list because lists are great.
- NPC Automation
- Building UI Updates
- New Tileset (Fae-themed Obsidian)
-
Winter Holiday Event including pets, seasonal outfits, furniture and
snow.
- "Listen Server" - lets players talk to each other without having to be in multiplayer mode.
I might have to log in just to see the new snow. I do love snow.
Otherwise, I think I might just be over Nightingale now, at least until the update that adds Nightingale City itself. That I would love to see. Doubtful it will ever happen but as the devs point out in the video, while the overall rating on Steam is mixed, the Recent Review rating is Very Positive so things are at least going in the right direction.
An Epic Early New Year's Resolution
I just referred to Nightingale's Steam player count as I frequently do with games I play on Steam. It is, of course, important to remember that, with a few exceptions, most games, particularly MMOs and MMOlikes, are available on other platforms as well.
Some of those are proprietory logins for individual games or Publisher Portals like NetEase's Loading Bay but Steam does have a direct competitor in the shape of Epic Games. Nightingale is on that so maybe more people play it there.
I have an Epic Games account. I just never remember to use it. Or that it exists. I do add things to it every once in a while via Prime Gaming but that's now so nicely automated I don't have to leave Prime to do it, which means I just click the freebies onto my EG account and promptly forget I have them.
I was moved to make the effort and actually log into my Epic account yesterday by a welcome PSA from Tobold, who posted to let everyone know that The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is free on Epic Games this week. Thaniks, Tobold!
It wasn't a game I had on my radar but Tobold's description ("a procedurally generated "open world" survival crafting game") and advice ("if you like survival crafting games like Valheim, this is certainly worth checking out") caught my interest, so I logged in to grab it. And I'm glad I did.
Not because of the Moria game itself. I haven't tried it yet. What pleased me was finding another game, Infinity Nikki, one I'm a lot more interested in playing, is also available for free from the Epic Game store.
As I mentioned a few days ago, I was about to play this one when I found I didn't have enough drive space to install it. I still don't although I will do after Christmas, when I'll either have received a new SDD as a gift or have bought one for myself if not. I already have the standalone installer downloaded but it would be much neater to have the game available from a platform I'm already using (Or could be using, if I was more organized, which is where that New Year's resolution comes in.)
While I was logged in, I also noticed a bunch of other games I own there that I probably ought at least to take a look at, like some of the Borderland titles, BioShock and Frostpunk. I also notice that, like Tobold, I have notifications set to inform me of all the games Epic gives away for free. Unfortunately, because notifications annoy me, I have Desktop Notifications switched off so I never see them. I wonder if there's a way to get those by email?
Surely He Can't Have MORE Music?
Ohhh yes he can! I'd start an actual music blog if I thought anyone would see it. Maybe I should seriously think about that for the New Year...
Meanwhile, as I was saying earlier, I've fallen completely behind in posting my current listening habits. Partly that's because of all the Christmas music but it's also largely down to a change in viewing habits. I'm doing most of my musical investigations on the laptop late at night and I've been very lax in transferring that data to my PC, where it needs to be before I'm likely to do anything with it.
I have got a few things bookmarked over here, though, so I think I can find something. How about this?
Today's "Naughty" Christmas number is a tune by Advance Base. Advance Base is actually one guy called Owen Ashworth, who also works under the better-known (For a given definition of "known".) name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.
I was familiar with that band name but I'd never bothered to listen to anything by them. It reminded me of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and I imagined they'd be part of that noughties, New York, post-twee scene, of which I have probably heard as much as I care to by now.
I was wrong. It's not that. It's something arguably more interesting, much as I love my tweepop. Ashworth specialises in slice-of-life narratives, delivered in a sort of lo-fi, indie electronica fashion that verges on outsider art. He has a new album out under the Advance Base name which Stereogum just made its Album of the Week.
They describe it as "a haunting, minimalist collection of story-songs set in the same fictional town where only bad things happen". It's called Horrible Occurences and here's a track from it.
And we're done.
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