No-One Expects The Seventies Discotheque

To avoid stretching this whole thing out to an unreasonable length, I'm going to ram the last two Next Fest demos together in one, final post. They don't really have a lot to do with each other, apart from both being point-and-click adventures of a sort, but even that's more coherence than any two random demos deserve, so I guess it'll do.

First up, let's take on Dancing Bones which, when you stop and think about it, is an odd name for a game set in the Old West. But then, it isn't really what you'd call a traditional western. There's a sub-genre generally known as "Weird West", where fantasy or sci-fi tropes are spot-welded onto a backdrop lifted wholesale from the traditional Hollywood version of the 19th century American myth and I guess that's where Dancing Bones fits.

It has some pure fantasy elements, with one character styling herself a "mage" and another talking about grimoires, but it also leans towards alt-history with mention of "the Inquisition", a body that seems to have a more than nominal connection with the infamous historical institution. In the demo, or at least in the section of the demo I was able to play, most of this stays in the background, although I did get the sense of some kind of oppressive Roman Catholic hierarchy lurking in the background, possibly in full control of the Americas, North and South.

I don't recall any actual magic spells or mythical beasts, just some talking cows. Although I think the only talking they did was mostly in the main character's mind. He'd clearly been spending far too long hanging out with them, without benefit of human company.

In fact, what I spent most of  my half-hour in the demo doing was his chores, all of which involve cows. The character you get to play is employed as some kind of stable-hand or cowman and the demo opens with you picking up bales of hay to feed the animals and dusting the cowshed for cobwebs.

Which is fine as far as it goes. I appreciate the need both to introduce players to the controls and to set the scene but I would question whether it's the best use of an opportunity to show your game to potential players (And buyers.) at an event like Next Fest. If the bulk of the game is actually all about supernatural entities, magic spells and adventure, perhaps it might be better to showcase a segment from later in the game, when at least some of that stuff is actually happening.

As far as those controls go, they're fine. I did have to go into the settings to reduce the camera swing a bit but other than that everything felt comfortable. 

 

Visually, the game is delightful, as I'm sure the screenshots show. The whole thing has either a sun-bleached desert vibe or a sepia-toned old photograph feel, both of which feel wholly appropriate and look great. The character models are quirky and characterful and the backgrounds are just as detailed as they need to be and no more. I particularly liked the journals, books and maps, all of which are charmingly rendered. 

The writing is solid. I did get the occasional feeling it might have been translated but no amount of research (About five minutes on Google...) has been able to reveal the identity or origin of developers "Lotter". The plot, which barely gets going in the part of the demo I saw, involves a sick sister who may very well be cursed, and a mysterious Mage, who turns up unexpectedly and invites herself into the family home.

 

At the point I had to log out I'd reluctantly teamed up with the Mage to travel to see some shaman who might have information on my sister's condition. Since the Mage was wanted by the Inquisition, I imagine shenanigans were about to ensue but first there was also the option of going round the surprisingly sizeable town, picking up jobs from the locals before we began, so there might be at least some element of open-world gameplay too.

Really, there could be anything. There has to be much more to the game than I was able to explore in my short time with the demo, as this developer blog about recent additions suggests. There's no release date yet and it very much looks like a game still in full development. I enjoyed what I saw but I didn't get far enough even to be sure where it was all going. 

I've wishlisted it, as much to see how it develops as anything.

 

The final demo on the shortlist was Death On The Nile and I found it highly confusing. For a start, I thought I knew the plot, having both read the original novel when I was a teenager and listened to at least one radio adaptation much more recently than that, albeit still a few years back. What I played didn't tally with my expectations or memories at all.

When I've read or listened to it before, the location was a cruise ship in Egypt and the time was the 1930s, so I certainly wasn't expecting the game to open in a discotheque with a discourse on the mirror-ball, which the game quite accurately describes as having been invented in the early 20th century and having had a good run through the 1920s, before falling out of fashion until a revival in the glory days of disco, fifty years later, when it became known, for obvious reasons, as the disco-ball.

This, I can only assume, is offered as some sort of justification for re-imagining the story in the 1970s. The demo itself takes place entirely in a London nightclub, something that once again completely threw me. Neither the Nile nor indeed death itself make any kind of appearance at all.

 

Had I seen Kenneth Branagh's 2022 movie of the same name, I might have worked out what was going on. According to Wikipedia, that film opens with a scene in a London club, in which some of the same characters I met in the game do some of the same things. That's in 1937, though, and it's a jazz club. Disco does not feature. (And to be strictly accurate, Wikipedia tells me the very first scene in the movie takes place during the First World War but I don't feel any need to be pedantic about it...)

What with all of that, I was on the back foot from the start. I also had to go into settings yet again to stop the camera yawing and pitching as though we were on a ship at sea. Why the defaults are set so high (Or maybe low.) in these things beats me but it happens a lot.

Visually, the game is a bit of a mixture. The backgrounds and environments are quite convincing and the characters look very era-appropriate but the animations are so poor as to be distracting. Everyone lurches about like zombies, arms flailing and bodies twitching. It's even worse when they're not supposed to be dancing.

 

The perpetual bad disco soundtrack is disorienting, too. I like disco but not like this. I had to turn it down after about ten minutes, something I rarely do in games. If you're going to set a scene in a disco, you might at least get the music right.

The game is more of a mystery-puzzle-solver than a straight point-and-click adventure although it's really both. The mystery part is pretty well done or at least it's quite patient with players like me, who can't be bothered to do the actual detective work. So long as you talk to everyone until the little check-mark appears by their name to let you know they don't have anything more to tell you, you can button-mash the actual case-board until things match up. 

I was on Story difficulty, the default, so maybe there are more challenging ways to play but I found it quite time-consuming enough as it was. I didn't feel like I wasted much time but it took me fifty minutes to solve the mystery of the disappearing emerald engagement ring. Or, more realistically, it took me about half that long to figure out what had happened and the rest to get all the game's ducks lined up so it would agree with me.

And I quite enjoyed it. The dialog and the plot aren't great but they aren't bad. The characters feel very hollow but having read a lot of Christie in my youth I wouldn't expect a huge amount of depth. She's a much better writer than she's often judged but finely-drawn characters were never really her thing.

There were a couple of attempts to add something for the player to do besides interview suspects. There's a whole  mechanic where you add the names, activities and secrets of various characters to your little black book, although at no point did any of it seem to have any effect on anything. Maybe it does later.

There were also a couple of times when I had to eavesdrop on people, which meant shuffling backwards and forwards until two images of the sonic pattern of their conversation lined up. It made Poirot look as if he was having a seizure and seemed like a very bad way to go about things if he was trying to avoid drawing attention to himself but I guess it was the 1970s. They probably just assumed he was on drugs.

The game's take on Hercule Poirot was what really took some getting used to for me. I'm much more familiar with the David Suchet version, a small, dapper man in a smart suit and tie. I had heard that Branagh's interpretation was somewhat... different and that's clearly the inspiration here. This Poirot was certainly dressed for the occasion in his Saturday Night Fever white suit. I'm surprised he wasn't doing the Hustle.

Technically, the demo performed very well. There were no bugs or glitches and the fairly complicated sequences of events held together pretty solidly. That bodes well for the finished game, which I think could be quite entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. 

Personally, I found the setting too claustrophobic and the characters too annoying to want to spend a lot more time with any of them, so I didn't wishlist it. I'd certainly take it if it ever crops up as a giveaway on Prime Gaming, though. It's exactly the sort of game that might.

And that's Next Fest done for another three months. Let's all gather back here in October and do it over again.

Anyone Available To Get Some Kid's Cat Out Of A Tree?

At the risk of initiating a vortex of anticlimactic disappointment, I'm going to begin with the best and work back. Seems like a bad idea until you consider the very real possibility that events, circumstances or just good old ennui could see leaving the best 'til last turn into leaving the best 'til never. 

Dispatch was, by a number of country miles, the best of the six demos I downloaded and played for this June's Next Fest but it would have been one of the best in any batch. As a demo it could hardly have done a better job of giving a glimpse the game good enough to make me think it was something I needed to see in full. 

Structurally, the demo seems to be an early, although possibly not the opening, sequence taken from the finished game, the kind of slice a lot of developers lift out to put in the shop window, with varying degrees of success. It works exceptionally well here for the simple reason that it's a very solid and entertaining introduction that slips its tutorial functions in almost unnoticed. Demos that are basically just the tutorial rarely convince.

The whole thing only takes about twenty minutes but it packs an enormous amount in without ever feeling overwhelming. The first half is a visual novel with the looks of a quality animated movie or TV show and the script and voice acting to match. The characters are immediately relatable and recognizable, the dialog is witty, the jokes land and the whole thing just rips along.

There's a fair amount of player-interaction in the form of dialog choices, all of which come with a timer. You have to pick one of three responses and, depending on your reading speed, you only have just about enough time to read them all and consider the implications for a moment before you need to pick one. This sounds as if it might be stressful but I didn't find it so in the least. I generally dislike timers but in this case it added a sense of welcome urgency to what can sometimes feel like a fairly rote and purposeless process.

It did raise two issues, however, both of which occurred to me almost as soon as the mechanic appeared: do the choices affect later gameplay and what happens if you don't pick one in time? 

As to the first, according to the description on the Steam Store page "In Dispatch, every decision you make influences the unfolding narrative. From banter in the breakroom to life-or-death situations in the field, your choices affect your relationships with the heroes, their allegiances, and the path your own story takes." That's quite fluffy, I'd say. You could easily have all of that inside a purely linear narrative. There's certainly no way to know for sure from the demo how much, if at all, any of your "choices matter", to use the infuriating jargon of the genre.

The second, though, what happens if you dither so long you time out on the response, I really should have tested it while I was playing. It's a big mark in the demo's favor that it never even occurred to me to do it until after I'd finished. I was much too invested in the story to start messing around with the controls for science.

Luckily, the demo still works even though Next Fest has ended, so I just re-ran the first few minutes to try it out. All that happens is the choice defaults to whatever's first in the list. You could just sit back and watch it all play out in front of you like a movie if you wanted.

At least, you could until you got to the second half, which is when the game comes in. Unlike a lot of visual novels or walking simulators, there really is a game here, one that requires you pay attention and click buttons at the right time.

The set-up for Dispatch is that you play an ex-superhero, one who used to have a mechanized suit that gave him powers but doesn't any more, although how he came to lose it is not disclosed in the demo. You're now reduced to taking a job at what is effectively a superhero call center. Your new job (The demo shows you arriving on your first day.) is to sit in an open-plan office in front of a screen and field calls from the public asking for super-heroic assistance. 

The jobs vary wildly, from PAs for businesses to pet rescue to armed robbery. You assign available heroes from your roster and send them to do the job. All your team have different powers, skill sets, aptitudes and red flags so fitting the right hero to the right job is crucial. So is managing them as they do it. 

Sometimes you can leave them to get on with things on their own but on some jobs you need to be available to take their calls and provide specific advice in real time on tactics such as whether they should go for a full frontal assault or sneak round the back. When they've succeeded (Or in my experience made a complete hash of things.) its down to you to review their performance.

And that's it, in the demo anyway. It's a lot harder than it sounds because the calls just keep on coming and pretty quickly it all starts to fall apart. Every job has criteria that ought to be met but good luck with that! It goes from a thoughtful selection process to a juggling act to a series of compromises and finally just comes down to sending whoever the hell is available.

Or it did for me. I imagine the idea of the full game is that you get better at doing your job as you gain experience but by the end I was just glad to be able to send anyone to stop the bar fights or get the little girl's cat down from a tree.  

It was almost always obvious which hero would be best-suited to a job but I'd usually find I'd already sent them out on the previous call and they were still on it. Or they'd messed up and were recovering, because they may be superheroes but they still need time to decompress after every mission. And then sometimes they'd just go off somewhere without telling me where or why...

It's the kind of gameplay I generally dislike but I thoroughly enjoyed it here, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was funny. The heroes are, frankly, not the cream. They all have issues. Some of them have more than others but there's not one that you'd really trust to go where they're told and do what they're asked without close supervision. They all chatter on comms all the time and none of them is at all impressed with you, your history or your performance.

The humor made it feel like fun but the main reason I didn't find it stressful in the way I would have expected was I couldn't see how my performance mattered. There didn't seem to be any penalty for screwing up that I could see so after a while I just leaned into it and stopped worrying that I was sending the ex-thief who can turn herself invisible to go deal with the robbery at the jewellery store. I can only assume that how well you perform in your role as a dispatcher does matter in the full game but it doesn't seem to mean much in the demo.

The doing-your-job segment lasts most of the second half. Then there's a brief return to the visual novel before a final montage sequence kicks in as a kind of coda. It's full of what I assume must be scenes from the full game and it makes it plain there's some sort of over-arching plot and narrative and that the visual novel aspect isn't merely a framing device for a superhero-skinned office sim. 

And the clips in the montage are really good. They're like scenes from a movie and it's a movie I'd like to see. I went straight to Steam after the demo ended and wishlisted Dispatch immediately.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the demo is professional and the game looks to be the same. The people behind it include writers and directors of Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us among others. They know how to do this sort of thing. 

If the writing is good, the graphics are easily its equal. The character design is excellent and the aesthetic is exactly right, all clean lines and flat surfaces like a good superhero show ought to have. The UI is uncluttered and intuitive and there's a wealth of lore and background material, all presented in a very approachable and attractive style.

Altogether a first-class demo for what looks like it could be a first-class game. Especially if you're a superhero fan. 

Or a fan of low-status, poorly-paid office work, I guess. I bet someone is. 

The Dirty Half-Dozen

For the first time since I started picking, playing and reviewing Next Fest demos, I'm in the happy position of being able to rank them as well. I've now played - or at least tried to play - the full half-dozen and this is how they pan out:

1. Dispatch - 26m

2. Dancing Bones - 35m

3. Death On The Nile - 51m

4. Solo Leveling - 26m

5. Elevator Music - 16m

6. Board Game Society - 29m

Let me unpick that list a little. For a start, the time I spent playing each demo doesn't necessarily reflect how much I enjoyed it. Some of them were linear and that's just how long it took. Others were seemingly open-ended and the time noted is how long it took me either to decide I'd seen enough or to feel I'd had enough. 

There was also one I would willingly have played for longer, if I could have gone back after a break and started from where I'd left off. Unfortunately, my progress wasn't being saved, so to carry on I'd have had to start again from the beginning. I really hate when demos do that without warning you what's going to happen before you log out.

Undisputed #1 and fully deserving a post of its own, which it will get, or at least that's the plan at the moment, is Dispatch, the self-described "superhero workplace comedy". Just to spoil my own reveal, I really liked it a lot. 

Possibly by co-incidence, possibly not, it didn't just feel like the most interesting demo I played this time but also the most professional, It was slick as heck. I would happily have gone on playing it for a lot longer but even counting the montage sequence promoting the full game at the end, twenty-six minutes was all I could squeeze out of it. Obviously, this one went straight onto the wishlist and I'm fairly sure I'll end up buying and playing it, too, although probably not the moment it comes out.

At #2 and a fair way behind comes Dancing Bones, the weird western. This was the one that I stopped halfway through and then couldn't pick back up from where I left it. Based on where it felt like it was going at the time, I'd guess there's at least an hour's gameplay in the demo, maybe more. That one I'll also try and review separately. I took lots of screenshots and I'd hate to waste them. I'm going to wishlist this one but I suspect I won't get around to buying it.

At #3 and about as far behind Dancing Bones as Dancing Bones is behind Dispatch, we have Death On The Nile. I might just about get a full post out of that one, too. Depends how short I am of ideas this week. Maybe half a post. I'm not sure it merits a whole one. 

As you can see, I spent the longest playing it of all the demos and that's entirely because it took me that long to finish. I found it about equal parts entertaining and annoying. I didn't wishlist it, mainly because I can't imagine actually wanting to play thirty hours or more of it or however long it's likely to take. As a standalone short story though, I'd tentatively recommend it. 

Now for the three I am not planning on giving posts of their own. I guess I'll have to go into a bit more detail. The top three ranked themselves but I feel the placings in the lower half of the chart are much more arbitrary.

#4, Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive, is perfectly fine for what it is or at least what I take it to be from the demo. It seems to be a pared-down MMORPG with a very heavy focus on "dungeons", all wrapped up in an extremely meta shell.  

There's a perfunctory introduction, which I'm pretty sure takes for granted that anyone playing will already be familiar with the source material. It covers the absolute basics, which appear to be that you died in real life and got offered the chance to come back as a video-game character. How and why isn't explained. It's just a framing device to get you into an endless sequence of fights, as far as I can see.

For the demo, the text is available in English (Decently translated.) but the voice acting isn't. It's in a choice of two languages, neither of which I could identify with any confidence, although one sounded like Japanese to me. I muted the voice-over after a couple of minutes anyway.

It didn't really matter because there was very little dialog or story in the near-half-hour I gave it. It was just a string of instances one after another in which the goal was just to get from the entrance to the exit so you could do it again only harder. Every room was a cavern with nothing much to look at and all the mobs in each "room" were the same - ants in the first, scorpions in the second, werewolves in the last one I did before I stopped.

Most of the fights started with a huge bunch of mobs that did almost no damage, followed by a boss that did more but mostly still not anything to worry about. Even with no real time to study my abilities or learn the controls, none of the fights was hard. One boss did have me drinking two health potions but I didn't die to any of them. 

Combat itself felt quite good. I found the controls reasonably intuitive, with the key binds feeling more than usually comfortable  - all letter keys for the main attacks and specials. The number keys supposedly summon... something. Or maybe someone. Nothing seemed to happen when I pressed them. 

I was doing a bit more than pure button mashing but not much and it was non-stop frenzy but quite manageable. Whether it's fun or not probably depends on your mental age. If it's somewhere between ten and fifteen you'll probably have a great time. Twenty-five minutes of it was more than enough for me, though,and since it showed no signs of stopping or changing I called it a day before I got to the end. Whether the demo ever opens out into any kind of open world or develops any kind of plot I can't say but clearly the aim is to showcase the combat, which it does pretty well. I didn't wishlist it but it ends up as a free to play title I might give it another look.

At #5 comes Elevator Music. I strongly suspect this will turn out to be a good game. It's visually very well-designed, the writing is solid and the set-up is promising. I'd have liked to have been able to play the demo all the way through. Unfortunately, I just could not figure out how the controls worked.

There's a short introduction, to which I clearly did not pay enough attention, and then you're left to get on with things. The idea is that you operate the lift in a skyscraper with more than thirty floors. That's your character's new job and it's their first day. 

People get in and tell you what floor they want and you take them there. You're advised to plan your movements for efficiency and you get tipped accordingly, although what you need the money for I have no idea. Those are the basic mechanics but there's a plot, too. There's a peace conference being held in the building and all your passengers are delegates or officials or hotel workers. As they talk to each other and to you, I think you're supposed to be able to pick up what's going on and maybe eventually influence the outcome.

Which all sounds very interesting - if you can get the lift to work. I could not. I could get it to go up or down but not to stop where I wanted it.  Not reliably, anyway. I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out who wanted to go where so the idea of planning the trips went straight out the window. Or maybe down the lift-shaft.

I was already starting to find it all quite frustrating even before I managed to get the lift stuck completely. I couldn't get it to go up or down no matter what I did. If I'd been enjoying myself more I might have tried harder to figure out what I was doing wrong but instead I took it as a welcome opportunity to give up altogether.

I suspect that even if the game is much better documented when it goes live and has a much clearer tutorial and more intuitive controls, I'd find the underlying mechanics too restrictive to have a good time playing it. Let's be honest - not many people dream of becoming an elevator operator and there are better ways to spend your time than pretending to be one, no matter how important the people getting in and out of your car might be. 

 

And finally at #6, the game that turned out least like I expected, Board Game Society. When I chose this, I thought I was getting some kind of visual novel or point&click adventure, in which a bunch of Breakfast Club-inspired high-school stereotypes somehow end up playing board games and adventures ensue. God knows how that would work. 

The only part I got right was the high-school stereotype bit and as far as I could tell those have literally as much impact on the game the dog or the boot do in Monopoly. You just pick the one you like and... er, that's all. 

There's a very brief, wordless introduction that appears to suggest some kind of Jumanji situation in play, where a bunch of kids get sucked inside an actual board game. You get to pick one of the stereotypes (Which are quite nicely represented.) and then it's all about moving around a board, killing monsters and finding loot.

The game is intended to be multiplayer and you get a couple of warnings that although it can be played solo it won't be nearly as much fun. I can vouch for that. Playing it alone isn't a lot of fun although I wouldn't say it was no fun at all. 

I could have played with others. There's a Party With Randoms option (I think it does actually use the word "Randoms".) but I thought I'd at least get the feel for it on my own before I subjected myself to that. Then, by the time I'd finished I couldn't see how it would be all that much more entertaining with strangers, so I didn't bother.

What happens is that you click directional arrows to move around the board and as you land on various spaces, things pop up. Mostly monsters that want to kill you but sometimes crystals or chests or keys to open the chests. Monsters also sometimes drop keys but mostly they drop consumables like molotov cocktails or weapon upgrades like baseball bats or chainsaws.

When you pop a monster, there's a fight. You each roll a six-sided die, your various bonuses are added and the higher score wins. I lost only the first fight, when I had no idea what was going on. After that I won every time and it wasn't even close. By the time I had the chainsaw, nothing could touch me.

And I enjoyed it. It's mindless fun but mindless fun is still fun. The UI and character graphics are nice but the game-board itself feels very lo-res, which did put me off a bit, but I can't help feeling that if the whole was slicked up it might be quite addictive. You can see by the numbers that I went on playing for a lot longer than I needed just to review it, so I must have been enjoying myself. 

The main problem I had with it, other than the ugly look of the thing, was that I couldn't quite see the point. Solo there's literally no reason to play at all, other than the in-the-moment fun of the fights and  to get through each level to see the next. The only score or win condition relates to playing against others. You play to get crystals and that's it. The player with the most wins.  

If there's only one of you that's not really much of a motivation but I can't see it being much fun with "randoms" either. Unless you're pathologically competitive, you'd need a bit more of an incentive than that, I'd have thought. It might work quite well between siblings or friendly rivals, though, where bragging rights and crowing come into play. 

I didn't wishlist this but I didn't dislike it either. Could be fun for the right person int the right circumstances. I'd likely play a prettier version with a few good voice actors yelling out amusing one-liners here and there and some kind of win condition for solo play. 

And that's it for Next Fest until next time. Except for the three full reviews I still have to write. Look forward to those later in the week, then, I guess... 

Notice Served: Three Months To Quit

It wasn't like I had plans to move anywhere. I was quite happy where I was. Then one day, out of the blue, the eviction notice comes through the door...

That's what it felt like, when Standing Stone decided they couldn't afford the upkeep on the old 32-bit servers and told everyone still hanging around there they had three months to pack up and leave. And for once, I didn't waste any time doing as I was told. I was gone in less than ten minutes.

That was the biggest surprise of the lot, really, the speed of it. And the efficiency. Two words rarely seen in any sentence that also contains the name Standing Stone Games, unless that sentence also includes the phrase "lack of".

I had been vaguely following the long-running saga of Lord of the Rings Online's transition from 32 to 64 so I was aware the worst of it was over but I still wasn't prepared for the swiftness of the operation. For a start, it only took me a couple of minutes to log in, which has to be some kind of record. I had patched up quite recently but in the past that's not always made a huge difference. This time it only took about twice as long to get to character select as it would in any other game.

Once I was there I was expecting to have to go look up how the whole move-to-another server thing works but no, it was all there in front of me in easy-to-read form. I just had to click a button and the launcher walked me through the whole thing.

I didn't think I had any other characters than the five on the EU-RP server Laurelin but it turned out I had one other - a Level 7 Hobbit Hunter named Juniperry on another EU server by the name of Withywindle. I didn't remember much (Or anything.) about her. Not surprising, considering I last saw her fifteen years ago!

The tool tip handily tells you when all your characters last logged in and Juniperry hasn't been played since November 2010. LotRO, very annoyingly, doesn't have a command to tell you the date a character was created. The best it can offer is how many hours you've played them for and when you last logged them in. 

The game launched in 2007 and I think it was at least a couple of years before Mrs Bhagpuss and I got around to playing it, so Juniperry is one of my older characters for sure. I wish I knew why I created her on a different server. I suspect it might have been back when being on the RP server was getting on my nerves but just before it became so infuriating I couldn't stick it any more. 

Back then, servers in almost all MMORPGs really were siloed, not like later when megaservers, phasing, clusters, instances and similar gimmicks made the separation mostly notional. I'd long been in the habit of creating a new character on different server, whenever I wanted to get away from some annoying person or just be assured of some peace and quiet, so I imagine that's how Juniperry got her start.

Just to add a further element of confusion, the confirmation emails I received from SSG aren't identical. I got separate emails for the two outgoing servers. The one for Laurelin lists the five characters on that server by name and includes the line "Account data transferred successfully for subscription EU subscription 06/20/2011", which would seem to suggest all my regular characters are actually newer than Juniperry, something I'm sure isn't true. 

The email for Withywindle doesn't mention an account date at all. Instead it just refers to the date of transfer: "Your World Transfer is complete! Below is the information for your transfer on 2025-06-13 12:52:14". What that all means is anyone's guess. 

For the big move, I did think about keeping Juniperry separated from the rest of my characters and moving her to a non-RP 64-bit server but in the end I decided it was so unlikely I'd play LotRO often enough in the furure for it to matter, so she might as well go live with all the others. I also decided that, for all its past faults, I probably would rather stay on the RP realm, which is at least slightly better-mannered these days. No-one's called me out for not roleplaying in a long while and I note the official SSG description of the server strongly warns that RP is neither enforced nor enforceable, the clear implication being that the roleplayers need to suck it up and play nice when they don't get their own way, just as much as the rest of us.

With that decided, I moved all of them to the new 64-bit RP world, Meriadoc. I have to say that, had I been choosing a server without all the other baggage, I wouldn't have picked one named after a really annoying Hobbit but what can you do? At least it wasn't Samwise.

The move operation itself only took a few moments but then the confirmation screen came up to warn me that my account would be temporarily uavalable while the data was being processed. I knew the move wasn't likely to take days as it had done at the beginning of the operation but I assumed it would mean I'd at least have to wait until the next day to log in and check out my new home.

Nope. The notice also said they'd email me when it was all done and it felt as though that email arrived almost immediately. It was that quick. 

It seemed like I probably should log in and see that everything had worked and naturally I picked Juniperry to be the scout. She is a Hunter, after all. 

She was standing on the road in Michel Delving in the pouring rain. Honestly, Hobbits have no sense. I went through her bags to see what she'd got and found that at Level Seven she'd already managed to fill four of them. She did have one empty bag, so I thought I might claim all the stuff she'd been gifted over the last decade and a half...

... only there wasn't any. Or hardly any. I spent about twenty minutes trying to find the mailbox in Michel Delving (Seriously, could they make the things any harder to spot?) in case her presents were in the mail but she didn't have any there either. I guess being on a different server didn't entitle her to her own anniversary presents, which I guess is fair enough, although with no cross-server trade and shared storage having so many limitations, it does seem a bit mean.

I suppose I should be grateful in a way. All those things do is clutter up your bags anyway. I mean, who actually uses all those fireworks?

With everyone safely moved, it's goodbye to the 32-bit servers but not good riddance. As I said at the top, I had no intention of moving. I was planning on staying on Laurelin as long as it was there for a couple of very good reasons. For one thing, on the rare occasions when I play LotRO, I play entirely solo, so the fewer people around to get in my way the better I like it. And for another, I never really experienced the infamous lag and even if I had it would have been a safe bet it would have improved with all those other players having left.

Still, you have to move with the times, I guess. So long as the new server wasn't overcrowded and everything there carried on as smoothly as before, there couldn't be much to complain about, right? 

Well, as far as the overcrowding goes, Michel Delving was pretty quiet although there's not much you can read into that. Logic suggests, though, that if everyone has to move and there are fewer servers in total, those servers had better be able to handle a considerably higher population. And logic also suggest that, while 64 bits may give the back-end more room, it's not going to increase the size of Middle Earth itself by one square millimeter, so all those characters are going to be standing closer together every time they go to the bank or the auction house.

Still, I spend most of my time out in the countryside when I play so maybe I won't see them. And of course, it'll be all smooth and lag-free with the new technology, won't it? 

Anyone sensing irony here? Hard to put it across without the sarcastic tone of voice.

I was in Michel Delving, pretty much on my own, and the whole time I was there it was like pushing into a strong wind. I didn't see the full rubber-banding effect but there was plenty of  stuttering and glitching and poor old Juniperry did keep flicking back a few paces as she ran all around the town looking for the mailbox. I hardly ever saw anything like that on Laurelin, not at all in recent years, so Meriadoc is certainly not feeling much like an upgrade to me right now.

As Wilhem points out, with supporting evidence, Standing Stone did more than suggest they were going to keep the 32-bit servers open as long as enough people wanted to stay on them. Either almost everyone left immediately or that plan got changed pretty fast. Possibly when they realised how many people didn't want to go. Or maybe, as a couple of people suggested in the comments, SSG is throwing out the ballast in the hope of keeping the ship afloat for a little while longer. Can things really be that bad?

As a very occasional, casual player, I can't say I feel incensed by the bait&switch tactics but it certainly doesn't give me any more confidnce in any promises SSG might make in future. And now I see they're doing the same thing with their other game, Dungeons and Dragons Online, only this time they're not making the mistake of letting anyone think they have a choice.

I do have a couple of characters over there, too, although it must be a decade since I last played the game. At the moment I feel like I'd be fine with letting them slip away into the darkness but I guess I have a while to decide for sure. The final cut-off there is also 31 August. 

I bet in the end I crack and have to move them even though it's odds-on I'll never play them. Just like I'll probably have to do something about Mrs Bhagpuss's characters in LotRO before it's too late. And don't I have another account on the NA server cluster, too?

It's like having children. The feeling of responsibility never goes away. 

I'll Take Six To Go - Better Make Them Small Ones.

Well, that sure snuck up on me... is something you'll only ever hear me say when I've been playing a game set in the Old West. Which is what I've been doing for the last half hour. 

To be strictly accurate, it was the demo of a game. And it's more like the Alt-West than the Old West because there's magic but we'll get to that. First, back to what it was that snuck up on me.

The Summer Next Fest on Steam, that's what. I am so out of the loop with everything right now, all because of this damn obsession with making music with AI. I can barely drag myself away to go to work or write this blog so there's not much chance I'm going to stay on top of anything else.

I don't suppose I'd know Next Fest was on even now, if I hadn't spotted something about it on MassivelyOP yesterday. Not that I looked at whatever they were on about. I just saw the headline in my feeds and went straight to Steam to see how much I'd missed. 

Four days! I'd missed four days, nearly. And it only lasts a week! And I'm working all weekend, so that left me just yesterday evening, today and Monday to pick a bunch of demos and play them, all so I can write about them here. 

I did the first part, the choosing, last night. It was surprisingly easy, which makes a change. From my perspective, Next Fest seems to swing wildly from being stuffed full of games that look like they might be interesting to having hardly any at all and this one's a glut.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to settle on half a dozen demos that looked like they might make a reasonable selection both for my own interests and to write about. I could have taken twice or even three times that many, if only I'd thought there was any chance of playing them. There have been Next Fests where it's taken me a couple of hours to find even half a dozen I could contemplate spending time with.

For these posts, usually I take on about half a dozen, play the demos all the way through if I can and then write the kind of ridiculously long, over-detailed reviews that anyone in their right mind would save for release. Then I wishlist the ones I like and never think of them again, Or if I think of them, I never buy them. Or if I buy them, I never play them.

Seriously, I should go back through all the Next Fest posts I've written one day and write a follow-up about which games ever came out, which I bought and which I played. It would be like a pyramid, with a huge base of demos I reviewed at the base, going all the way up to a point for the handful I ever played in full. If indeed there have ever been any. Can you have a pyramid with just a base?

With barely any time to play the demos, I decided I wouldn't insist on playing any of them all the way through. Hardly anyone who posts about demos ever does that because most people actually treat demos as a vehicle for deciding if they'd be interested in the finished games, not as games in their own right. 

Not insisting on finishing the things turned out to be a very sound idea, when I actually tried playing some of them. I've played three so far, which means, since I only picked six, I'm already half-way through! Almost back on track...

I'll save the reviews for another post because the blog doesn't have a timer running the way Next Fest does. Makes more sense for me to get through all six before writing about them for a change. And I can already say that they're not all going to need a post to themselves. When I've finished, I'll be better placed to pace myself, too. Some of the demos might only need a paragraph or two while others might require the full treatment.

For today's post I'm just going to list the six and give the set-ups. There is a seventh, BitCraft, but that one came with a head start and I've already played and posted about it. Still counts though!

In the order I picked them, here are the six complete with their Steam Store Page descriptions and a screenshot, which is just about all I had to go on when I chose them:

 

Dispatch : "Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy where choices matter. Manage a dysfunctional team of misfit heroes and strategize who to send to emergencies around the city, all while balancing office politics, personal relationships, and your own quest to become a hero." 

The first demo I picked and probably the one I'm most looking forward to playing. There are a lot of familiar buzzwords in there and it could turn out to be quite generic but I'm hopeful. I do love a good superhero comedy.

 

Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive - "Solo Leveling, the webtoon with 14.3 billion views worldwide, is now an action RPG game! Help our hero grow from his humble E-Rank beginnings." 

I mostly picked this because I've put the manga on the shelf at work countless times and I've often wondered what it was about. I had no idea it was a webtoon.

 

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile - "Death on the Nile is an adventure-detective game, offering a fresh twist on Agatha Christie’s famous story. Set in the lively 1970s, play as Hercule Poirot and detective Jane Royce as they solve two connected mysteries. Dive into a journey filled with intrigue, deception, and unexpected revelations."

It's really rare to see a video game adaptation of a famous novel these days, let alone one I've actually read, albeit more than fifty years ago. Very curious to see what they've done with it. I can't say the screenshot above reminds me of anything I remember from the story, which was set in the 1930s as I recall. I think they may have made some minor adjustments...

 

Elevator Music - "You're the newly-hired elevator operator at the Matterhorn Hotel in Dernich. You make it go up, go down, go fast, and go slow. And yet by the end of the week, you'll have been the deciding factor in either devastating continental war, or an uneasy peace."

This one has a great title and a great promo poster. I had very good feelings about it. And I've already played it, so were those good feelings justified? You'll have to wait for the full review but - SPOILER ALERT - I lasted seven minutes.

 

Board Game Society - "Board Game Society is a turn-based RPG soaked in 80s VHS horror vibes. Play as a misfit crew of teen archetypes — the goth, the jock, the nerd, and more — as you explore the cursed forest of Timber Falls. Roll the dice to fight monsters, collect loot, and race to defeat the Boss."

I picked this because I thought it was going to be like The Breakfast Club. Once again, I've already played it and - SPOILER ALERT - it is not.

 

Dancing Bones - "Wild West, ancient magic, non-linear plot, puzzles and colorful characters are all waiting for you in “The Dancing Bones”! Deep drama and humor intertwine in a unique world where every choice you make changes the story. Are you ready to uncover secrets, break curses, and change your destiny?"

Last but definitely not least (Played it, liked it, more later.) comes this one set, as I said at the top of the post, in a version of the classic American West that also includes magic and, apparently, the Spanish Inquisition. I've put in half an hour so far and I'm more than happy to carry on until the demo ends.

That's the lot and given the time constraints, I should probably stop writing about them and get back to playing.

Dance Dance Dance To The Music

As I've said before, I don't really like to do a lot of tributes or obituaries for the simple reason that creative people die all the time and I could quite easily record the passing of someone significant two or three times every week. One thing I really don't want to start doing is ranking celebrity deaths in order of importance until I have some kind of amateur Hall of Fame thing going on.

Mostly I've stuck to marking the departure of people, the news of whose death has some more than usual personal resonance for me, something I find quite hard to predict or even, occasionally, to explain. For that reason, I wasn't immediately motivated to post anything, when I saw a couple of days ago that Sly Stone had died. 

Sly Stone (and his eponymous "Family") is a bit of an outlier for me. I'm not even sure I'd heard of him at all before I snuck in to see the Woodstock movie when it had a brief cinema revival in the mid-seventies. 

I can place that fairly precisely because it was rated 18 (Or in fact, "X", I think, because we would still have been on the old letter-based ratings then.) and I wasn't old enough to see it legally. I was close though. I'm pretty sure I was seventeen. I remember it clearly because it was the only X-film I ever lied about my age to see, which tells you everything you need to know about my priorities as a teenager.

In the movie, Sly and the Family Stone are seen doing the now-classic I Want To Take You Higher, which Rolling Stone just this week described as showcasing the power of live music "better perhaps than any other performance ever captured on film". It certainly had an impact on seventeen-year-old me because after that I sure as hell knew who Sly Stone was. 

It was probably also the moment when I realised I liked funk. Until then I don't think I'd paid much attention to it at all. It was the mid-seventies by then and funk was all over the radio. As a recovering prog and heavy metal fan I was finding new musical interests in all directions, something the supposedly barrier-breaking but actually frequently prescriptive punk hierarchy strongly discouraged, as I was about to discover.

Didn't stop me listening to and enjoying all kinds of forbidden sounds, from Joan Armatrading to the Hues Coroporation but for a while I did learn to keep some of my less culturally acceptable tastes to myself. I don't recall anyone ever compaining about me listening to Sly Stone, though. To have done so would have been be tantamount to admitting you were a cloth-eared philistine (Which, to be fair, would have been a badge some people I knew then would have worn with pride...)

So, I was still pondering on whether or not to say something about Sly's passing, when someone else rolled over and stole Sly's thunder. Sly Stone was a very major figure in the history of popular music, albeit he'd been off the pace for a long while, so it was going to take someone very big to put him in the shade. And of course it was.

If we're talking western 20th century pop/rock canon, there aren't a lot of names left alive bigger than Brian Wilson. When I was talking to Mrs Bhagpuss about it, I described his demise as a Bob Dylan level event.

Bob, of course, is still happily and very actively with us, so maybe I could more accurately have referenced Bowie or Lennon but I already had Dylan in mind because Mrs Bhagpuss had been telling me only the day before about a video she'd watched, going through the top musicians and bands he hated.

I haven't watched it myself. I know how these things go. I'm also way, WAY more tolerant and accepting of all kinds of different music now than I was fifty years ago and I bet Bob is too. I mean, he has to be or what the hell is he doing acting as hype man for Machine Gun Kelly?

Anyway, most of Bob's pet peeves, as relayed to me by Mrs Bhagpuss, didn't surprise me much - Coldplay, the Grateful Dead, the Eagles, Oasis... there's a particular kind of monocultural blandness to them all that you might expect would rile him up, but the one that really didn't fit the profile was the Beach Boys.  

For one thing, he seemed to be homing in on their early surf era, which is hardly the whole of their identity. Given that most of Bob's heavyweight contemporaries were falling over themselves to praise the Beach Boys even when they were only singing about cars and girls, even that seems odd. Post Pet Sounds, just about all the critical traffic was headed in their direction, with the Beach Boys being widely thought of as America's best answer to the Beatles, something openly acknowledged by the Beatles themselves, especially when Paul McCartney called God Only Knows "the greatest song ever written", an opinion he seemingly still holds today.

That conversation meant I'd already been thinking about the Beach Boys and their legacy even before the sad news of Brian's death exploded all over the entertainment news feeds. And one thing I'd been thinking was that although I'd never shared Bob's disdain for the band, I certainly used not to take them any more seriously than he apparently did.

Unlike Sly Stone, I was very well-aware of the Beach Boys even before I was old enough to start buying records or going to gigs. Those early-sixties singles are very child-friendly, with their bouncy rhythms and cheery harmonies. Plus Good Vibrations always sounded utterly weird whenever it came on the radio. Who could forget that?

 

A curious thing that happened around the time punk began to take over my attention in 1976 was that I started listening to a lot of 1960s bands I'd never really bothered with before. Somewhat ironic considering the Clash's proclamations about "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones" in 1977. There was a very simple reason for it: if you wanted to listen a lot of short, loud, fast, songs back then, you'd run out in about half an hour if all you had was a stack of punk singles. There just weren't enough yet.

Which is how my punk-inflected pals and I ended up listening to a lot of sixties r&b, early Who, Tamla, US garage bands and... the Beach Boys. I played the hell out of a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits I picked up second-hand around then and the whole vibe seemed to fit right in. A lot better than all that dub reggae that got the official punk stamp of approval anyway, that's for sure.

Even then, though, I never thought of the Beach Boys as having any gravitas. In the 'eighties I developed a theory, which I would occasionally expound at parties if anyone put a Beach Boys track on the stereo, that only men liked the band. For some reason the band's obsession with sports, automobiles and objectifying women (Or "Girls", as they would have it.) seemed archetypally male to me. Plus I had more than once heard women express distaste for the band or even ask for Beach Boys records to be taken off if they were playing, so it seemed like a safe position to take.

Eventually I did meet women who really liked the Beach Boys so I abandoned that one. I had a lot of strongly-held musical opinions in those days but I was always happy to give them up and make up new ones. Few survived for long, I'm happy to say. (Simply Red are still crap but that's not an opinion, just a fact.)

The Beach Boys as major figures in contemporary music, though? That one took a looong time come  through. I don't think I even began to notice that anyone was taking them seriously until the 'nineties and it took me a few years of reading that "Pet Sounds" (Consistently ranked #2 in Rolling Stone's influential Top 500 Albums list.), or maybe "Smile" or "Smiley-Smile", might be the greatest album of all time before I thought maybe I should find out what any of them sounded like.

I still don't have much of an opinion on that. Certainly not an informed one. I suspect it's one of those "You had to be there" things and although, technically, I was there, I would have been eight when Pet Sounds came out, which is probably a bit young to appreciate its subtleties.

In fact, embarassing though it is to admit it, I still have never sat down and listened to any of those three albums all the way through. I've almost certainly heard every track at some time or another but the only Beach Boys albums I've ever owned are the aforementioned Greatest Hits and the really excellent early seventies album "Surf's Up", which I do love, although by then Brian was already having issues and his influence over the album isn't as all-consuming as it once would have been.

For all of the above reasons, I wasn't going to do a tribute to Brian Wilson either. Also, it's interesting that throughout this piece I've been implicitly suggesting he and the band are interchangeable, when of course there were other songwriters in the mix. It's always Brian Wilson that everyone thinks of in that context though, isn't it? That's where the Beach Boys differ from their friendly rivals the Beatles or even from the Rolling Stones, where the other Brian (Jones, that is.) used sometimes to be cast in a similar role, until he made the mistake of dying young and leaving Jagger and Richards the field.

This morning, despite my reservations, I thought maybe I would do something after all and as you can see I followed through on that thought. And as usual it's ended up being much more about me than them. But then, that's just a sign that they had some definite impact on my life, I guess. It would be worse if I just rehashed their biographies, like one of those vicars at a funeral who never met the deceased.

I don't really want to just slap up three or four of either of their top tunes, which would be extremely easy to do since they both wrote so many absolute bangers (Not, I imagine, the term either of them would have used and, to be strictly accurate, I don't think it's controversial to suggest Brian wrote a lot more bangers than Sly.)

Instead, I've chosen to include a couple of my personal favorites and a selection of odd or unusual covers. Not to suggest that some of each of their work wasn't already weird enough...

The legends may have passed but the legacies live on.

Crystal Of Atlan: The Fleet's In!

I was out for much of the day and I didn't have any particular ideas for a post so I was going to skip a day but then I thought why not just do something quick about Crystal of Atlan? So here it is.

Last time I wrote about the game I was level 27. Now I'm Level 32. I did notice that the last level took about as long as the three before it, so maybe the pace is slowing down. Or maybe I just wasn't doing anything that gave much xp. 

In the caption to one of the screenshots last time, I mentioned I hadn't found out what the Fleet thing was about yet. Well, I have now. A Fleet is CoA's version of a Guild. There's a short quest that explains it and sends you to look at a notice board where Fleets recruit. 

Being an antisocial git, I usually don't bother with guilds or clans or whatever the local jargon is but if the game allows me to make one and keep it to myself, I always take advantage. CoA does that, so I made my regular guild of one and with it I got an airship.

I was quite excited about that. Who wouldn't be? It turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax though. The airship consists of the upper deck and that's about all. It's in a private instance and you can wander about the deck and look at the view, which is nice, but you can't go inside. 

As far as I can tell, you can't decorate it either, so it isn't what I'd call housing. The little room you get in the starting town is more of a home than the airship. At least that has a bed youcan lie down on and a gramaphone that actually works.

The airship does have some facilities. There's an NPC that gives Fleet missions and another that runs a shop where you can spend the currency you get for doing them. Since they most likely are tuned for actual fleets with more than one member, I don't imagine I'll be doing many, but who knows?

As you can see from the screenshots above, the in-game camera doesn't seem to work on the airship or in dungeons, either, so I'm thinking it may not work in any instances. If they offer me the chance to give feedback on any of the surveys (I've already completed two of those.) then that's the first thing I'll be asking them to fix.

It's a shame because the dungeons are really rather nice to look at, even the sewers. I do find Crystal of Atlan very pleasant company visually. 

The story is better than I initially gave it credit for, too. It's nothing out of the ordinary but it does zip along and the plot, entirely unoriginal though it is, has its moments. The character writing is decent, too, which makes the whole thing feel quite jolly. 

As for combat, the difficulty for a mostly unskilled player who's not willing to put in much effort to get any better, as I was describing last time, is somewhat mitigated by the option to revive yourself at full health every time you die. Your opponents don't get the same option, thank heaven, so you can just throw yourself at them and keep getting up every time they knock you down until eventually you just wear them out.

That takes a consumable every time so I imagine it's not a viable, long-term strategy but it's working for me at the moment. I wouldn't need to be doing it at all if I could remember to get my pet fox to heal me in ample time but I keep forgetting until it's too late.

That certainly seems to put the mockers on the idea that CoA isn't a Gacha game. "Premium" pets are Gacha pulls and they have a big part to play in combat. It seems like a fairly arbitrary line to draw, saying your game isn't gacha because there are no gacha characters when there other key systems use the mechanic but fine lines are what these distinctions are all about.

I have yet to get the hang of swapping between my two pets in a fight. Or more to the point, I know the game swaps them for me but I don't really know what either of them can do apart from heal. The fox does that. I think the rabbit is DPS but I really need to look into it.

The rabbit also talks but not in any language you can understand. The fox doesn't seem to talk at all. Lots of NPCs have dialog options if you go up to them and start a conversation, just like they do in Wuthering Waves, although what they have to say isn't as complex and detailed as in the older game. Still, it does make the place feel a bit more lived in, knowing you can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone.

As you can see from the screenshots, CoA comes with the typical visual clutter of its peers. The last game I played that placed quite so much emphasis on huge overhead titles in over-dramatic fonts was Noah's Heart. 

Strangely, as someone who habitually turns off almost every overhead name and title in any game, I kind of enjoy these. They're so over-the-top I find it endearing. In Noah's Heart, I put some considerable effort into getting the titles I liked and I may well do the same here. 

I certainly don't want to be running around forever with "We're Scaling" over my head, that being the only title I have at the moment. What the heck does it even mean?

I also don't want to spend a moment longer than I have to dressed as a kind of Whitehall farce version of French maid. It's embarassing. Unfortunately, although I do have another, much more suitable outfit I could wear, these "cosmetic" outfits are bursting with combat stats and the maid one is a lot better, so I'm stuck with it. There may be some way to tweak appearance so I don't have to see it. I ought to look into that as well. Or just work on getting something else that's not so dodgy.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I said it was going to be short and for once it really was!