Goodbye, Marianne

As I've said before, I don't plan on running obituaries on every artist, writer or musician that once meant something to me. If I did that, I'd never post anything else. Certain people pass, though, and it feels necessary, somehow, to mark a fresh absence in the world.

In the case of Marianne Faithful, who died yesterday at the age of 78, it just so happens I once wrote a song about her. I thought I might just post the lyrics. They have an elegiac feel to them or I like to think so.

Naked Under Leather

Downtime waiting at the jail gate door
Taken so much you gotta take more
Love so rich he's making you poor
Don't understand what you're doing it for

Eyes wide open, hair so long
Wrapped in the paper of a throwaway song
Looking at you hard like you grew up wrong
You'd like to break down but you're too damn strong

Moroccan sand and the white paint wall
You can hear one crying and the other one call
They say the higher you fly the faster you fall
You listen and look and say nothing at all

It's something so easy to do what they say
You tried to keep it and to give it away
Followed the path and lost your way
You try to come out but you're in there to stay

There's a scarf on the lamp and smoke in the air
You're begging for help but there's no-one there
You want to go out but there's nothing to wear
It's all been sold and you're running scared

You fight your way clear of Norwegian wood
It's dirty and clean and they tell you it's good
It wasn't worth waiting but you thought that you should
You'd let it all go but you never could

You're naked under leather
Naked under leather
Naked under leather

The title, of course, is the alternative name for the infamous feature film in which she starred, Girl On A Motorcycle. The full movie is on YouTube if you're interested although how long it'll stay there is anyone's guess. I saw it on TV once. It's a slow watch.

It's also not what I'd want to remember Marianne for. That would mostly be the superb Broken English album she released in 1979. That's also available in full on YouTube if you don't own a copy, which you certainly should, although nowadays who owns anything?

She made a lot of good music before and after but that's the one that matters. To me, anyway.

The song I wrote is mostly about the time she spent as what people used to like to call a muse to various famous musicians That's something that will always be linked to her memory but again, it's not what I want to remember her for. She far surpassed any kind of supporting role to become the superstar of her own, exceptional life.

That's about all I want to say. Probably ought to finish with an example of her work. She had to go to court to prove her co-authorship on this one. Figures.

To Cut A Long Story Short - A Day Of Reckoning For DCUO's New Narrative-Led Approach

Following on from yesterday's post, where I talked about how reliable Daybreak's patcher is and finished up promising I'd say something about the actual content of what I'd downloaded with it, namely DCUO's latest update, Light and Rain: Day of Reckoning, I thought I'd probably better go play the thing. So I tried. I managed about half of it.

The first part was fine, although I can point you to a forum thread where 98% of the posters would beg to differ. No-one had any problems with the setting, a snowy town in the Balkan state of Kaznia. Most people agreed the snow looked great and there was lots of detail. The art department was clearly having a good day.

Unfortunately, no-one really plays DCUO for the scenery. The game engine is getting quite elderly now so even a good-looking map only looks good relatively speaking. None of them are going to be winning any prizes for looks in 2025. I don't think it would be controversial to say no-one plays DCUO for the story, either, which could be a tad more of a problem, given the whole, new, narrative-first rebrand. 

Okay, I'm sure someone plays DCUO for the story. Someone probably plays it for the music. Speaking of which, the music in Day of Reckoning is probably the best I can recall hearing in the game. In fact, it's the only time I can remember noticing music in the game at all, except when I've turned it down in combat because it was too loud.

Again, though, no-one's here for the music and Dimensional Ink isn't pretending otherwise. They are, however, trying to sell players on the concept of more story than they've been used to getting and this update is the first practical evidence we've seen of how that change of direction is going to look. So far, it seems to be going down about as well as Spinal Tap's pivot into free jazz.

As I said, I've only seen maybe half the first installment so my judgment is necessarily incomplete. It's  likely to remain that way, too, because the reason I had to stop halfway through is that I can't even come close to beating the first of the two storyline bosses, Felix Faust. 

I'd say she has to be freezing in that costume but then, y'know... magic.

This is entirely down to my complete incompetence as a DCUO player. I can't play my own character - as in I literally don't know what most of her powers or abilities are, let alone which sequence of key-presses activate them. Ironically, after playing a ton of FPS and action rpgs these last few years, I no longer have any real issues with keyboard dexterity. I can press the buttons now - I just have no clue which buttons I ought to be pressing.

I tried to beat Faust three times and the closest I got him was halfway. I'm reasonably confident I could learn and improve enough to beat him in a few more attempts but I'm neither interested or motivated enough to try. The only reason to do it, other than to be able to write a more complete and balanced post about it, would be to see the story through to the end and sadly that's no motivation at all.

Coming to Day of Reckoning off the back of the Riniscita storyline in Wuthering Waves feels a bit like putting down Animal Farm to go read a three-year old their Peppa Pig book. I mean, they both have pigs in but otherwise...

Okay, that's a bit harsh. I'll make a fairer comparison. Yesterday, I played a fair bit more of the Scars of Destruction storyline in EverQuest II. There's a lot of narrative to get through there. EQII NPCs are chatty as hell but generally I enjoy the house style, verbose and off-topic though it often is.

Scars of Discord, though, feels like one of the weakest expansion storylines to date. The plot is the main problem but the writing in general feels a little tired, as though whoever was responsible knew they didn't have a lot to work with. Even so, SoD is orders of magnitude more interesting and entertaining than what I had to plow through in DCUO yesterday and today.

They grow 'em big around these parts, it seems.

The writing in the game has always been terse, to put it politely. I think it must be someone's very misguided idea of how DC comic books work. As a lifetime reader, I'd say they were never that basic, even in the glory days of Bob Haney, but it's been the game's house style since launch so I don't expect anything different.

At least, I didn't until DI started to hype the new, narrative-driven approach by issuing press releases about it and posting short stories on the website. That does kind of raise expectations, which is unfortunate because this goes nowhere at all towards meeting them.

The players complaining bitterly in the thread I linked seem to object mostly to the story being there at all, although a minority would like more story in their game, just not this one. I had a slightly different take. Had I not read about in advance, I would have had no idea this update was any different to any of the others I've played in recent years.

I found the story, such as it is, to be so slight it risked slipping my notice altogether. If I hadn't been looking for it I'm not sure I'd have spotted there was one, or at least not any more than usual. 

Every chapter I remember from the old format began with a message over the communicator sending you to a new map where some questgivers would be all standing close to each other, handing out a bunch of combat or collect quests. This one does have an introduction of some sort, although I've forgotten it already. It probably also came via communicator but it was even shorter than usual. 

Then came the inevitable new map with its combat and collect quests, same as always. The only notable difference I could see was that instead of a bunch of superheroes all standing around like greeters at the mall, handing out quests, I had to keep running in and out of the Laughing Hound pub to get them from John Considine.

The cavernous interior of Considine's local.

The voice actor playing Considine spoke in a stilted and unconvincing way and employed a hard-to-define accent that was probably supposed to suggest London but occasionally sounded closer to Sydney. After a bit Zatanna turned up outdoors to hand out more quests and a local hero called Voivode, also hanging out in the pub for no obvious reason, added a few more. After just about every quest I had to leg it back to the pub and talk to Considine again.

All of this felt pretty normal to me but on reflection that's probably because it's how questing in most MMORPGs works. I'm so used to it, I don't even think about it any more. 

I'd not really thought about the way DCUO does it differently either. Or used to, I guess. Judging by the many comments complaining about the utter pointlessness of having to keep going back to the pub to get the next quest instead of just picking it up on location via the communicator, I don't get the feeling many players appreciate the old-school legwork.

The quests themselves were not popular either and for good reason. There's a lot of "talking" to NPCs that comes down to nothing more than listening to them spout the same handful of phrases over and over. Which, to be fair, is what NPCs in DCUO have always done, only until now they did it mostly while you were killing them. You didn't generally have to stand around waiting for them to finish before your quest would update.

As several people mention in the thread, there was also a lot of lag and the quests had a nasty tendency not to notice you'd done them. I had to speak to a lot of witnesses before I got all my updates. I do find it a little ironic that the forum, as it always is, is full of people claiming the update is so bad everyone is going to quit, while at the same time moaning about the lag caused by the servers being full of people throwing themselves at the new content...

It took me the best part of an hour to finish the first map and it wasn't always a fun time. It was okay, for the most part. Not terrible. The story was all over the place and hard to follow, the dialog was dull, Considine was annoying and everything felt undercooked but it was no worse than average for an MMORPG. It reminded me a lot of Guild Wars 2 at times in that there seemed to be about a quarter as much actual story as the time it took to see it play out suggested there should be.

Meet Voivode. Makes you wonder about the drinking laws in Kaznia, doesn't it?

Once that was out the way, it was on to the first solo instance. It takes place in a sprawling graveyard which , once again, looks very good, given the limitations of the game engine. The first part of the story there involved wresting control of an obelisk from Felix Faust by playing king of the hill with his lackeys. I enjoyed that part.

It was followed by an escort quest. Oh goody! No, wait, three escort quests. Even better!

You can imagine how well that went down with the regulars. And with me. No-one likes an escort quest, let alone the same one three times in a row. I failed it the first time but I soon got it figured out so I only had to do it four times in total, which was three times more than I wanted. And that's being generous.

After that it was straight to the throw-down with Faust which, as I said, did not go my way. He wiped the floor with me and Considine did nothing to help. As things stand, I can't imagine wanting to git gud so I can go back and finish the story. It isn't anywhere near interesting enough for that.

This is part one of the four-part arc that forms the spearhead of the new narrative-driven approach. It's not an auspicious start. I really hope the other three parts are a lot better than this one, especially since as it stands right now you have to do the whole thing on every character you play if you want to get to what most players think of as the meat of the game - the repeatable content.

I'm quite glad I don't have to deal with that although I'd bet it gets changed to Account access pretty quickly. If there's one thing that might really get people to quit it's having to play through this storyline on every alt they've got.

I'll Tell You When I get There...

I'm sitting here writing this as I wait for DCUO to patch. I want to log in and check out the new "narrative-focused" update, Light and Rain: Day of Reckoning, the video for which makes it look rather intriguing, if not much like the DCUO I'm used to. I'll embed it a little further down so you can judge for yourself.

I feel like I do an awful lot of that, these days. Sitting and waiting for things to patch. Or update. Or install. Or verify. Or validate.

Recent posts here have seen a litany of moans and complaints from me about not being able to find the time to play games as much as I used to, or as I'd like, but among the many reasons I've given, I don't think I've mentioned - and I'm certain I haven't sufficiently emphasized - the cumulative effect of  modern update procedures, particularly on Steam.

I think I did mention it once and someone in the comments put it down to the way Unreal 5 works, although I might have imagined that. Anyway, it doesn't seem to be limited to games using UE5. Almost everything I ever have to update on Steam feels like it takes significantly longer than it used to and updates fail and have to be repeated much more often. 

The obvious conclusion would be that there was a problem at my end, most likely with  my drives or possibly my broadband but I'm pretty sure that's not it. I have no problems downloading large files or updates for other services and although I've swapped the Steam installations from mechanical to SSD to external drives, it's much the same any way I try it. 

It's very anoying when it's a game I want to play but worse still when games I'm neither playing nor planning to start to patch and then hang, preventing me from closing them or doing anything else. Even logging out of Steam or rebooting won't stop that. As soon as I log back into Steam and before I can do anything at all to stop them, they begin again from where they left off .

When Once Human got stuck in that loop, the only way I could stop it was to go to the directory where the files were and manually delete them. Uninstalling via Steam didn't work because Steam constantly flagged the files as "Busy". I was able to "stop" the download but that just put it into a permanent state of "stopping" that never actually stopped.

I find the whole thing particularly galling because I never want any of my games to update until and unless I'm about to play them anyway. I don't want anything updating at all unless I specifically tell it to do so. On Steam I have everything I play regularly set to update only when I log in to that specific game.

Unfortunately, as many others have complained, Steam won't allow users to set Update On Play as a global default. You have to set it separately for every game and every time I fire up Steam it seems to find some old demo I'd forgotten about that now urgently needs to add Latvian language support or fix some essential problem with hairstyles.

Unless I'm fooling myself, nothing like this used to happen. I only started turning automatic updates off last year, when I noticed a problem. Before that, if there were any updates, they seemed to take a minute or two and involve a few megabytes, not a couple of hours and 70gb.

It's not just a problem with the downloading, either. Those 70gb always need to be verified and then installed and that takes even longer. And doesn't always work. Again, I'm perceiving this as a fairly new problem. I'm sure it wasn't happening a year ago. It's beginning to put me off using Steam a little.

DCUO, of course, isn't on Steam or rather that's not where I'm playing it. I access the game through Daybreak's own launcher, which is excellent. It never gives me any of these problems. The issue I'm having with DCUO today is a much more familiar and acceptable one; coming back after a break.

I haven't played the game for about nine months and as anyone who's ever played an MMORPG should know, a lot can change in under a year. In this case it's about 13gb that's changed or at least that's what the game is now installing. And doing it smoothly and quickly, I'm pleased to say.

In fact, it's all done, in less than the time it's taken me to write this. And I've passed the time usefully by writing this post, which also solves my problem of not having anything in mind to write about today.

Granted, it hasn't made for a very interesting post but you can't have everything. Now all I need to do is log in, take a couple of screenshots, promise to write something about the new update itself, when I've had a chance to play it, and that'll be my job done.

Thanks, Daybreak patcher! If only Steam was as reliable. It used to be...

Stars On Saturday Night

Here's another post about the Stars Reach pre-alpha, which is ongoing, although with the Kickstarter close to revealing its secrets, this already feels like the end of an era. There was a four-hour test for everyone on Saturday, including all the people who got invites off the back of "following" the fundraiser. Naturally, I was barely able to manage even an hour.

I don't want to go on and on about it (No, really...) but it has been very instructive for me to discover exactly how little control I have over my own time these days. The Stars Reach testing program has been almost entirely responsible for making that very clear indeed. Before I signed up and got in, I hadn't really noticed how far gaming had slipped down my list of priorities. 

There's so rarely anything in my gaming schedule that's in any way time-sensitive on a scale beyond "I suppose I'd better log in sometime in the next six weeks", I don't generally notice that it's a lot more difficult than it used to be find a clear hour or two for uninterrupted play. I was aware I'd not been playing as much as I used to but until these tests I'd assumed that was through choice. Now I'm not so sure.

These days, just about everything takes precedence over games, anything from eating meals to writing blog posts to watching broadcast TV shows as they go out, all things that would definitely not have pushed gaming to the back of the queue a few years ago. The biggest change by far, though, is having a dog in the house, particularly one who has her most active, social phase in the evening. It makes sitting down to play an uninterrupted session of any game a very hit or miss prospect.

All of that I've complained about to the point of tedium in previous posts. Even I'm bored with repeating it and I love talking about myself, as must be all too obvious from the long history of this blog. I mention it once again mostly to add weight to the rest of what I have to say about the testing program and my further involvement with it.

We are currently in an extremely early testing phase. It's pre-alpha. There is no permanence and no suggestion that there should be. There is also no game to play although that's less of an issue. Even without my well-documented personal issues over the awkward timing of the tests (It would suit me so much better if they mostly happened on weekday mornings or afternoons.) I'd still have reached the point now where it would be difficult for me to do anything of any great moment or purpose with the time I do have.

When I logged in on Saturday evening, the first thing I had to do was make a new character. My previous one and all the progress I'd made with her had been wiped. As I said, this is entirely proper at this stage of development and no-one, certainly not me, is complaining about it. It's not a question of complaining about having to start over. It's more about what that means in practical terms.

I've written about the opening stages of the game already - the tools you need to learn to use, the skills you need to raise, the materials you need to acquire and the devices you need to make. I've written about the housing possibilities and the combat and the exploration. 

With each new build there are new activities to try and refinements of the existing content to evaluate. The problem is that most of them require going through many of the same stages of progression as before. That in itself requires a certain mindset and personality and I'm not sure I have either. Even if the tests fell at the perfect time for me I'm not convinced I'd be willing to start over from scratch every three or four weeks and work my way back up to where I was before I could start testing whatever had been added.

As things stand, since I can usually only manage an hour or two each week, even if I was willing to go over and over the same ground, I would never be able to catch up. It saves me the worry of having to make a decision over whether I'm willing to try - it's just not possible.

Another odd side effect of these intermittent sessions, separated by days or sometimes weeks, is that I can't always tell with any certainty whether something has changed, not even how things look. On more than one occasion I've logged in and looked around and thought the graphics had improved. 

This Saturday I was convinced there'd been some kind of graphical upgrade. The world looked brighter and somehow fuller, the trees more leafy, the mountains more impressive. After a few minutes, though, I began to think maybe nothing had changed after all.

There's a strange phenomenon I've commented on before, whereby games that I haven't played for a while look much richer and more visually impressive when I come back after a time away. I noticed it most in Guild Wars 2, which I played daily for a decade. The only time I stopped for a while was when I went on holiday and each time I got back after a week or ten days away, when I logged in the whole game seemed to be in stereoscopic 3D. 

Literally. It was freaky!

It was so visually arresting I found it disorienting. I felt dizzy just looking at the screen. It took me a couple of hours to get used to it but when I did I could see that absolutely nothing had changed except my perception. I suspect something similar, albeit less dramatic, happens every time I come back to Stars Reach after a week or more.

It's not just the visuals, either. My memory isn't good enough to remember what I was doing last time I played nor what I need to do next. It's not a case of just picking up and carrying on; I have to start re-learning the whole thing all over again, something made even slower and more difficult because many of the things I need to do may have changed.

That makes sending bug or feedback reports feel a bit iffy. I'm never sure if something's off in the game or whether it's just me. 

What I certainly could do, though, is send feedback about the things that I'm certain have been added or changed or removed. For instance, the new Tutorial. Since that comes right at the start, I had no trouble testing it on Saturday.

I didn't much like it but that was because I took against it from the start, when the game openly insulted me for using it. I very much did not like being addressed from the get-go as "Meatbag". I will be sending feedback on that next time I log in. I didn't do it at the time because I was fuming too much to be civil. 

Seriously, who thought it was a good idea? If it's meant to be funny it isn't. If it's meant to have some in-game lore implication, there'd need to be some actual in-game lore to support it and again there isn't. And even if there was, does anyone really think the opening of a tutorial is the place to start slinging even lore-appropriate insults at the newbies?

That put me in a really bad mood for the rest of the Tutorial, which was otherwise somewhat helpful. I did learn one new thing although two days later I couldn't tell you what it was. I just remember thinking "Oh, I didn't know that.."  The only other thing I can remember about the Tutorial now is that it was short.

Oh, there was one interesting thing that came up in passing. There's a line that begins "We have not yet granted you permission to use starfaring vessels..." Up to now there seems to have been very little space travel in this game about space travel, to the point where I wasn't sure any more if I'd misunderstood the basic concept. I had thought Stars Reach was going to be at least a little like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous in that there'd be ships and we'd fly them between stars. 

This one half-sentence doesn't necessarily suggest that's what's going to happen. For all I know the Servitors might just issue us with the equivalent of a space bus pass and we'll trundle around the galaxy in the back seats of some kind of space Greyhound. Even that would be better than clicking a pylon and appearing on an asteroid like we do now, I guess.

There were other changes. I didn't bother to place a camp but I see that now you have to use a consumable so the days of plonking down a camp whenever you feel like it are over. As Wilhelm mentioned in a post a while ago, the Grav Mesh recipe now requires different materials, one of which is a specific Tier 5 metal with anti-gravity properties. 

These and other, similar changes are all logical, for which I support them. In context of a live game with full permanence, they will also contribute to immersion and make the game-world feel more coherent and convincing. In a series of limited-time tests, though, they constitute another step up in how long it takes to get anything done and therefore how much more repetition you have to go through just to get back to where you were.

I stuck it out for just under an hour, almost all of which I spent surveying, mining and defending myself from the voracious wildlife. I am no more enthusiastic now than I ever was about the hyper-aggressive nature of the mobs or the mob density. There are far too many creatures for a starting zone and they're far too keen on attacking when not remotely threatened. Obviously the mechanics need testing but I'd have thought there could be a specific planet for that, not every damn place you ever want to do anything.

Again, I need to send feedback about this stuff in the game itself. Next time I log in for a test session I think I'll start by giving my feedback before I get on with trying to get anything done. I've been leaving it for the end up to now and somehow I never get around to it before either the test ends or I get interrupted and have to stop.

What I'm really looking forward to isn't the next test but the start of the Kickstarter campaign. I want to see what the pledges are and I want to see how the whole thing goes. I hope it goes well and the project funds. I plan on pledging although it won't be at more than a basic level. 

From a purely personal perspective, I would like to see Stars Reach move into a more open form of testing and then Early Access just so I can structure my own time with the game more effectively. As it is now, I spend a lot more time worrying about if and when I'm going to be able to play than I spend actually playing and when I do get to play there's not a lot I can do that I haven't done several times already. 

The wider question, whether Stars Reach is a game I'd want to play with any frequency once it has full persistence and live servers, remains unanswerable. What's available in the pre-alpha is so far from what's projected for the finished game. 

What I am able say is that I can't easily imagine playing any sandbox MMO for all that long or out of much more than curiosity. Most seem to focus on activities that feel too much like work and not even all that interesting work, at that. I think I'd have felt differently twenty or maybe even ten years ago but time moves on and we change. 

As must be evident from my recent posts about other games, I'm in a much more story-oriented phase right now and the stories I want to hear are well-constructed, professionally-written, entertainingly performed narratives, not improvised gestalts. 

Maybe that will change. I'm not closing any doors. Right now, though,I'm content to sit back and watch the show.

And So The Story Goes

I took a break from Scars of Destruction in EverQuest II yesterday so I could carry on with the Rinascita storyline in Wuthering Waves. It really is very good indeed and for a number of reasons.

It's extremely well-paced. There are four parts, a prologue and three acts, all with titles that appear to be quotes, although from what I couldn't say:

Prologue: Through the Sea Thou Break
Act I: The Sacred Breeze So Often Breathes
Act II: Veils Off in Sun or Shadow
Act III: What Yesterday Wept, Today Doth Sing

I'm now a little less than halfway through Act II, so presumably more than halfway through the whole thing, and there have been no slow spots, no dull passages and no frenetic, rushed moments either. The story feels as if it's progressing organically, each scene a natural development of the last.

Both the direction and cinematography are quite possibly the best I've seen in any game I've played. I use the terms advisedly because although we often say that certain passages in games "feel like being in a movie", this really does. A huge amount of time is spent in what I suppose we have to call cut-scenes but the experience is very different from the comparatively static, mannered approach I associate with this kind of storytelling.

There's no set cut scene mechanic or style. Sometimes conversations happen in the world with everything going on around, sometimes there are full, cinematic inserts but mostly the characters talk to each other while the camera moves around according to the needs of the narrative. There are pans and close-ups and medium shots. There are birds-eye views and ground-level and over-the-shoulder and knee-level and pretty much you name it.

There are reaction shots, too, where characters reveal something of their inner thoughts by the way they move their heads or change their expression. Sometimes there are visual metaphors, where the camera cuts away to an object or a view to add nuance to what's just been said.

And it all works. It's never fancy or fussy or awkward or distracting, or at least no more than good film-making ever is, by which I mean that there are moments when it's so good it's hard not to find yourself appreciating the artistry instead of following the dialog.

Fortunately, the consistently excellent voice acting means focus never wavers for more than the occasional moment. Every sentence earns your attention as much for the way it's spoken as for what's being said.

All the new characters are good but one, Zani, is outstanding, which is just as well because she's in it a lot. She's the bank executive assigned to guide and assist the player character during their visit to Ragunna and for some reason she seems to be the only person in this Italianate city to have an Italian accent.

Or maybe it's Greek. Or Spanish. Opinions differ. It's definitely Mediterranean, though, and it's musical as hell. It's a real pleasure to listen to, whatever the origin. And in the end it's good that it can't be nailed down precisely to a real-world location. It is, presumably, a Ragunnan accent. Although that does raise the question of why no-one else in the city speaks the same way...

Zani also exemplifies another of the strengths in Wuthering Waves' storytelling: she's a genuine adult, something all too rare in video games or at least the ones I play. By that I mean she not only uses adult cadences in her speech and has an adult-sounding voice, she also expresses the kind of concerns and talks about the kind of topics I associate with a certain kind of adulthood.

Even though she lives in a magical, fantasy city, surrounded by the trappings of a child's storybook come to life, Zani works at management level in a bank and she sounds like she does. She also has a secondary role as a trusted functionary with a significant power grouping in the local political structure and she sounds like that, too. And to top it all, when encouraged by the player-character to relax and be more herself, Zani convincingly reveals a private self that seems equally grown-up.

This isn't a unique situation within the game. There were grown-ups in earlier storylines, not least the stiff and formal Baizhi, who always seemed weighed down with responsibilities, and some of the side-stories featured minor characters worrying about very adult topics, like problems at their place of work or in their extended friend and family groups. Even so, much as I appreciated it at the time, those feel like preparatory sketches compared to this. 

The main reason I mention it is because this kind of grown-up texture in storytelling seems quite unusual for something of this style, an anime-inflected gacha game set in a high-fantasy world. There are plenty of very un-grown-up characters in Wuthering Waves - precocious children, angsty teenagers, insecure young adults and cute, non-human creatures - and they're also both written and acted with exemplary skill, but those kinds of characters are frequently met and done well in these kinds of games. Grown-ups with full-time jobs and adult attitudes and concerns - they're a lot rarer.

Kuro, the developer responsible for Wuthering Waves, seems to be acutely aware of the path they're taking here and it's potential risk because they've included a lengthy, detailed questionnaire on exactly that topic. I filled it out the other day and the whole thing was question after question about the preferred age, attitude, personality and emotional frame of mind of characters you'd like to see in future. 

I've never seen anything quite like it in a game before. I hope enough people ticked the "adult" options to keep the ship sailing in the right direction although if not I trust the writers and artists to give us worthwhile stories, whoever they pick as protagonists.

Then there's the plot. It makes sense! Or it does so far, anyway. That ought to be a low bar but it's one so few games manage to clear that it feels like an achievement when any of them do. 

Wuthering Waves makes things harder for itself than it needs to by using a lot of jargon that makes it tough to understand what's going on until you attune your ear to it all. When you do, though, it's worth it. It's taken me this long to reach the point where words like "frequency" and "echo" mean what the game wants them to mean rather than what they usually would but I'm there now and it opens the story out significantly.

While you're getting used to all the pseudo-technical talk, it helps that, as well as the over-arcing, mystical through-line, there are much more down-to-earth sub-plots to hang onto. In Ragunna, there's a mystery to be investigated and a traitor to be exposed. A cabal of them, in fact. It's absorbing and entertaining stuff.

And there's a lot of it. There are several full playthrough videos on YouTube and none of them is less than six hours long. While there is some fighting, puzzle-solving and travel in there, the huge majority of your time will be spent watching or listening to NPCs talk, occasionally hearing your own character speak, and now and again selecting one of two responses that, as far as I can tell, make no material difference to what happens next.

Put like that, it sounds tedious but it's never that. It's six hours very well-spent. Or at least it's been about three and a half hours very well-spent for me, so far. I have every confidence it's going to go on that way until the end. 

One thing I do find it somewhat counter-intuitive is how I seem to be willing to spend as long watching this quasi-movie run as it would take me to watch three or four actual movies, when I can't generally talk myself into watching even one. It definitely doesn't feel all that much like playing a game at times.

I believe this, along with my recent experience with Cloudpunk, has finally chipped away the last of my resistance to video games as a narrative platform. Even though I've been playing these things for most of my life, I've always felt there were better ways of telling the stories; that the constant interruption of having to press a key hindered rather than helped immersion. If I have any lingering doubts, they mostly revolve around the eternal question of whether we really ought to be calling some of these experiences "games" at all.

It's still a difficult trick to pull off, all the same. I'm aware that almost everything I'm praising Wuthering Waves for here is uncomfortably similar to the things I most disliked about Final Fantasy XIV. All those endless cut scenes! All that talking! 

As the Funboy Three so wisely put it, though, it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. And this is how you do it right.

Picking At Scars And Other Questionable Activities

I've written a lot of long posts this week so I'm going to try and keep this one really short. Place your bets now...

Should be easy enough. It's just a recap of where I am with the games I'm playing and that's mostly been EverQuest II these last few days. 

I finished the Tradeskill Signature Questline from Scars of Destruction on Tuesday. It was short and simple and I'd be lying if I told you I really followed what it was supposed to be about. 

There was a bit with the Open Hand, the new, cultish organization introduced with the expansion, about whose background and motivation I still have no more idea than when I started. Nothing I saw or heard in the crafting quests made any of it any clearer.

Then there was some business with Raffik, the ratonga introduced long ago in an excellent crafting storyline devised by the much-missed Domino. Raffik was an orphaned child when we first met him, then he became a pirate and now he seems to be the captain of a merchant ship, working with the Far Seas Trading Company. It was good to see him again but I thought he seemed a bit less exuberant and more downbeat than usual, which didn't feel great, especially when his ship sank.

The last part of the questline involves yet another snarky gnome who thinks everyone else is an idiot, which is par for the course with gnomes in Norrath. They either behave like hyperactive, sugared-up toddlers or that one sarcastic teacher everyone loathed in school. If you haven't played EQII, just replace "Gnome" with "Asura" and you'll know exactly what I mean.

I didn't have a clock on it but I doubt the whole thing took me more than three hours, not counting the extra faction work in Port Woe, most of which I did as an adventurer. It certainly helped that my Weaponsmith, who was doing the quests, is also a max level Berserker. 

There are long sections when the narrative assumes you're going to be sneaking about or using the W.H.A.T. device that lets you astrally-project as a giant, non-aggro hand that can gather for you but mostly I didn't bother with any of that. I just plowed through the mobs and killed everything that got in my way. It was a lot faster.

The main reason I wanted to get the crafting timeline done first is that you get full flight privileges for the expansion at the end of it. That makes a truly enormous difference when you do the Adventure timeline, for which you don't get flight until all the hard work is over. It makes so much difference, in fact, it's hard to imagine there's anyone who doesn't max a craft skill on their main adventuring character just for the head start on flying, even if they actively hate crafting.

Once I had that out of the way, I went back to the Adventure Sig, on which I spent a couple of hours each day for the rest of the week. It's been fun, mostly because the fights are really easy. Either I've set myself up better this time around or the instances have been tuned almost exactly to my preferences for a change.

It's so lenient now that mobs in the instances, including bosses, are easier than stuff in the open world, which is a bit weird. The way it works in EQII these days, and has for a few years now, is that almost everything outdoors is an actual, solo mob but all the mobs in solo instances are heroic. You get a huge buff when you zone in so you can handle them. 

In the past that's been a slog at times but in Scars the "heroics" actually die much faster than the genuine solo mobs outside. It seems like a back-assward way to do things but I'll take it, especially now I can just fly over everything I don't want to waste time on outdoors.

Drops in the instances are good this time around, too. Lots of upgrades, some cosmetics and yesterday I even saw an Adept spell book! Those are like hen's teeth nowadays. It wasn't for my class, of course, but you can't have everything.

After what must be ten or twelve hours altogether by now, I'm still in the first of the two overland zones doing the Adventure questline. I've done three "dungeons", I think, and I'm about to start the fourth. I'm guessing that will probably move me on to the second zone, Western Wastes, which of course I have already explored as a crafter. 

Western Wastes quite attractive, for a Velious zone, particularly the mob density, which is generously sparse. I'm looking forward to adventuring there.

I'm also looking forward to the story beginning to make some kind of sense because it certainly doesn't yet. All I know is that Lucan d'Lere, the undead Overlord of Freeport, is in Western Wastes, possibly looking for a Dragon's Soul. Why, and more importantly why I should care, is not explained, other than by some very vague scaremongering along the lines of "Well it would be bad for everyone if he got his hands on one, even Freeport". 

My Ratonga Berserker is not convinced. He thinks it might be quite a good thing if Lucan got even more powerful - and why wouldn't he? He's met Lucan several times and Lucan has generally played straight with him. As for the Open Hand, the ones whispering all the bile about Lucan into his ear, who the hell are they, anyway, and why should he trust them?

I know no-one plays EQII for the plot but generally the expansion plotlines are at least coherent and convincing within their own terms of reference. This one, so far at least, is anything but. Paradoxically, that actually makes me more interested to get to the end of it, to find out if there's some twist coming or if it all comes together in the end. At the moment I'd bet against it but it does give me some motivation to push on and find out.

Other than EQII, I've not played much. I did buy Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete Edition as I said I probably would. It was £8.99, slightly less than I expected, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I knew I was too late to transfer my old character across but I made a Nintendo account anyway, just in case. No joy there but maybe it'll come in handy for something later. 

I can't say I'm sorry to be starting over. I wasn't very emotionally attached to my one and only character (Can you even have more than one per account? I don't think you can.) so I was quite happy to begin again without all the impedimenta of the past.

What did surprise me was how good it felt to see the good old campsite again. I'd be lying if I said I'd missed it but it felt nice to be back, all the same. 

The game runs beautifully on my new phone. The image is super-sharp, gameplay is very smooth and the phone barely seems to notice the game is running. I played the online version on my Kindle Fire and it was fine there but this looks and feels noticeably better. The experience feels so comfortable, in fact, that it's encouraging me to consider the possibility of playing more games that way. 

I might install Wuthering Waves. It should run well enough. It allows crossplay, so I could swap between phone and PC on the same character, which would work very well for all the talking that makes up more than fifty per cent of the gameplay, although I can't imagine doing the fighting or the fancy gliding and jumping and climbing with mobile controls. I mean, I'm sure some people can but I can't imagine it being anything I'd enjoy or even manage.

I also might consider Once Human on the phone, when the game eventually come to mobile. Not because I think it would be good that way - I very much doubt it will - but because I'm having huge problems updating it on Steam. 

I tried several times this week and it failed over and over again, something that's happened more than once before. I uninstalled and re-installed it and it still failed so now I've uninstalled it, possibly for good. It's a great game in everything but the patching, which has always been a problem. Maybe it'll update more fluently on mobile.

Other than that, I haven't really played anything. There's a Stars Reach testing session tomorrow evening that I hope to find time to attend. I caused a bit of a stir on a Massively OP comment thread about the game recently, when I mentioned I'd been invited to the test on three different email accounts. 

That got the attention of both Raph Koster and Carneros. I didn't realize it was going to be a big deal - I assumed it must be happening all the time but maybe other people just stick to a single email address and don't get themselves into these awkward situations.

The Kickstarter-proper should be up in a week or so, anyway, and at that point I imagine the current testing phase will become somewhat moot as we wait to learn the outcome of the campaign and what happens after. If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to see the level of attention the whole thing draws. Here's hoping it all turns out well.

And that, I think, is about it for today. Was that a short post or not? It was quick to write, which is what matters. 1,500 words in just over an hour. Wish I could knock these things out that fast every day...

The Drugs Don't Work

Remember when I said I was working on a music post that was going to be all songs about drugs? Well, that's not going to happen. I started writing it and it didn't go as well as I expected. For one thing, it turned out I'd already used several of the best songs already. For another, what I had left to work with wasn't as good as I remembered. And worst of all, it didn't really flow.

Believe it or not, I do try to program these music posts, at least a little, so there's a rhythm or a mood or a theme - something that carries you through from one end to the other. It often doesn't work as well as I'd like but this one didn't work at all. So I junked it. It may come back some day, if I get enough new examples worth sharing, which, let's face it, is bound to happpen because if there's one thing musicians like to sing about it's their drug habits. 

Or maybe I'll just do a playlist instead. For now, though, I'm going to go somewhere entirely different, namely back to where I usually go: random stuff I've picked up from here and there over the last week or so and tried to force into some kind of uncomfortable coherency as though I had a plan. 

Good stuff, all of it, I hope. Gotta try and keep those standards up, which frankly was not happening in the drug post. 

There were exceptions, though. Like this one:

(He'll Never Be An) 'Ol Man River
TISM (This Is Serious Mum) 

I'm guessing any readers from Down Under (God, that's such a dated expression now, isn't it?) already know who TISM are. I was going to add "or were" because I thought for a moment they'd broken up but no-one ever truly breaks up any more and then I remembered I'd watched footage of them performing live about a year ago so present tense I guess. I bet no-one reading this outside Australia and maybe New Zealand has even heard of them all the same, regardless of their current status.

Australia is such a weird place, isn't it? Not just because of the really quite very weird stuff that happens there, seemingly all the time, but because of how little news of any of it ever seems to filter out into the wider world. I mean, I get that it's a long way away but we have the internet now and as far as I know the Australian government hasn't banned TikTok yet.

I'd never heard of TISM until a few days ago but I've been digging through their extensive back catalog on YouTube and cross-checking the historical record and from what I can gather they were some kind of big deal in the twenty-teens. I'm not entirely clear if they're a band or a satirical theater troupe. Both, I imagine.

Controversy was or maybe is their lifeblood but this is by no means the most offensive of their songs  I've heard. That's the one coming next, so brace yourselves. As for this one, in case you can't make out the lyrics, although you should have no problem because their enunciation is admirably clear, the chorus goes

"I'm on the drug, I'm on the drug
I'm on the drug that killed River Phoenix"

It's about celebrity deaths and how we all get such a kick out of them, which is hardly a new idea but seldom have I heard it expressed more amusingly and with such force. They don't restrict themselves to drug-related casualties, either - Mama Cass's sandwich gets a mention - but the focus is on the drugs as you can tell from all the jacking-up gestures. Tasteful it is not.

I've Gone Hillsong - TISM

It's a lot more tasteful than this, though. I had absolutely no idea what Hillsong was until I looked it up. It's a "charismatic Christian megachurch" that started in New South Wales and expanded to cover the entire planet, apparently. Except for the bit where I live, thankfully. 

They do say the devil has all the best tunes.

Man Made Of Meat - Viagra Boys

Mrs Bhagpuss likes to amuse herself by pointing out how girly and twee it all sounds every time she walks in and hears me listening to something. Yeah, well, not always! I'm fond of a bit of macho, male posturing now and again, always provided it comes thickly coated in irony. It looks like we're getting an extra-thick ladling today.

Viagra Boys (No definite article, for reasons, presumably.) have the worst name, even allowing for the irony, but they're Swedish so I suppose that gives them a pass. I have an unreasoning suspicion of Scandinavian indie music, something I can't even begin to rationalize, let alone excuse. Any other part of the world and I assume authenticity but anywhere north of Germany and my bullshit detector goes into overdrive. God knows why. I'm going to have to take in to be recalibrated or risk missing out on some very good stuff indeed. 

The Sign of a Man - The Moonlandingz

Not the sign of a man made of meat, presumably. Although the Moonlandingz and Viagra Boys do hit a lot of the same notes. And I don't mean that literally. Or do I?

Pony - The Men

This is just getting silly now. I have been listening to a lot of garage bands lately, though. And I do have a documented musical pony fetish. I mean theory! Musical pony theory!

Gay Bar - Electric Six

Okay, that's the last of these, I promise. And yes, I know it's twenty years old and everyone's heard it before but I hadn't, not until a few days ago, because I have a lost decade at the beginning of the millennium, musically speaking, so anything from about 1999 to 2012 is pretty much new to me.

Also, I have a great cover of it I want to share, when I get around to doing another covers post, so it's a good opportunity to remind everyone of the original.

Hopper's On Top - The Waterboys

Did I lie? I don't think so. I'd call this a transition. It is quite macho but it's mid-tempo. Still, seven in a row with male vocals has to be some kind of house record.

Also, I never thought I'd share a Waterboys track here. I don't much like them and I even more don't like the kind of scene I associate with them. I mean, it's only a couple of steps from there and you're listening to U2. Okay, three steps, let's not be unreasonable.

Mrs Bhagpuss likes them, though. We have one of their CDs in the car. I mean a CD they're on, not one we stole when we were at that party at Mike Scott's house. Which we totally weren't and which never happened. (It didn't happen.) Or did it? (No, it didn't.)

The Whole of the Moon is a good tune, all the same. It would be churlish to pretend otherwise, but if you've been trying anyway, like I have, then I have a cover of it by Fiona Apple that's going to render your position intellectually untenable. That'll be in the covers post, too.

As for this one, I really only listened to it because I read they were making an entire album about Dennis Hopper and that seemed so bizarre I couldn't ignore it. Glad I didn't, now. I wonder if the rest of it will be as good. Hard to imagine but we can hope.

The New Alphabet - Delivery

Help! I climbed up on this thing and now I can't get off! Also, we're back in Australia and everyone's in some kind of cult. I'm scared!

Okay, I really need to turn this thing around. Let's see what I can do... Oh, I know...

Let's have some songs about horses!

Horses - Mallrat

Alright! We're still in Australia but I think we're safe now. Mallrat did this live on the Kelly Clarkson show or so the link I followed yesterday told me but when I got there she was in a field with a guitarist and a horse which I thought gave a whole new meanig to the concept of playing live on a TV show.

Kelly Clarkson is fun, isn't she? I watch a lot of her leftfield covers (Not Leftfield covers - that really wouldn't work.) but I don't believe I've ever included any of them here, mostly because she tends to do shortened versions. Maybe in that covers post that I really seem to be hyping now.

Goodbye Horses - Q Lazzarus

Aka that song from Silence of the Lambs. I saw Silence of the Lambs at the cinema on release, back when I saw every Jodie Foster movie the first moment I could. I carried on trying to get copies of everything she'd done until the late '90s. I think I got it all up to when I stoppped caring, including the stuff she did in Europe when she was recovering from that whole Hinckley thing. 

There are a couple I own that I've never watched, like The Accused and Nell, and I will certainly never watch Silence of the Lambs again, I'll tell you that for nothing. Took me too long to get over it the first time.

I may have been a little obsessed but I think I'm over it now. There are pictures of Jodie up in the house even now, though, so maybe not. And I would like to watch True Detective...

Er, I seem to have strayed away from the point a little. I meant to talk about Q Lazzarus not Jodie Foster. I'm thinking of doing a whole post about the mysterious, enigmatic artist who "disappeared from the public eye in the mid-1990s" as her Wikipedia entry puts it. A bit like me, then. Maybe she was playing EverQuest, too, although I kinda doubt it.

Not to harp on about it but I have a couple of interesting covers of this one that might turn up in a post sometime soon.

Switch Over - Horsegirl

Okay, so it's not about horses. It's close enough. 

One more makes a dozen, which I always think is a nice number for a music post. I think we've had enough thumpers. And enough rock. Let's end with something a little more soothing.

Baby Little Tween - Okay Kaya

I don't know, though. That might be the most disturbing of the lot. Just goes to show you don't have to shout and jump around to scare people.

Until next time, which won't be long.

Jentryfication

Yesterday, I wrote a rave review about a video game. Today, I'm writing one about a TV show. I do occasionally worry I'm turning into that guy from the Fast Show who thinks everything is "brilliant". According to the Fast Show wiki - because of course there's a Fast Show wiki - he's called "Brilliant Kid". Well, he would be, I guess.

I always thought he might be based on Andy Kershaw, a DJ with eclectic tastes who was much in the media around that time (And also in the news, for reasons we won't go into although they're probably not the reasons you first thought of, for once...) Kershaw was often infuriatingly enthusiastic about things, frequently for no very good reason that anyone but he could see, or at least that's my recollection. He looked a bit like Paul Whitehouse does as the character, too. I seem to remember he wore a cagoule quite often.

I had the old sketch show in mind because Mrs Bhagpuss has been watching it on YouTube recently. Some of it still stands up although I do think it helps if you've been drinking, as I mostly would have been when I watched it the first time round. But we're not here to reminisce about TV in the '90s, are we? Are we? No, I thought not.

We're here to rave about TV in the 2020s, or I am anyway. It's good, isn't it? Some of it. There's also a lot, so it's easy to miss some of the good bits, especially when they're hidden away in the endless sub-sections of your second-favorite streaming service. 

We all make a conscious decision whether or not to watch the likes of Squid Game or Stranger Things (Watched the latter, haven't seen the former.) because it's hard not to hear about zeitgeisty phenomena like those, but we rely on word of mouth or reviews or blind chance to find about short-run shows that barely pick up any traction. Even popular, successful or critically acclaimed shows can slip past if they're marketed to a demographic that doesn't include us. 

So, anyone else seen Jentry Chau vs the Underworld? 

Thought not.

As per Wikipedia, to which I really ought to donate again, given how often I keep referencing the hell out of it here, "Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld is an American animated supernatural-action television series created by Echo Wu." It came out on Netflix just before Christmas and because Netflix thinks I'm some kind of animation-obsessed teenager (Can't imagine how it got that idea...) the show immediately turned up in my recommends.

Netflix recommends are actually pretty good, I think. Certainly one whole heck of a lot better than Prime, which doesn't seem to have a clue who I am or what I've watched, judging by the kind of shows and movies tries to push me towards. You'd almost think they had something other than my tastes and interests in mind...

I wouldn't say I trust Netflix to make my choices for me but I will often actively consider what it's suggesting. In this case, it was pushing at an open door because this is a show I very well might have watched, had I happened across it organically. Then again, I let a lot of shows like this drift by. There's only so much time, so if Netflix wants to do some of the sifting for me, that's fine by me.

In this case it all turned out to be more than fine. Jentry Chau (As I'm calling it for short.) is excellent. It's a thirteen-episode season centering on a Chinese-American girl who discovers the powers she didn't even know she had have been promised to a demon when she turns sixteen. Guess when that's going to be!

The show has a number of strengths, one of which is the ever-changing mystery surrounding Jentry's past. Almost nothing in her life is ever as it seems, then or now. No-one tells her the truth, everyone lies to her, everyone is hiding something and the rules are constantly changing. 

Revelations follow discoveries from the first episode to the last and although it could have seemed like a year's worth of soap opera plots condensed into a few weeks, I found all of it made sense and held together. It's an extremely well-crafted narrative.

Another strong positive is the characterization, particularly Jentry herself. She's a convincingly adolescent mix of self-assured confidence, insecurity and impulsiveness, always behaving and reacting in ways that feel authentic and plausible, even when they're clearly ill-advised, wreckless or uninformed. 

If anything, she's perhaps a little too grounded at times for someone who's been consistently lied to, tricked or threatened by just about everyone who ought to have her best interests at heart. As the season continues it becomes evident that everyone from her parents to her guardian to her classmates to her school principal just can't be relied upon to be honest or even approriate. Although there are some people who play straight with her, it's hardly surprising she struggles to know who to trust. 

In the face of the endless torrent of bad news, disaster and betrayal, she stays strong for far longer than anyone would have a right to expect but perhaps the most convincing moment in her journey of self-discovery comes when, at a very crucial and excruciatingly public moment, she just can't any more. I'm not sure I remember seeing a supposed superhero simply break down in tears and give up when called upon to put herself in the way of danger, the way Jentry does at one point.

There are, of course, many supernatural shows starring teenage girls, animated and live action both. They can all become a bit of a blur. The USP of this one is that all the monsters are taken directly from Chinese folklore. 

This does give the show a very distinctive look and tone. The demons look markedly different from the norm and behave somewhat differently too. It's also refreshing, as a viewer, not to have to deal with a whole bunch of preconceptions every time a new monster appears. Most of the time I had no clue what the creatures I was looking at were capable of, nor whether they were likely to be good, neutral or evil.

The animation is solid, not spectacular, but the character design is excellent and the big fight scenes are satisfyingly explosive. When Jentry gains full control of her powers and really lets rip it gave me some serious Dark Phoenix vibes.

Although Jentry Chau makes for a pretty good superhero show when it wants to, it's really more of a coming-of-age story. There's a good deal of teenage slice-of-life stuff around Jentry's home-life (If you consider a houseful of ghosts, one of whom is your dead great-aunt and supposed legal guardian to be just a normal family.) and schooling (If you consider having to deal with a principal who believes you're the incarnation of his obsessive conspiracy theories or a classmate who's actually a demon in disguise to be just another school day.)

I got a little confused about both Jentry's ethnicity and lineage at times, what with the show opening with her at school neither in Texas nor China but in Seoul and with her "gugu" being her great-aunt not her grandmother, but I found ambiguity, even if it was only in my own mind, helped make the whole thing feel more laminated. There are layers of supposition, belief, expectation and reality all overlapping and clashing and it really beds the whole thing in and gives it weight.

And Jentry Chau does have weight. Even gravitas, at times. It's PG-rated on IMDB but I thought it was quite a grown-up show, thematically. It's about things that matter and it doesn't offer easy answers to very difficult questions. It's based in part (Presumably not the demons...) on showrunner Echo Wu's childhood and adolescence in Dallas, Texas and a sense of personal experience infuses much of the narrative.

I also found it quite scary. The Chinese demons and monsters are visually unsettling but also behave in a disturbingly demonic fashion, often as not. The mogui is exceptionally sinister and unnerving, especially when it's revealed in its true form late in the season. 

Much to his own disappointment, the exception to the scariness rule is Ed, the jiangshi who becomes Jentry's best friend and supernatural sidekick and threatens to steal just about every scene he's in. His transition from would-be terrifying supernatural entity to wannabe social media superstar is very entertaining, if maybe not quite the stretch it ought to be.

There's much, much more I could say about the show, not least the clear and apparent line of descent I could trace from two of my favorite shows, Buffy and the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, but I'll refrain. The final thing I'm going to mention is the music, which really stands out. 

The opening theme is from a song called Flame by the LA-based "global" girl group KATSEYE, whose origin is a whole story of its own. It rocks. There are enough songs scattered throughout the thirteen episodes to fill a double album, which is exactly what's happened, although in actuality only the first disc has songs by established artists, the second being mostly music written for the show itself.

As this reddit thread suggests, a lot of people are wary of engaging with any Netflix series these days, thanks to the platform's propensity for cancelling shows before they've barely begun. In the case of Jentry Chau, though, there need be no such worries. The one and so far only season has a clear and complete narrative arc that concludes satisfactorily, with no cliffhangers and no major loose ends.

It does, however, also have huge potential for further stories featuring the same characters and there's enough left unexplained in the backstory to justify at least another season. So far, there's no news on whether there will be one although both Echo Wu and Ali Wong, who voices Jentry, would like it if there was.

Let's hope they get their wish. It's mine, too. In the meantime, if you're in any way inclined towards this kind of thing, don't let this gem pass you by.

Night And The City - The Cloudpunk Review

Last night I finished Cloudpunk. According to Steam it took me a little over eleven hours, which feels about right. It's one of the best games I've played in a long while and I'd recommend it highly to anyone with even a passing interest in either cyberpunk settings or strong storytelling.

There's really not a lot I can say about the main storyline that isn't going to stray into spoiler territory. In fact, even confirming there is a central plot might be giving away too much. I'd probably been playing for a couple of hours before I even began to suspect there was one and honestly the game would work perfectly well without, as the purely episodic collection of short stories I originally thought it was going to be.

That said, the plot, when it develops, is excellent; coherent, intriguing, exciting and eventually satisfying. It's so complete in itself that I'm somewhat put off buying the DLC that carries on from where the base game finishes. It's one of those problems of success you very occasionally hear about. Things finished so well, I'm not sure I want to hear about a whole new set of problems threatening to spoil the happy ending.

Let me see what I can safely say about the story and the characters without giving too much away. 

The set-up is that Rania, a youngish woman from the Eastern Peninsula, has arrived in the vast, sprawling city of Nivalis, where she knows absolutely no-one. Rania is an outsider in the city, which allows for your own ignorance as a player, but she's also a cultural outsider. She wears a head-covering and her background is clearly rural and possibly also ethnically diverse, although what the ethnic norm in Nivalis might be is anyone's guess. Just being human gives her privilege.

She's on the run from a debt collection agency with exhaustive and terrifying powers. What she owes, to whom and what the penalties might be for not repaying the debt is never specified but we meet other people in similar situations to whom very bad things have been done, so her sense of endangerment is patently justified. 

To pay the rent on her one-room apartment, she's taken a job as a delivery driver for a borderline-illegal company called Cloudpunk. It's never entirely clear how much of their operation is tolerated by the authorities but it's certainly not all of it. 

This gives her the use of a HOVA, a flying car, but she has to pay for the fuel and repairs out of her earnings. The game begins with the start of her first shift. It's a night-shift, naturally.

And that would be enough for a game, in my opinion. I was quite happy, picking up the deliveries, flying around the incredibly detailed and complex city, discovering new areas, meeting new people and hearing snatches of their stories. Particularly since I was doing it in the company of Camus.

There are a lot of good things about Cyberpunk but the best might be Camus, the "s" in whose name is sibilated, not silent like the existentialist for whom he may or may not be named. 

Camus is a dog except when he's not. He's an Automata, which from context I believe is some specific kind of AI. There are AIs, Automata, Androids and Humans in the city but at least one Automata we meet used to be Human and the term AI doesn't always seem to mean exactly the same thing.

This ambiguity, of course, plays directly into my own, personal preferences when it comes to science fiction. Having grown up on, and having had my core intellectual conceptions shaped by, the work of Philip K Dick, any discussion of machine consciousness presses all my engagement buttons. There's a lot of that in Cloudpunk and it's done with considerable subtlety and nuance. If you want a game to make you think, this one will do it.

Camus's situation is a prime example. He's an Automata with self-awareness, who used to be housed in the body of a dog, presumably an android dog, although I'm not sure if that's ever explicitly confirmed, as neither is what he may have been before he was a dog. 

When Rania fled the Eastern Peninsula she brought Camus with her on some kind of hard drive and when she acquires the HOVA she installs him as its resident persona, replacing the generic one that comes with the car. He's her pet, her friend, her companion and in some indefinable way, her conscience.

Most of the time, Camus is in charge of communications and systems in the HOVA but occasionally the original, generic persona is re-instated and once Camus even ends up back in the hard drive for a while. 

At times, Camus muses at some length on his existential situation, conversations I found fascinating and could happily have heard much more of. He also asks some very searching philosophical questions, not least whether he can still be considered a dog now he's a car. People who meet him in the city for the first time naturally believe he's the HOVA. They have no idea he is or even was ever a dog. We do, though. He's a constant, affable, occasionally questioning presence and I just couldn't get enough of him.

When he speaks, he's represented by an icon that looks like the head of a border collie and his naive, innocent way of expressing himself somehow manages to make him sound like a dog, but also like a machine intelligence, or more properly what we might imagine either of those things to be like, could we hear them. It's exceptionally convincing, in equal part due to the quality of the writing and the perfectly-pitched voice acting.

The writing throughout is of that same, high standard and it's all the work of a single person, Thomas Welsh. The voice acting, which is handled by literally dozens of actors, is more variable. 

Most of it is really excellent. Andrea Petrille, who  voices Rania, gives one of the best performances I've heard in any game, pretty much note-perfect throughout. The other voice actors are almost all on top of their game too, so it's jarring when you very occasionally run into one who isn't. The two gang members I talked to a couple of times and Rania's co-worker, Baz, I found less than convincing but they were the exceptions and even they only stood out in contrast to the rest of the cast. In most games their performances would have been just fine.

The story, dialog and acting would be more than enough to recommend the game on their own but the visuals are also wonderful. Nivalis is immense and overwhelming. Like every cyberpunk city ever, it owes an immense debt to Ridley Scott's vision in Blade Runner, but unlike many it takes that as a starting point and carries on from there to become something original.

There's a vertiginous complexity to the cityscape, made up as it is of skyscrapers rising above the clouds, criss-crossed by highways and transected by tunnels. Piazzas and boulevards are separated by chasms, the only access being by flying car, pater-noster or the blue-screen portals that somehow flick pedestrians from one side to the other.

It's a wild and dangerous environment, where vehicles careen at speed, appearing to follow no rules, not even which side of the stream to fly on. Drug pushers and gang members pace the walkways in direct sight of sinister Corpsec police. Preachers rant about the endtimes and confused veterans panhandle for lims. Anyone you meet could be a threat or an opportunity or most likely both.

One of the very best things about Cloudpunk is that when the game ends, it doesn't end. Again, no spoilers, but when the credits have rolled and you've beaten the game, Nivalis just carries on and you can carry on with it, if you want. 

That apartment Rania's renting is a lot nicer than she'll admit and nicer still when you help her decorate, something you can do - if you have the money. It has a balcony, even, and a fish tank, now she's paid for one. There are other things more special and meaningful, too, but I can't tell you or even show you a picture or it would spoil the surprise when you play the game, which you really should.

About the only thing I haven't mentioned is the gameplay itself. It's pretty good, too. I think it would class as great if you're more adept at flying your HOVA than I was. 

From a reddit AMA with the writer that I read after I'd finished playing last night, I gather the main thrust and thrill of the game is supposed to be the driving itself but I never got good enough at it to relax and enjoy myself. I was too concerned about crashing into oncoming traffic and more than once I managed to steer myself into tight spaces I couldn't get out of, which was stressful, especially that time I had a ticking bomb in the car with me.

I suspect the whole thing would be easier with a controller. If I get the DLC I might try it that way. Even so, and with all the ineptitude I brought to the game, I enjoyed the traveling. Which was just as well because there's a lot of it. 

Fortunately, the HOVA is easy to control, for the most part, and very forgiving of damage. There are garages everywhere and repairs aren't too expensive. Nor is fuel. I also found out that you can't destroy the car or run completely out of fuel but I didn't discover that until I'd finished the game. Might have taken the stress down a notch if I'd known.

Instead, out of caution, the longer I played, the slower I took things and the better it felt. There are quite a few modifications you can make to your vehicle but I only bought the ones that decreased the damage it took, never any that made it go faster. Go faster was the last thing I wanted it to do.

In the overall design of the game, there were only a handful of things I felt might have been done differently and even those were more an aesthetic issue than anything. For example, I did find it strange how you could quite easily make more money just wandering around the city, picking up discarded objects to sell to vendors, than you'd make in a night's work delivering packages for Cloudpunk. It made me wonder why she'd bothered getting the job in the first place.

Then again, if Rania didn't work for Cloudpunk, she wouldn't have a vehicle and she wouldn't be able to zoom around picking up salvage from here there and everywhere. There's only so much valuable litter to find on a single block. 

Then there was the parking paradox: since no-one ever seemed to do anything in Nivalis without getting paid for it, and since the authorities were militaristic goons, it seemed unlikely all the parking in the city would be free. It's not like I wanted to be made to pay for it but it felt like an oversight that I wasn't. 

These are just tiny cavils but they do occasionally remind you you're playing a game. I prefer to avoid that whenever possible. Slightly more annoying was the over-zealous reaction of the game engine at certain crucial moments, when it would decide that, since I was standing right next to an interactable object, any key-press must mean I wanted to use it. That made getting in and out of my apartment more of a mini-game than it needed to be and left me driving a different vehicle to the one I meant to choose, when I was given an upgrade.

The worst thing was when Rania ended up making a choice she hadn't intended because she was in the exact spot the game expected her to be when the time came to make it and I foolishly tried to move her somewhere else so I could think about it. The game revolves around morally challenging dilemmas but a couple of my more dubious decisions weren't actually my choices at all, just mis-clicks.

None of that detracts in any way from the overall experience, which was engrossing, involving, moving and not infrequently thrilling. I loved my time in Nivalis, which is why I was extremely happy to discover the same team that made it has spent the last four years working on a sequel, all about the city itself.

The new game, called simply "Nivalis", takes the form of an entrepreneurial sim, possibly one of my least-favorite genres, in which you start with a noodle bar and work your way up to a chain of restaurants. Not my thing at all but I'll take it as a way in to a full-on simulation of this amazing city.

There are three trailers for the game, which is in the late stages of development now and has a release date of "2025". If the trailers are remotely representative of the game itself, it's going to be absolutely stunning. I've wishlisted it and for once I might even pay full price for it as soon as it goes live.

Before that happens, though, I should probably buy the DLC, City of Ghosts. I'll get to that just as soon as I've finished up all the side quests I missed in the base game. And finished decorating Rania's apartment. And when I've explored the rest of the city...