Names From The Past, Names For The Future

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, otherwise known as the 1980s, I used to write an opinion column for the comics fanzine I co-created and that column was called "Scattershot". It's mildly unsettling that my original opening line for this post was going to start with "A few scattershot topics I've been wondering about...".  Seems like some things haven't changed as much as I like to tell myself.

The thing is, though, "Scattershot" was always a good name for a column. Maybe I should start using it again. In fact, maybe I should start thinking more in terms of columns and features with names and set topics. It would add a much-needed sense of structure. Maybe I'll do that, although now I think about it I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about it in Blogger.

Blogger is pretty inflexible when it come to layout, or or so it's always seemed to me, but then that has a lot to do with the decision I made, not long after I started, to use a custom template that isn't officially supported. I don't dare change anything now in case it breaks the whole blog, which is the main reason everything here has stayed almost exactly the same, at least visually, for more than a decade. I imagine it's only because Google has pretty much forgotten Blogger exists that I've been able to get away with it this long.

Still, at least it's not WordPress, right? They break things all the time from what I hear. Wilhelm was complaining again about something else WordPress had broken. 

I made accounts with both platforms before I decided to go with Blogger. The main reason I went that way was that Blogger seemed less technical. Now I wonder if it even that's really true. Wilhelm was describing how awkward it is add urls. Blogger does have an HTML editor as standard. I toggle between the regular word-processor screen and the HTML code all the time to fiddle around with the code. Can you do that in WP now?

I am curious, I admit. It's a constant background worry that one day Google will remember they own a blogging platform and decide they don't want one. If that happens I might have to consider WP as an alternative so, since I already have an account there, I am toying with the idea of starting a WP blog just as an experiment. Maybe  I should call that one Scattershot. It's a good name.

So much for the introduction. On to the topics.

Back To Camp

I became unreasonably excited last week, when I read a post at Kay Talk Games about how Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was coming back as an offline title. The online version shut down last year and even though it had been a long time since I'd played and I hadn't been thinking of starting again, I was somewhat miffed to know I wouldn't be able to go back and play some more if I happened to get the urge.

If we're honest about it,  I imagine that's how most people feel when they hear that games they once played are closing down. It's not that anyone really wants to play them again, it's just that no-one likes being told they can't. 

A suggestion (Or demand...) that often comes up at such times is for the game to be somehow converted into an offline version, so people can at least go on playing on their own, but the response from developers is almost always that it would be too expensive or that technical reasons make it impossible.

Nintendo, though, will always be Nintendo. They do what they want not what other companies do and apparently what they want is an offline version of ACPC, so now there is one. 

It's very expensive for a mobile game. The full price will be $20 but for the rest of this month you can get it for just half that. Ten dollars is still a lot for a phone game, all the same.

And yet I am almost certainly going to buy it. ACPC is the mobile game I've played the most. I have a Label for it on the blog with eleven entries, many of which are full posts. I started playing in lockdown, when everyone else was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch and ten I kept playing almost every day for months, long after people stopped gosh-wowing about New Horizons..

At the time, I played the game on my Kindle Fire but as it happens I have just bought a new phone. It's a budget phone but a good one. It's a Samsung Galaxy A16 and supposedly it can play Genshin Impact, albeit at low settings, although I haven't tried it yet and won't believe it until I do. If it can run GI, though, it certainly ought to be able to manage Pocket Camp. 

As well as Kay's post, I read a long and helpful review of the offline version at Eurogamer and jut reading about it made me feel nostalgic for the many hours I wasted, talking to peculiar animals about their utterly pointless obsessions. 

I could do that again. I think I will. It'll be £10 well spent, I'm sure.

Free At Last?

On a thematically-related topic, there was a news item on MassivelyOP recently about another somewhat twee game I used to play and would quite like to play again: Free Realms. FR went under in the Great SOE Purge of 2014 but ever since there's been a bubbling, roiling, mumbling demand for some kind of return for the game that apparently everyone loved but no-one wanted to spend money on, something John "Smed" Smedley blamed on the players being mostly kids, although that never seemed to hold Runescape or Roblox back much.

For most of the last decade, the only runner in the Free Realms emulator race has been FR Sunrise, a project that began almost as soon as the game shut down and which has made many promises and released several videos but has so far produced nothing whatsoever of interest to anyone outside the walled garden in which it's supposedly growing.

Now, though, there's competition in the form of an open-source project described as "a reversed engineered walking emulator", meaning that so far all you can do is wander around an empty theme park, imagining the fun you'd have if the rides were switched on. 

I'm a little unclear on the exact timing behind this new initiative, which has been up and running for a good few months now, but the apparent lack of clarity over who actually owns the Free Realms IP these days might have something to do with it. That and the inability or unwillingness of the FRSunrise crew to get a functioning build to market, I guess.

The team behind the open-source project is looking for help to try to rebuild the content so feel free to pile on if you have the skills. I'll join you when there's a working game and I'll lay odds that will happen before we see any kind of publicly playable release from FRSunrise, whose beta sign-ups opened four years ago, which was when I signed up, but whose actual testing program, as far as I can tell, has yet to begin.

Metaversion

Here's a 21st century koan for you: if a virtual popstar performs in a virtual world, do they make a sound? Well, now's your chance to find out because Hatsune Miku is currently appearing in Fortnite Festival Season 7. She'll be there, for whatever value you care to assign to "be" and "there", until 8 April.

Three or four years ago, that news would have made me very excited. I'd have patched up Fortnite to log in and check it out and I'd have taken a bunch of screenshots and written a whole post about it. I will most likely get around to taking a look by way of Amazon Luna - I should really have done that before I wrote the post - but these vague, occluded hints of our true future no longer make my blood rush the way they once did.

And that's a good thing. It means that, just as I predicted, the real metaverse is already building itself around us as we ignore it. All the lunatic, self-serving, self-aggrandizing claims of the money-is-all cult have predictably come to nothing, while the infrastructure seeds and replicates with no external plan or purpose. 

The downside, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness has found to her irritation, is that early adopters attracted to the quirkiness and unpredictability of the tools now find themselves bored and uninterested by the much more consistent and reliable output of their successors. I find myself, as she says, "uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing", which is why you may have noticed a lot less discussion about it here of late. 

What applies to GenAI applies equally to the metaverse. Still, I do like Hatsune Miku and I do find the idea of her "performing" inside a video game attractively irreal. We are slowly getting to where I want us to go even if we don't always notice it's happening.

Get Weird On Me, Baby

Since I've mentioned AIWeirdness and video games in the same paragraph, I ought to link to Janelle's latest post, especially since I'm about to cannibalize it for my own purposes. She rarely finds anything weird enough to comment on these days but she made an exception for a "generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else."

Never having played Minecraft, it's not something I feel I need to see for myself, which is just as well because it doesn't want to run on my laptop.  If you'd like to take a look, here's the link. It's called Oasis, it only runs in Chrome, and it's supposedly "the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model". 

As Janelle suggests, it's also ultimately pointless. As it stands it's a curiosity precisely because of how little it reassembles an actual, functioning game but if it ever manages to become one, "this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run." Now, if they could get generative AI to replicate Free Realms, then we'd be getting somewhere...

And that'll do for now. There's more but when isn't there? You have to stop somewhere.

I guess we'll end with a song because that's traditional around here. So, what d'you reckon the chances are of there being a song called "Scattershot"? And if there is, of it being any good?

I'll take it.

 

Notes on AI used in this post. 

Ironically, having gone on about not bothering much with AI any more, I immediately realized AI would be ideal for the header image. It's a great example of how un-weird the apps have become and thereby how useful but also no really worth talking about any more.

I wanted a picture of Hatsune Miku in Pocket Camp so I just typed in "Hatsune Miko in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp" and that's what I got. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?

The model I used was Flux Schnell at NightCafe.