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! 

My Top Five Free Prime Gaming Picks For June

How d'you like the clickbait title? I guess if I really wanted views I should have said "All The Games Amazon's Giving Away For Free In June Stink - Except For These Five!" or something like that. I do still have some self-respect left though...

And in any case, this is more than a little late, seeing as how I got the email telling me about the June slate of free games on Amazon Prime Gaming over a week ago but what is it they say? Better late than after the horse has bolted the door or something like that. Or maybe it was never look a gift post in the eye. One of those.

Anyway, I did want to mention it because it seemed like a considerably more interesting offer than last month's. I don't think I claimed a single game in May. I have to say it doesn't say a lot for your selection process, when people won't even take what you're giving away for free. Of course, that might just be me. I do have very sophisticated tastes, I'll have you know, as must be obvious to everyone by now.

Enough waffling to up the word count. So, what games did I take? It goes without saying, I hope, that I have no idea. I mean, it was a few days ago now. Who can be expected to remember anything that far back? Luckily, Amazon sends a confirmatory email every time you claim anything so I don't have to go grubbing through Good Old Games and the Epic Store to find what I took.

Oh, and this is handy! They even give you a nice little picture of the game with a little icon to say which platform you claimed it on. That's very thoughtful, especially since I can steal those and use them here. Saves me scrubbing around for some screenshots from the website. (Anyone getting the idea this is some sort of cut-price, low-effort filler can just go try and come up with five posts a week themselves and see how they like it. Not the people already doing that, I don't mean you... or the ones who post every single day, either... all of you can have a good laugh if you want but I bet you've all been here...)

Back to the games. I'll take them in the order I claimed them. It would be easy to read something into that but it was most likely just the order they appeared in the original email.

Just for fun, let's see how much I can remember about any of these before I go look them up. I did read the descriptions at the time or I wouldn't have known which I wanted, so I ought to have at least a vague idea. There were far more games available than the five I picked, though, and I read some of those as well, so there could be bleed-through.

Hmm. I think this one's a turn-based rpg set in the Warhammer universe. (Edit: It is!) More than that I couldn't say but I'm quite impressed I could remember that much. It does look a bit Warhammery but then so do a lot of things. 

I bought the Warhammer RPG Rulebook when it was first published and GM'd some of the campaign that came with it or that came out at the same time. It went down quite well but I don't think we finished it. Then I played the Warhammer MMORPG for a few months but only a year or two after it appeared. Mrs Bhagpuss and I did an awful lot of battlegrounds and I think we got into the thirties or maybe the forties before we quit. I know we never got as far as the cap.

Other than that, I have no experience with or affection for the IP. I do like a good turn-based RPG, though. 

I seem to remember this is a Point&Click adventure. And that's just about all I do remember. I was going to go through all of them without looking up any details and then grade myself at the end to see how well I did but clearly that's not going to work. 

Ok, so I checked and I was right. This is going surprisingly well. It's a "throw-back, retro-inspired, point and click adventure with chunky and beautiful pixel art" according to Steam, where it has a "Very Positive" rating, albeit from fewer than a hundred reviews. 

It also says "Inspired by games like Myst and Riven with a dash of the LucasArt adventures of the 90s, The Abandoned Planet is sure to scratch that old-school adventure game itch.", which very nearly put me off taking it even for free. I did not like Myst or Riven at all and I find almost all LucasArt adventures intensely annoying. I'm hoping those are just generic touchstones for "popular puzzle-based adventure games" and not actual templates the dev team followed. Looks pretty, anyway.

Pretty sure I know this one. It's another Point & Click adventure, set in the 1920s, in which a flapper finds herself partnering with Oscar Wilde's ghost to solve a mystery. Now, that's a solid elevator pitch.

More than that, though, I can't say without looking it up. So let's look it up. 

Ooh! It's more interesting even than that! 

"In 1921, young French artist Jennifer Chevalier becomes embroiled in death, espionage and revolution, assisted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde. A hand-drawn Point & Click adventure with a unique comic book inventory design. " 

Yep, there's "comic book inventory design".  Worth claiming just to find out what the heck that means. Comic books aren't famous for inventory management and I find it hard to see where the connection comes in so that'll be interesting. I note it doesn't say she's a flapper but just look at the cloche hat...

Now, this one is set in the French Revolution. Go on! Ask me how I knew! That makes it the second game in the set with a French setting. Other than that I got nothing. Let's ask Steam.

Well, stap me! I would have been a long time guessing this one. It's "a deck-builder roguelite inspired by the French Revolution and body horror." Was I drunk? I don't much like deck-builders, I have never knowingly played a "roguelite" and I have a total aversion to body horror. Why the heck did I pick it?

I can remember, as it happens, or rather it's coming back to me now. I thought it might be time I gave roguelikes a try, seeing as how I'm always reading about them but never have played one. 

Astute readers will have spotted that I said "roguelikes" not "roguelites". That's not a typo. I realise now that I misread it the first time. Not that it would have made much difference. I haven't played any roguelites either so the principle still applies. 

As for the body horror part, though, I missed that completely. Had I spotted it, I very likely would have passed and now I've seen it the chances of my ever playing Liberte have gone down by an order of magnitude.

And finally...

Nope. No idea. Don't have clue one. It could be just about anything from that generic name and picture. Going to have to look it up.

Ah! It's a dungeon crawler! Now I remember! Also it's famous, if ancient. "During the golden days of action RPGs, FATE was a powerhouse, winning runner-up for PC Magazine’s Role-Playing Game of the year. Popular enough to spawn 3 sequels, this was one of the premier dungeon crawlers of its time."

You'd think I'd have heard of it then. Maybe if they hadn't given it such a bland, unmemorable title...

Still, probably going to be quite good, of its kind. Not that I was a fan of action RPGs back in their heyday. I bought Dungeon Seige when it came out, thought it was pointless and boring and never bothered with the genre again. I think when I claimed this one, I was thinking of modern ARPGs, which I like a lot more.

"Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam though, from almost four thousand reviews, so somebody likes it.

That's my pick of what's available so far for June and not bad at all, I'd say. If you want to see the full line-up, it's on the Prime Gaming blog. 

Other than the above, it includes one of the Thief games (Again, bought the original when it came out, didn't like it, never played a stealth game since.) and one called "Dark Envoy" that's not available for another week or so that I might claim then. That's some kind of party-based RPG.

And finally, it seems I was mistaken when I slagged off the May collection. On closer inspection, some of the ones I picked in June were actually from last month. Maybe I just didn't even look at May's choices.

Someone ought to do a monthly blog post about this stuff so we'll all know what there is! 

Crystal Of Atlan: Further First Impressions

As you might surmise from the picture above, I have been making some progress in Crystal Of Atlan. I'm Level 27 now. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone. I didn't expect to be playing the game much at all after downloading it on a whim, especially since I'm currently not doing a lot of gaming. And anyway, if I was going to pick the pace back up, wouldn't there be a whole load of games more deserving of my time than this one? 

Well, yes, probably. For a start, Wuthering Waves is far more nuanced, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying and don't I keep going on about how good the story is there? That game is getting a huge content drop in a few days and I haven't even started the storyline from the last one yet.

So, why am I playing CoA instead of WW? I don't think there's a very straightforward answer to that. It's new, of course, which always helps. It's linear and straightforward, which could be a problem later on but which, at the start, makes the game very accessible and easy to follow. 

It's pretty to look at at and while the visual style says anime, the writing feels a lot like a good old Saturday morning cartoon series. The story skips along cheerily and the characters are broadly drawn but with plenty of personality. 

The witch of the mines. She's a baddie. Or is she?

Structurally, there's just enough choice to make it feel as though you have some agency but really it's a straight through-line you're happy to follow. Everything progresses through a series of "dungeons" that a helpful bot teleports you to on request. There's no traveling as such but you can wander around the fairly large and very attractive non-combat areas to get a sense that you're somewhere with substance.

I'm not entirely sure that there isn't some kind of open-world element to the game, anyway. I was wandering around the city the other day, when I bumped into a zone line that popped up a warning about the next area being some kind of combat-enabled area. It made it sound as if there was an open-world area beyond, where PvP might happen, but I was too chicken to go through and find out. 

I could google it but for the moment I'm in that honeymoon phase, where I want everything to surprise me, so I haven't. That's always a sign of a well-designed game and CoA is nothing if not well-designed.

The most significant reason I find myself wanting to log into this game at the moment, rather than any of the dozen or more others I could be playing, is the torrent of new systems and mechanics that just keep on coming. This is true of most games and accounts for a great deal of the excitement and enthusiasm I have for starting over in new ones all the time. 

Classic example; the game told me how to change my appearance and I did but then I still looked the same after. Now I have to figure out how it works, which is my idea of a good time.

It's absolutely an Explorer Archetype thing and if there was ever any doubt that that's my segment of the pie chart, this blog, with its never-ending drip-feed of First Impressions and game reports from the early and mid-levels of games I never go on to play at endgame, proves it. 

I'm sure the exact same aspects of this and many other games, the long introductions where you learn how the game works and what you have to do to survive and prosper in the world that's being revealed, are the very parts that drive so many new players to give up and log out, never to return. A lot of people just want to get on and play the damn game, not fiddle-faddle about with ninety-seven different ways to do stuff they don't care about and never will but for me it's like unwrapping a huge pile of presents under the tree.

And modern F2P titles really do go nuts with the things they give you to do. After a while it does indeed become too much and I'm noticing almost as many burnout stories cropping up in blog posts over there being just too damn many things to do in games these days as there used to be about how much of our lives had to be given over to getting to the point where we could do anything much at all.

The big difference I see between the two eras is that for the most part, the filler developers use to keep us busy these days is far more avoidable than it used to be. The open-world RPGs that are broadly replacing MMOs scarcely seem to respect our time any more than EverQuest or the rest ever did but they also seem a lot more amenable to casual play. You can spend a ton of time and money on them, sure, but you can entertain yourself very nicely in short bursts for free, too.

Building up your vinyl collection: A lot cheaper here than in real life.

How long that will persist in Crystal of Atlan I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons I'm so positive about Wuthering Waves is that so far it's proved not just possible but quite easy to keep up with the main storyline simply by... playing through the main storyline. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, generally acknowledged as the founder of and trend-setter for the genre, a game I liked but had to give up after a few weeks because the fights just got too hard, or even Noah's Heart, where I lasted a lot longer but eventually fell off the main story for the same reason, combat in storyline instances in Wuthering Waves has actually gotten easier as time's gone on. I don't know how long that can last, especially given that the whole business model presumably relies on players wanting to get the latest Resonators for some practical purpose, not just to fill out their collections, but I'm very much there for it so long as it does.

In Crystal of Atlan, though, I can already see the fights becoming more challenging and requiring more skill and I'm not even out of the introductory phase just yet. I wouldn't say I was still in the tutorial but the lessons are still coming even though the story is fully engaged. 

NuVerse make a big thing of how their game isn't a Gacha but of course it is. The swerve is that you don't roll for characters to do the fighting for you, so in that respect I do think it's quite likely the impact of increased difficulty will fall on players' skill instead of  their wallets. 

I know it looks like one but that's not a skill tree. It's the gear progression table and there's a screen like that for every slot on the paper-doll. I mean... why??

Unfortunately for me, I don't have much in the way of skill when it comes to action RPGs and perhaps worse I have a very low tolerance indeed for skill trees, builds and all that kind of nonsense. I never liked it much but the longer I've had to put up with it, the more I'm beginning to see it in much the same way other players see slow leveling or lengthy travel or long blocks of quest text or endless cut scenes: an annoying waste of my time that I should be able to click through or that the game should just take over and do for me.

It's more than just a lack of interest or enthusiasm on my part. I actively dislike having to read skill descriptions and I really, really hate having to try and figure out which one has synergy with which other one. I just want to hit stuff with a big stick or shoot it with a gun and leave it at that. 

So long as I can get away with button-mashing I'll put up with it but once I have to start thinkiong about sequences and putting combos together it all starts to become work. And if I'm going to do work, I either want to get paid for it or have something solid to show for it at the end. 

Beating a boss, just so I can go on to beat the next boss, doesn't motivate me in the same way painting the kitchen wall does. I really don't want to paint the kitchen wall either but at least when I've done it I have a better-looking kitchen and the comfortable knowledge that I won't have to do it again for a few years.

Never mix it with the maid.

Given the way Crystal of Atlan is constructed, I would imagine my time with it will be short for that reason alone. I'm guessing that when the time comes that I can't beat a boss in a storyline dungeon my ability to progress will be put on hold until I figure out how to do it, which I won't because I'll just stop and play something else instead.

Or maybe that won't happen. Maybe I'm negatively projecting. Maybe the devs have already thought about that. There was this odd thing the other day when I was playing...

I was right in the middle of a very hectic fight in a dungeon when Beryl came bouncing in, barking and jumping up at me and instead of carrying on with the fight I stopped and took her out to play. When I came back, my character had died (I literally abandoned her in the middle of a fight so it would have been very odd if she hadn't.).

It was the first time I'd died in the game so I wasn't sure what would happen but I figured at least I'd have to start the instance over from the last save point. Instead, I just ended up back at the questgiver, who congratulated me on a job well done, as though I'd finished the whole dungeon, and the story just carried on. I haven't deliberately gotten myself killed again to test it but wouldn't it be nice if the game just patted you on the head every time you died and gave you a pass to the next stage?

Spoiler: She's down but she's not going to stay down.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen. I think the way it's supposed to go is that you start engaging with all the many improvement and enhancement mechanics they've been introuducing you to over the first twenty-five levels and learn to git gud.

I've been shown how to upgrade my armor with spare parts I can get by dis-assembling my old stuff. I've been shown how to socket circuits to make it more powerful. I've been shown how to spend points in the many talent trees. I've been tested to see which Class specialization I'd like to take up and given a whole new skill tree for that. 

I've been introduced to the idea of hiring pets to help me. Pets who have their own stats and skill trees and the whole shebang. You can collect pets and you can have two up at once. And then there are the "cosmetic" clothes, the outfits and what-not. Those turn out to have stats, too. And you can collect those as well. At least they don't seem to have talent trees.

Hmm. "Fleets"? I seem to have missed that one...

It's early days and there's a lot I don't understand yet but it does appear to me that the whole "We don't do Gacha" thing falls apart quite fast when you spot that both pets and costumes, for both of which there most definitely is a gacha mechanic, directly affect your combat-worthiness. Not that I care, since I won't be paying for pulls, but it does seem a tad shifty.

Then again, maybe if you can actually play the game - if you have the knowledge and motivation to figure out a good build and the speed and dexterity to use it effectively - the added boost from pets and cosmetics is just icing on the I Know What I'm Doing cake.

I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I'm having plenty of fun all the same. We'll see how long that lasts.