Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween? Is that a thing? Do people say it?

Don't look at me. It's not really my holiday. I could ask Mrs Bhagpuss, who always says it's her favorite, although she never seems to do much for it. Mostly makes pumpkin soup and watches the Addams Family. More specifically, Wednesday Season 1 this year.

Speaking of the Addams Family...

I Enjoy Being A Girl 

Carol Burnett, Chita Rivera, Caterina Valente

I happened on that completely randomly a few days ago. I wasn't looking for Halloween songs or videos for a post or anything but I thought "OK, I can take a hint."

It's from the CBS Variety show The Entertainers, hosted by Burnett and Valente and also starring Bob Newhart. This skit was first broadcast in 1965, which makes it exactly sixty years old. Like everythng from that era it goes on a bit too long but it's still great. Boris Karloff turns up half way through, too, which is a bonus.  

The Addams Family TV show was mid-run then, having started in 1964 and lasting only until '66. It was a big deal, I guess. Carol Burnett is a legend and I'd heard of Broadway star Chita Rivera but Caterina Valente didn't ring any bells. It would have if I was on TikTok.  (That link goes to YouTube, by the way, so don't freak.)

At this point I imagine everyone's hoping I have lots more gems like the above to share. Well, I don't. Do you know how hard it is to search for unusual Halloween songs on YouTube? If not, be glad.

I tried to get some help from AI, this being exactly one of those research-assistant type jobs the megacorps keep trying to upsell their performing seals as being perfect for. Long-time readers may remember I've made several previous attempts to get ChatGPT or Gemini to do the leg-work for me when I'm putting posts like this together.

It didn't work then and it still doesn't work now. Gemini did at least explain why it doesn't work, which is because "The built-in YouTube search tool explicitly states that it "cannot filter by popularity" (which includes sorting by number of views)." Did you know that? I didn't. Don't say AI never teaches you anything.

On that basis, I wouldn't do any better acting as my own researcher, either. I was reduced to caveman level, where I just plug in keywords and hope for the best. My best was not best enough, I'm afraid. If Calishat reads this, maybe she'd like to build a low-view-count search tool for YouTube...

A deal of effort did not get me much but it did introduce me to the Hawkbirds.  

Pet Semetary - The Hawkbirds

The Hawkbirds are one of those family bands - mum and dad on guitar and drums and daughter on bass and lead vocals. I didn't even realize that's what it was until after I'd watched the video. Thanks mostly to the costumes, I thought they were all the same age, i.e. a regular teens/twenties indie band. It was only when I had a look through what else they'd done that I figured out the set-up.

They specialize in covers of punk-adjacent bands, specifically the Ramones, although they occasionally switch lanes. There are covers on their YouTube channel of songs as diverse as the Crystals' He's A Rebel and Radiohead's Creep. There are a few originals mixed in, too.

They've covered several Halloween-appropriate songs and they take the trouble to dress up so I'll throw in another. They even wish us all Happy Halloween at the start of this one. See? I knew it was a thing!

Horror Business - The Hawkbirds

Just in case that felt altogether to wholesome for Halloween, try a little of this...

 

I Go Where The Party Takes Me

The Phantom A.D.

Can you believe that comes in under two minutes? Feels a lot longer, doesn't it? He looks like he's dressed as Handsome Dick Manitoba for Halloween, which would certainly be a costume you could guarantee no-one else at the party would be wearing.

And finally, because Halloween isn't all about having fun, here's something a lot spookier.

 A Ghost - The Mall Goth Moths

Obviously I initially picked that one for the name of the band but it's a good tune and the video is... actually, genuinely disturbing and not necessarily in a good way. It would be a tough note to end on for a holiday post, too, so let's have something a bit lighter to send us out into the night dancing.

Pumpkin - The Regrettes

That's better!

Happy Halloween! 

Nobody Wants This More

I'm back to watching an hour or two of TV every night, right before I go to sleep. Partly that's because we're coming into the peak season for returning shows, when the days get dark before it's even nighttime and all the stations and platforms start to make a grab for attention by bringing back all those shows they think people liked last year. 

And it works! I can't say I've been losing sleep waiting for the next season of Hazbin Hotel but I was unironically delighted when I logged into Prime Video last night and saw the familiar logo splashed across the top of the screen, somewhat predictably just in time for Halloween.

It'll be a while until you see my review of that one here. Amazon has chosen to employ some faux-retro scheduling, dropping a pair of episodes every Wednesday for a month. Expect a review in December.

The returning show I'll be reviewing today, whose second season I've just finished watching, is Nobody Wants This, the Kristen Bell/Adam Brody romcom. It's on Netflix, who decided to let us have the whole thing at once in the equally old-school style of a DVD box set. I didn't binge but I did end up watching more than my regularly-scheduled one episode per evening, which may offer a clue as to how much I enjoyed it.

The other reason I'm back to watching TV at all, let alone having the time for two episodes of the same show some evenings, is that I've stopped making songs with Suno. For the last six months, I've spent two or more hours, pretty much every night, working on original material. It's been verging on an addiction.

The reason I stopped has nothing to do with losing interest or even feeling I ought to take a break. I just ran out of source material. In half a year I've completed "definitive" versions of well over a hundred original songs, for which I had to generate thousands of works-in-progress (All of which still exist because you literally cannot permanently delete anything you make on Suno.)

The first batch were all actual songs from decades ago that I pulled off of decaying cassette tapes but the great majority (And by far the better results.) are scores of new songs I created by cutting up prose I wrote in the nineties. About a week ago, I finally hit the point where I couldn't find any more sections or paragraphs that felt like they could be converted into lyrics. So I stopped.

I didn't plan on stopping. I was going to start going through the older, less-successful songs and work on better versions. I've found I have by far the best success with Suno v4.5Pro, which didn't come into existence until May and which wasn't as solid when it was introduced as it is now. (Don't talk to me about the downgrade that is  v5.0...)  

That hasn't happened. Not yet, anyway. I did spend some time playing around in Suno, getting Gemini to give me prompts for certain artists or bands, then having the AI do covers of my songs in those styles, but that was more of a party game than any kind of serious project. For the moment, I think I'm done with making new songs with AI. The next thing is to figure out what to do with the half-dozen albums-worth of material I already have. 

I was going to say that I've unsubscribed from the app but when I went to do it a few minutes ago, I got one of those "Please don't leave - we'll  give you a really good deal" offers and it was so good I took it. Suno is already ridiculously cheap at $10 a month but at half-price it seems daft not to keep the sub going for another month. Also, I'm curious to see how many times they'll try to bribe me to stay.

That's a long pre-amble to the substantive purpose of the post, which is for me to tell you what I thought of Nobody Wants This, Season 2. It's possible I might be playing for time. I'm not entirely sure what I did think about it...

I liked it. I enjoyed it. I'd watch a third season if there is one. It hasn't been confirmed but apparently the stars are up for it and "the writers' room is working" on one so the omens are good. I'm just not sure if I buy the premise that the central characters are made for each other...

Starting at the end, since that seems to be where I've gone, the season doesn't really finish with one of those annoying cliff-hangers, nor even with an obvious bunch of loose ends left blowing in the breeze, all begging to be neatly tied up next time around. There are plenty of unfinished storylines, for sure, but they all have more of a slice-of-life feel to them, the inevitable unraveling of lived lives we just happen to be seeing play themselves out, rather than anything that demands urgent resolution.

Time for the spoiler warning, I guess...

That final episode! Hah! I loved it! Also, it made me want to watch When Harry Met Sally again, which is never a bad thing.

Everyone breaks up. Well, the three central couples. Then one pair gets immediately back together, one goes "on a break" (We all know what that means...) and the third is fucking cooked - thank God! All so very satisfying. If you're going to invoke the spirit of Nora Ephron in your title you better have a goddam plan and they did.

So the wrap-up left me feeling like I'd gotten closure. Always what you want, coming out of a season. But how was the build up?

Hmm. Confusing, I'd say. I mean, come on, I love Kristen Bell. We all love Kristen Bell. But do we love Joanne? I'm not sure we do.

She's kind of annoying, isn't she? And a lot more so in Season 2 than last time. In the first season it seemed like sister Morgan was the self-centered, solipsistic one but this time around she came across as considerably more vulnerable and capable of self-analysis. Also sadder. 

Okay, the pair of them are terrifyingly judgmental and prone to acts of petty vindictiveness not usually seen outside of high school but at least Morgan seems to be learning something, occasionally. Joanne is mostly just doubling down.

And then there's Esther, the sister-in-law, who acted like such a terrifying hard-assed bitch in Season 1.  She's much warmer, more nuanced and yes, again, vulnerable. A lot of character growth there, too. Possibly more at times than seems entirely likely but then much of what was there before was obviously an act. Obvious now, that is.

Even Rebecca, the fiancee who gets dumped at the start of the first season and who just gets a couple of cameos here, even she seems to have grown. Joanne, though? She might have shrunk.

All of which is in the writing and the playing. It's a great performance as always by Kristen Bell but it isn't very endearing. There were multiple episodes where I didn't like Joanne all that much. Of course, she was frequently at her funniest when being at her least likeable and this is a sitcom so it's a valid trade-off. Plus "endearing" isn't really Kristen Bell's thing, is it, now I come to think about it. 

In the end, though, for a romantic comedy to work, the audience has to want the prospective couple to get it together and there were plenty of times I was rooting for them to realize they were dead wrong for each other and call it quits. 

Which, I think, might even be the idea. You're supposed to feel that until the very end, when they turn it around. And they do. It is, nonetheless, a lot of Shawshank before the redemption, as the saying goes. Also, it might feel a lot different on a re-watch. And no-one just watches these things once, do they?

So that's Joanne. How about Noah?  Geez, but he's infuriatingly un-ininfuriating! I feel like I ought to be able to say I wanted to punch him in the face but it would be like punching one of those inflatable bosses they supposedly have in the basements of office buildings in Japan. He'd just roll around a bit and come back up for you to punch him again and it wouldn't get either of you anywhere.

He's so fricken' unbelievably nice without really being very nice at all. He has so many barely-concealed anger issues with which he is not dealing at all but he has a seemingly-bottomless well of niceness he can smear all over any emotion he feels to tamp it down so he can pretend it isn't there. And it works! For him it works, anyway. Not so much for anyone around him or indeed anyone who has to watch him doing it.

The other thing about Noah is that he's hardly ever funny. He's mostly a straight man for others but he does occasionally do a kind of pained fish-out-of water thing, like when he's running about between the Strongly Agree/ Strongly Disagree markers with the teens at his new job and getting it wrong every time, something that passes for humor only until you think about it. 

Also, is he really that good-looking? I have issues with the scraggly facial hair but I guess I'm not the target demographic.

He does a job, anyway. It's fine. And he is good when it matters, in the non-funny bits. He convinces me every time he cracks and tells Joanne how he really feels about her. If Adam Brody couldn't sell that, the show would be in real trouble. But he can.

The really funny characters, though, are... all the others. Another generic problem with romcoms, of course. The couple at the center can't always be making it with the one-liners and the funny faces and the pratfalls. They have to gaze meaningfully into each others' eyes once in a while.

The show is full of hilarious couples that aren't Joanne and Noah:  Esther and Sasha, Sasha and Morgan, Morgan and Dr. Andy, even Joanne and Morgan's parents ffs. Every time any of those pairs gets going it's like someone switched the "Sitcom Filming" light on. 

I would personally love a spin-off starring Justin Lupe and Timothy Simons as Morgan and Sasha. They have a ridiculous chemistry that just burns off the screen. Not specifically a romantic one, either, although if the script took things that way it would be entirely convincing. It's the way they communicate so comfortably, intuitively and naturally that makes me want more of them together.

The whole dynamic between Sasha, Morgan and Esther in Season 2 is so unexpectedly lovely it almost overwhelmed the main plot for me. It's rare, even now, to see this kind of male/female friendship between characters, who could viably have a romantic relationship but have something different and deeper instead; to see it alongside recognition and acknowledgment of its value and purpose from a partner, who could very plausibly be expected to be threatened and concerned by it, is astonishing.

It is a clever show, though, which shouldn't come as any kind of surprise. The one thing that ties all Kirsten Bell's projects together is their intellectual rigor. They all make you think. Hard.

At which point I ought, I suppose, to say something about the central conceit, which is that he's Jewish and she's not. Only I'm not going to, other than to say I found it confusing and distracting in the second season in a way it wasn't (So much.) in the first. I feel as though it's adding something to the show that makes it harder to analyze and understand than a romcom normally would be and harder still to talk about. 

Did I learn anything from it? Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not. Except the bit about how you can apparently just decide to be Jewish. That was new. And some people make a big deal about gender!

What I would say is that regardless of whether Noah is a rabbi or a vicar or a policeman or the Wichita lineman, anyone who openly states that marrying them would be, first and foremost, marrying a job does not make for a very convincing romantic lead, even without all the angst over changing religion. There's a lot of talk about "red flags" in Dr. Andy's behavior that could easily apply here, too.

"Nobody Wants This" is a very interesting title. It's the name of the sisters' podcast but it also refers to the central relationship, in which it's never clear who actually does want it. The text is that even if the pair at the center do (And at any time one or both of them might not.) any number of outside forces certainly don't. The subtext is that all those outside forces might be right. Maybe the universe doesn't want it either.

I do, though. The show, that is. There were plenty of moments where what one or other character was doing annoyed me more than amused me but that's the grit that builds the pearl. I'm still not remotely convinced that Joanne and Noah ought to be together. As things are now, I do kind of hope that the series finale, when it eventually comes, sees them go their own separate ways. I think the prospects of them having a long and happy marriage are vanishingly small. 

Until then, though, I'm more than happy to watch them struggling with the same doubts for another ten episodes, this time next year. And for a few years after that, if Netflix so allows.

New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company at all. It never was. 

Tails Noir: Preludes - Completed

Truly, really, super-short post today and I mean it (Maaaan!) Lots of annoying things kept getting in the way of sitting down to write so it's too late to do anything much. Still, I don't want to skip a day and luckily I have one very quick and easy option backed up, ready to go, which is that

I finished another game!

Yes! I know!  What the hell is happening?

I think I mentioned in a post a couple of days back that, having knocked off Crowns and Pawns, I might go back to another game I'd left off half-way through and try to finish that next. The game in question was Tails Noir: Preludes, a prequel to the excellent Tails Noir.

I finished the original and I could have sworn I wrote about it but there's no Label for it. Except, yes there is. Only when I played it, it was called Backbone and the prequel was called Tails: The Backbone Preludes. Both games have apparently been renamed since. (In fact, the url for the prequel on Steam still refer to the original title, although the one for the first game doesn't.)

Anyway, Backbone or Tails Noir or whatever it's calling itself today is excellent and I highly recommend it. And now I can confirm that the prequel is also very good indeed and I recommend it too.

Except I wouldn't fully recommend it to someone who hadn't played the first game. I wouldn't not recommend it - it's a complete game in its own right and I think it can be enjoyed for what it is - but it really exists mostly to explain and elaborate on the motivations, actions and backstories of characters in the earlier game. (There's also a Prologue, basically the first chapter of the main game, which is free on Steam and acts as a kind of demo.)

I don't consider much of what comes next to be a spoiler but I'll leave that thought out there just in case...

The main reason I would be a little wary of recommending TN:P as a standalone experience is that it doesn't really have an ending. Well, it has lots of endings since it's one of those games you can replay many times, making different choices to see what happens, but given that the future for all the characters is set in stone by way of the original game, all you're ever going to get with the prequel are beginnings.

Or, more likely, possibilities. It's as though you're seeing alternate timelines in the past, all  of which are going to lead inexorably to the same future. 

None of which diminishes the immediate impact of the stories you hear, all of which are very "noir" indeed. The game is not a laff riot. 

I won't go over the milieu, characters, mechanics or aesthetics again. The prequel is extremely similar, not to say identical, in all those respects to the first game and if you want to know what I thought about all of that you can read it here. The prequel has more of the sense of a series of inked vignettes than the enmeshed but ultimately coherent storylines of the older game but other than that it's very much business as usual.

Both games are fairly short in absolute terms and also exactly the same length. And I mean exactly. They each took me 4.9 hours to complete. 

That's just for a single playthrough. Many people will multiply that run time by at least as many times as there are characters, looking to find out what happens if they make different decisions along the way. 

I hardly ever play any "choices matter" games more than once, which is why I prefer "choices don't matter" games. Tails Noir: Preludes is very likely to be an exception. The moment I finished I immediately wanted to go back and replay two specific sections to handle things differently, which is very much not a reaction I usually have and a big plus point in the game's favor.

Anyway, for once I'm not going to go on at inordinate length about it. I really don't have a lot of time to post today. For once I really am going to keep it as short as I said I would. 

Having wrapped up two games I left off playing part-way through more than a year ago, I feel like I'm on a bit of a roll. I can think of another I left in a very similar position and a couple more that I started and then gave up on quite quickly. Instead of buying anything new just now, something I keep thinking about doing, I might see if I can't clear up one or two more unfinished titles first.

If so, next up is Lake. That's on Prime Gaming so I can't say exactly how many hours in I am but How Long To Beat has it at only six hours for a non-completionist run and I surely must be quite close to that already. 

Maybe I can finish it before the weekend...

It's All In The DNA - Duet Night Abyss, That Is...

I read an article at MMOBomb yesterday, speculating about the potential impact on the industry of a change to the monetization model of an upcoming action RPG. I found it interesting in a number of ways, not least that the game in question, Duet Night Abyss, was about to launch on Steam in just a couple of days and I'd never heard of it.

I suppose, on the face of it, there's no reason why I should have. There are a lot of new action RPGs or open world RPGs coming out all the time in this post-Genshin Impact world. It's like a virtual gold rush sometimes.

Usually, though, something filters through about them long before they're due to release. In some cases, like Neverness To Everness, for which it feels like I've been waiting at least as long as I expect to wait for a new MMORPG, although it's really been barely half as long, the problem isn't so much failing to hear about them as it is having to wait so long that all my enthusiasm and excitement has long since drained away by the time I get to play them.

Not that it matters. Anime-inflected acion RPGs and MMOs, most of them cross-platform or ported from mobile, come so thick and fast these days there's no longer the remotest chance of keeping up with all of them in any meaningful fashion. If you were to take the idea of playing them seriously, you might possibly have time for a couple, three at the outside, but even if you plan on merely dabbling, you'll still struggle to paddle along in the shallows of more than a small selection.

In theory, I'm currently playing three and that's at least one too many. In practice, I'm not playing any. As I'm frequently to be found whining, Wuthering Waves is just too good to waste anything less than my full attention on, which means I don't play it at all. Crystal of Atlan and Blue Protocol: Star Resonance are a lot easier to take lightly but they still each require more commitment than I'm willing to give them, at least if I'm going to see much more than the first couple of chapters of their storylines.

And they keep coming. And I keep wanting to see them all. Mostly it's out of comfortable curiosity. I do love a new thing that's almost the same as an old thing. Then there's the blogging opportunities every new game offers. Those First Impressions posts all but write themselves.

 

The problem is, every new game pushes the rest out of the way. It's how it's always been, only the timescale used to be measured in months or even years, not weeks, much less days. I look back on Keen, complaining bitterly about the mayfly attention span of the three-month cycle and his concern seems quaint. 

Three months! When did I last play a new game, exclusively, for a whole three months?! When did you?

Anyway, that's all a little off topic. The point I was making was that Duet Night Abyss had managed to creep up behind me unseen, somehow, and now it was about to sprint off into the distance before I'd even taken a quick look at it. So I took one.

Well, I tried to. The website for some reason does not want to display properly on my makeshift PC. I can see the static images and read the text (The lore is extraordinarily dense.) but any video just doesn't run. Or rather the images don't. The sound plays, which is really weird.  

The launch trailer worked perfectly on YouTube, though, so I watched it there. I think it was the same one I would have been watching on the website if it had played properly because it has a very distinctive and unlikely jazz soundtrack. 

And I mean jazz. Actual jazz. Not jazz-rock or jazzed-up pop. There's this thing I keep reading about how GenZ love jazz. I guess it might even be true if this is what they think is going to sell a mobile port nowadays.

The music I liked. The rest of the video didn't do much for me. It's all fights. Here, take a look for yourself and see what you make of it.

That's the 1.0 launch trailer. There are several more promos on YouTube, going back to the first reveal two years ago. I skimmed them all and none of them look very interesting. I'm used to seeing a lot of world-building and non-combat gameplay in promotional material for these kinds of games. That's always what gets my attention. I'm not seeing much of any of that here.

Which, honestly, is a good thing. It means I don't feel tempted to download DNA (Nice acronym for the Marketing Dept. there.) . It is on Steam, which would make it very easy to give it a try when the servers open tomorrow but I'm not planning on it. (I still might anyway, of course.)

So, if I'd never heard of it and I don't intend to play it, why am I even mentioning it? Mostly because of the other interesting thing about that MMOBomb piece, which is that apparently, until a few weeks ago, DNA was going to be a gacha game. Now it's not.

The developers, Hero Games, changed course late in development, following feedback from two closed betas. They decided to make all characters and weapons free, where previously they had used a gacha system for both. They also removed a stamina system designed to throttle progress.

MMOBomb describe the changes as shifting to something more like the model used by Warframe. I think this is supposed to be seen as a positive move because Warframe has long been held up as an exemplar of how to do F2P properly for a Western audience. 

It doesn't quite have that effect on me because, while I did briefly play Warframe and didn't exactly hate it, I didn't much like it either. That, it should be said, had a lot more to do with how it looked than how it played. I certainly never got far enough in the game for the payment model to become an issue , one way or the other.

In trying to explain why the change to a single new game might have repercussions for an entire genre, the article went on to attempt to codify three types of gacha-game players:

1. Min-maxers, looking to build the perfect team and willing to spend as much as it takes.
2. Gamblers, getting a thrill out of the gacha rolls for their own sake
3. Audience members, wanting to follow the plot and enjoy their favorite characters.

I'm guessing the argument would be that Type 1 will spend a lot of money under any system and there are a lot more of Type 3 than Type 2, so catering to Type 3 should compensate for losing the gambling dollars. Or something. I wasn't paying that close attention.

Obviously, there are more types of player than that but I think those three do probably cover a lot of ground. I don't feel like I fall neatly into any of them, although clearly the last one comes closest to the way I approach most games these days. 

Even so, I feel there ought to be a fourth group:

4. Freeloaders and tourists, happy to take whatever's going for free but never becoming sufficiently invested to spend any money at all and always being half-ready to move on to another game.

Those would be my people and I suspect we might be in the majority. Other than boosting the figures to make the game look like it's popular and successful (All those "5m pre-registrations!" press releases...) I'm not sure what companies get out of us but there's not much they can do to stop us tagging along even supposing they wanted to try. 

As far as I can remember, I've never paid a penny to any game to which I wasn't also subscribed. Mostly that's because I'm not willing to give them my payment details but it's also because they rarely have much to sell me that I want and nothing at all that I need.  

Free to Play, to me, means exactly that. In gacha games, it also means I don't have much chance of building a specific team. I have to work with whatever characters or weapons I happen to get from whatever free pulls the developers see fit to give me. 

I'm guessing that to anyone in any of the first three categories, that's going to sound like a problem. Maybe a big enough problem to make the games not worth playing. I mean, in some ways it's the main point of the game. 

To me, it's a bonus. The thing is, I don't like building teams. At best I find it a tedious necessity, sitting somewhere below sorting my inventory. (Quite a long way below it, actually. I like sorting inventory or at least I used to. I am kind of over it now though. Guild Wars 2 pretty much killed inventory management for me.) At worst, building teams is something I dislike doing enough to avoid it, even if that's to my own detriment.

Sometimes i can get into it but on balance I would probably prefer the game do it for me. In some games I'd be happy with pressing a single button to have some algorithm check all the characters and gear I have available and put together the best available combination. And then a second press to go apply all the available upgrades, too.

I know. It's dangerously close to asking the game to play itself. Throw in auto-pathing, auto-questing and auto-battling, all of which I'm broadly in favor of, and the very valid question even I'd ask myself is "Why are you even bothering to "play" this game at all?" 

It's a question that would be harder to answer if I hadn't just started playing another game, one with an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam from almost five thousand reviews and a Metacritic rating of 87, in which I'm doing even less than that. I played it for almost forty minutes yesterday and I did literally nothing other than press LMB to keep the dialog flowing. 

The game is Steins;Gate. It's a visual novel so this is apples and oranges but then again, given the extreme quantity of narrative content in some mobile ports I've been playing of late, maybe not.  

After my first session of S;G ended, I googled to see if anything you might call "gameplay" ever came into it. It does not. It's clicking LMB all the way down.

So, clearly, you can have games where the player doesn't really play. And now you can have gacha games where there's no gacha. In the reverse of Wilhelm's Dictum, which is that there's no feature so bad that someone won't claim it's their favorite part of the game if you take it away from them, there's probably nothing in any game you couldn't strip out without make the game feel like it just got more fun for someone.One person's tedium is another person's thrill. One player's motivation is another player's frustration. Et cetera.

If I'm going to be completely honest, I think the Steins;Gate approach leans quite a bit too far towards dis-involvement for my comfort. The reason I googled to see if it ever changed wasn't wholly unconnected with boredom. Now I know that it's going to stay that way, I might just forget about the game and watch the reportedly excellent anime instead. That way I at least won't end up with a sore mouse finger.

I guess I don't want to see my action RPGs and MMOs ending up like visual novels but I wouldn't be sad to see all that obsession with team builds and upgrades shunted off to AI. The good AI, that is. The old kind.

As for the gacha pulls, I'd miss my free ones. I do love me a bit of RNG. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to play the characters I want rather the ones I get. I may not be much for building the teams but I do like to collect the people.

On that basis, I think I'd give a qualified nod of approval to the possibility that  Duet Night Abyss might be the harbinger of change for the format. It's not going to happen, though, I feel fairly confident in saying. It'll need a bigger, better game than this to shift the needle.

Or so I reckon, knowing nothing more than I saw in those trailers. Maybe I will download it and try it tomorrow, after all, just to see if there's anything in it... 

Turning Back Time And Facing The Future All At Once

Just a very short post to say my old PC finally died. And I'm posting this from my even older PC. 

I forget exactly how old the newer old one was. I found the invoice for it just a few months ago but I still can't recall the exact date, except that I remember thinking it was even longer ago than I expected. I want to say I bought in 2016, which would make it getting on for ten years old but it might be a couple of years either side of that.

It was old, anyway. It's certainly been the longest-lasting PC I've ever owned. I bought it from Overclockers, who build a finished machine from a base model according to your selections. The older machine I'm using now was also from them. They're excellent and I highly recommend them although they're now so focused on the high-end they're no longer much use to me.

At the time, I ordered two identical machines, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss. Hers died last month so it's like they were one of those couples, married a lifetime and as soon as one goes, the other follows on in a moment.

They both went the same way, too. I have no idea what killed them. If I did, I might have been able to fix it. A lot of PCs we've had have "died" and then come back to life after I gave them some kind of Frankensteinian jump-start. I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to google and watch YouTube. Plus I know how to do comparative testing. Together, that'll fix a lot of things.

But not if the machine won't turn on at all. That's what happened to both of them. The first time, when Mrs. Bhagpuss's machine stopped, I did the first, most obvious thing and tried a different power lead. There was a bang and a flash and a small puff of smoke came out the back. I took that as a hint and gave up.

Given the age of the machine and the fact that Mrs Bhagpuss, having come out the far side of her twenty-five year-long gaming phase, is extremely unlikely to need a PC capable of playing anything more demanding than Candy Crush, I didn't bother pursuing it any further. 

Replacing it seemed like a much better option, especially since neither machine was capable of running Windows 11. We had both of them authorized to receive security updates to Windows 10 for another year but we'd already decided we'd need to buy replacements next year so it was just a question of bringing the date forward.

It was very easy to find something suitable for Mrs Bhagpuss. We got one of those clever, new mini-computers, small enough to stick in your pocket. Literally. The main downside is that you can't really add or upgrade anything inside but in the ten or whatever it was years she'd had her last computer, we'd never had recourse to install a single new or alternate component so it didn't seem like it would be an issue. 

She was using a very old monitor because her "new" one, itself pretty long in the tooth, died a year or two back (Anyone sensing a theme developing here?) so we got a new one of those as well, plus a couple of odds and ends and the whole lot came to less than £300. The PC straps to the back of the monitor so you can't even see it and the whole thing has worked perfectly so far. We're aware that these devices have a history of working until they don't, at which point there's not a lot you can do about it, but I figure if we get a couple of years out of this one we'll be ahead and it's under warranty for that long.

In the few days before it arrived, I had Mrs Bhagpuss set up, temporarily, on one of the old-old PCs I keep lying about. (Er... that are always to be found somewhere about the house, that is, not that I consistently misrepresent. English is hard.) That meant when mine died too, I was all ready to go with a short-term alternative.

First, though, I did try to see if I could resuscitate the better one. Since the last time I tried it sparks had shot out of the PSU, I figured rather than a new power cable I'd change out the supply itself.  I swapped in a spare one (Actually a better one. I don't know why it was in the oldest machine.) and... nothing happened. With some trepidation after the previous experience, I tried another power lead. Again, nothing.

A machine that appears to be incapable of powering up at all seems to me to be moving dangerously close to the territory of the electrician rather than the half-assed computer hobbyist. I don't mess with electrics.

Or maybe it was the power switch itself. Or one of the internal cables. Really, it's beyond my ability even to guess, let alone to fix.

And as said, I was going to have to replace it sooner rather than later anyway so my motivation to start learning new, difficult things was very low. Plus, I have a working laptop, so it's not like I was going to be offline.

Still, I prefer to sit at a desk to write these posts and I would like to keep playing the few games I still play these days. So I swapped everything that mattered out of the old machine into the even older one, which was three disk drives including the SSD with the OS on it and the graphics card. I'd have swapped the RAM and the CPU too only the Motherboard wouldn't take either.

To my surprise, everything just worked. Immediately. I've been using it for a day and a half now and for everyday use, there's no discernible difference. Well, okay, it's very slightly slower and it boots up a little oddly but other than that things are pretty much back to how they were.

For web browsing and media and blogging, that is. But what about gaming? Well, it is the same machine I used to play EverQuest II on back in the day so I was optimistic that, at least, would work, especially with the RTX 4060 to do some of the heavy lifting. 

And EQII does work. At least, I can log in and do my Overseer missions, which is about all I was doing anyway. Zoning takes a while and I haven't tried fighting anything yet but I'm fairly sure it would be fine. [Edit: After I published this, I played a little more EQII and ended up in a raid, doing the new, pre-expansion Public Quest in Enchanted Lands. No problems at all. Smooth as butter.]

I can't imagine this set-up will run Wuthering Waves or Blue Protocol or any of the new games I like, though. I mean, the CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 from 2009 and I'm back down to 8GB Ram. I guess I could try it and see...

Well, as the screenshots in the post prove, all of which I took after I wrote that last paragraph, it is possible. But only just. With Wuthering Waves, it took forever to log in and the only viable graphic setting was Ultra Performance. Everything above was a slideshow.

With that, though, I could move around and even fight although I wouldn't say it was fun. The game does still look great even on the lowest settings, though.

But then, I haven't actually been playing WW much lately, have I? Or at all. I should have. I wanted to. But I haven't. So I'm not missing much there that I wasn't missing anyway. 

I was playing BP:SR though. So how does that run?

Okay, actually. Pretty solid, in fact. And on "High" graphics too. Eminently playable. 

And as for all those Steam demos and point and click adventures, I haven't done any testing I'm pretty sure they'd run just fine. Most of them would run on the integrated graphics of my laptop.

So I guess I don't need to make any snap decisions. I can carry on like this for a while. Which is just as well because it's beginning to occur to me that although I play a lot of games and write about a lot more, I don't really have the same needs as a typical "gamer", not when it comes to the quality of equipment I play them on. 

All the reddit threads and reviews I read seem to assume I'm going to want to play the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 on the best settings at the highest resolutions or be ready for GTA6 when it comes out whereas I'm far more likely to be playing the latest mobile port on recommended settings at 1080p. Buying a proper gaming PC for what I'd use it for would be akin to buying a Ferrari to pootle along to the supermarket for the weekly shop. 

For the last three or four changes of PC, I've generally tried to come in somewhere around the low end of mid-range, which has always been plenty, but given that I've been doing very well with a machine that was that a decade ago - and now I'm getting by on one from five years before that - it's a pretty safe bet that even an entry-level gaming PC would put me at least back where I was and most likely a little bit ahead. (I did look at the possibility of building a PC from scratch and I'm sure I could do it but I just don't want the fuss.)

If I also swap in some of the bits and pieces I already have then that machine is going to be significantly above entry level and well above what I've been using for the last many years. I really can't see why I need anything pokier. I just have to make sure I get something with a motherboard that will take the GPU and extra RAM I already have and also, if possible, be good for another round of upgrades in a few years.

My plan, which may not survive contact with my patience, is to wait until Black Friday to see if any suitable bargains turn up. It would be very annoying to buy something now and then see it going for fifty or a hundred pounds less a few weeks later. For the time being, though, I shall muddle along as best I can. We'll have to see how it goes.

Also, that really wasn't "just a very short post", was it? Or a post at all, come to that. More like me talking out loud to myself. Thank you for listening!

Crowns And Pawns: Completed

Here's a rare event. I finished a game! Yes, I know. Doesn't happen very often, does it? And even more unicornly, it's a game I wishlisted after playing the demo in a Next Fest. And then I bought it. And now I've played it. Seriously. What are the chances?

The game is  

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit   

Inevitably, it's a point and click adventure, very much in the classic style. The demo reminded me strongly of the Broken Sword series, which I consider to be the gold standard for the genre. I'm always on the lookout for games that follow closely in that tradition, which is why I wishlisted it. 

The weird thing, though, is that when I reviewed the demo back in February of '22, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. In my summing-up, I described it as "...quite bland... adventure gaming by numbers" and concluded "... if it turned up for free on Amazon Games or Epic or somewhere like that... I'd probably play it.... I'm not sure I'd pay money for it, though."

But I did. I payed £8.49 for it on Christmas Day 2023. I can't remember buying it but given the purchase date I suspect I got a Steam Gift Card or similar for Christmas that year. Don't remember that either. In the same purchase I also bought Tails Noir: Preludes, which I've started but haven't finished. Maybe I'll get back to that one next.

Crowns and Pawns took me just under eight hours to complete, which works out at about a pound an hour. Looked at objectively, it's not great value. It's cheap enough, sure, but I've played Star Resonance: Blue Protocol for almost exactly as long and it hasn't cost me anything. 

I pick on that one specifically because I was playing it in between sessions of Crowns and Pawns and enjoying it just as much but I could name-check any F2P title, really. Is it any wonder smaller studios struggle to get attention for games when they have to charge money for them and there's so much of equal or higher quality available for free?

But... there are no major Free to Play publishers pumping out endless, throwaway point and click adventures. Not that I know of, anyway, although if there are any, I'd love to hear about them. For the dedicated teams hammering away at all those intractable puzzles and coming up with endless streams of witty one-liners, I guess the main problem would be all those giveaways from Amazon Prime Gaming. Prime seems determined to hoover up every P&C game ever made and hand it out for free to bulk out the ever-decreasing value of their offer.

 

Except, like having a show that goes into syndication back in the golden age of network television, having your five or ten year-old adventure game picked up by Prime or Epic might be the payday the developers were always hoping for. How much do they get, I wonder?

It seems the actual numbers are safely tucked away behind NDAs but this reddit thread, which includes a couple of replies supposedly from developers who've taken the shilling, suggests it's a flat fee upfront with some sort of payment for new accounts registered (In the case of Epic.). Whatever it is, for most of the aging adventure games I claim, it has to be a bonus. None of them are going to be generating much in the way of new sales by now.

So, was Crowns and Pawns any good? Yes, it was, thank-you for asking. 

I didn't like the opening, which had nothing much to do with the rest of the game. I can see why they didn't use it for the demo. If they had, I'd never have wishlisted it, let alone bought it. I disliked it so much, I stopped playing after I finished it and didn't pick the game up again for more than a year.

I suppose out of politeness I should insert a spoiler warning here. Like anyone cares...

The game begins with that peculiar "Prologue" set in Chicago, in which Milda, the protagonist, and her friend and roomate Dana, meet some annoying jerk about some job Dana is trying to get. There's a whole lot of infuriating business where you have to stop a busker from playing, get some guy a drink, print out fliers and pack your bags, none of which I found remotely amusing or entertaining and all of which seemed to take fucking forever.

Having played the whole thing now, I can see it's supposed to be giving you some backstory to Milda and Dana's relationship, setting her friend up to be a useful contact later in the game, but why it all needs to be presented in such a tedious fashion beats me. It feels like a different game altogether and a much less enjoyable one.

Once you get past that, though, the remaining 90% of the game is pure adventure. Milda arrives at her dead grandfather's cottage in Lithuania (Big spoiler - he's not really dead!), all of which you can read about in that demo review I linked earlier because the demo is pretty much that whole chapter.

From there the action moves to the capital, Vilnius, then to Belarus (To fix the result of an ice-hockey game.) and then to Siena in Italy. All with trips back to Vilnius in between. You get to see a lot of Europe, some views of which, particularly the many churches you have to break into along the way, look to have been taken directly from life. 

There's a lot of business with seals (The kind you use to put wax on documents, not the ones that honk horns in the circus - if you live in the 19th century.), codes, invisible ink, secret compartments... all the good stuff you expect from the genre. You have to read old books and look at old pictures and compare this with that and come to conclusions.

All of which requires a considerably more robust and coherent UI than the one you're given. I ended up using a walk-through quite a bit. I almost always knew what to do, I just couldn't figure out how to make the game do it. Often the way with these things, I find.

Some of the mechanics seem to get forgotten along the way, like the notes function on Milda's phone, which you sometimes use to combine facts you've discovered so as to learn something new but which mostly just seems to sit there, doing nothing. Or maybe I missed a bunch of stuff. That's always possible.

If so, it wasn't anything that got in the way of finishing the story, which ends in ludicrously dramatic fashion with a seismic collapse in a cave beneath the vaults of a church in Vilnius. The game begins like an episode of a failed sitcom starring two wacky girls just out of college and ends like the climax of an Indiana Jones movie. It's a bit of a leap.

One thing I did like about the ending is that you get the choice of grabbing the eponymous, extremely valuable and possibly magical but also allegedly cursed crown or letting it fall into the abyss, to be forever lost. I chose to let it go, which gave me an achievement only 17% of players have got, so I'm guessing greed wins out for most people there. Or possibly megalomania. 

The whole plot feels far from convincing throughout. There's something about KGB psychotronic experiments and a history professor who wants to rule the world using telepathy. There's a hint of magic that could just be an over-active imagination and an awful lot of quite detailed historical information concerning the Baltic States. Religion comes into things a lot and so does architecture, not to mention the rules of ice-hockey. It's all quite educational.

Mostly the puzzles are logical and realistic - for the genre. There are a couple of annoying "action" sequences involving precise timing that I could have done without. Also, if you're going to require a librarian to go to the far end of a library to retrieve a book so Milda can do something while she's away, I'd suggest not making that book the Necronomicon. That was one I had to use the walk-through for because I assumed it was a joke. 

Speaking of jokes, they're pretty good, on the whole. I wasn't rolling around but I did chuckle a few times. Milda and Dana have several good exchanges and Milda's friend Joris, at whose apartment in Vilnius she stays (Nothing happens between them, or not in my play-through it didn't, anyway.) has a droll sense of humor.

Altogether, I had a good time playing Crowns and Pawns. I've played plenty of worse adventure games. It's strengths are the graphics, which are very pleasing throughout, the characters, who are all either likeable or boo-hiss as appropriate and the setting, which is original.  

The mechanics are mostly very sound. Using items from inventory and combining them is intuitive and straightforward. Most things work as you'd expect. Movement is mostly walking slowly but you can double-click to move instantly from location to location including, within scenes, from door to door, which is very welcome. It's just a few of the more elaborate options that don't feel as polished as they could be. 

One innovation I can't recall seeing in a point&click game before is the option to change Milda's appearance, just as you would in an RPG. They could have made a bit more of that, I thought. If the game tells you about it, I missed it. I only discovered it by accident when I noticed Milda had left her travel bag by the sofa in Joris's flat.

I clicked on it out of curiosity and it opened a window where I was able to change her clothes, style her hair and add accessories. As far as I could tell, what she wore didn't make any difference (Except the one time she had to make herself a fake hockey fan shirt so the driver would let her on the bus.) but as you can tell from the pictures, I made good use of the option anyway.

I also notice now that two of the slots, bracelets and earrings, are empty. That suggests I must have missed something along the way. I don't think I care enough to go back and look for whatever it was I missed. 

The game has a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam and I think that's fair. I feel mostly positive about it too. Would I recommend it, though? 

Well, for a Point&Click fan, yes I would. It does more than enough right to keep the craving at bay for a few hours. For the casual player, though, probably not. There are a lot of similar but better options out there. And quite a few of them are free. Or will be if you wait long enough.

Next Fest - Nighthawks At The Demo

I sorted my Steam Wishlist by "Date Added" this morning and Nighthawks came out as the oldest game on there. I added it almost six years ago, on January 15, 2021. If there were any games on the list before that, I must either have bought them or removed them but I guess it's entirely possible I started using the Wishlist just to keep tabs on Nighthawks, which is the game I've most wanted to play ever since I first heard about it.

In fact, I just checked and there's a post from November 2020, actually called "Wishlist", in which I talked about games on my wishlist that had recently gone on sale. None of which I ever bought and none of which are on there now, either. At some point, my wishlist became dominated by games whose demos I played and liked during Next Fest. I do sometimes add other things but not very often. 

Nighthawks, though, was one of those exceptions, not that it's done me much good up to now. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first opportunity anyone's had to give the game a try in the seven years since the Kickstarter campaign offered a "proof of concept" demo back in 2018.

I had actually forgotten the game was ever on Kickstarter. It's being developed by point and click adventure specialists Wadjet Eye Games in collaboration with Richard Corbett, one of the people behind Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. With a pedigree like that, it hadn't occured to me crowdfunding, would be needed but lots of things that don't seem to make sense happen on Kickstarter.

The campaign did fund successfully but only barely, limping across the $125k threshold with a final total of just over $136k. I'm never really sure what low numbers like this mean for a game in development. Clearly that sort of money's not going to have kept the lights on for the last seven years and if it was to raise the game's profile, seven years with not a word about how things are going doesn't seem like the best way to build on the publicity of a successful Kickstarter.

Then again, it wasn't supposed to take seven years. The estimated delivery time was May 2020, less than six months after I added it to my wishlist. Five years later, this demo is pretty much the first I've heard of it. So, was it worth the wait?

Oh boy, yes! It's exactly what I was hoping for, a beautifully designed, elegant, classy package that's great to look at, listen to, read and play. I found the demo highly immersive and thoroughly engaging. If it wasn't already on my wishlist then it certainly would be now.

Stylistically, it's gorgeous. Beautifully designed without being over-elaborate. And every screen is a painting. I don't think it's a co-incidence that the name of the game immediately brings to mind that famous work by Edward Hopper, either. It's as though they've taken those "concept art" illustrations so many games use to get people excited and then used them in the finished game, instead of replacing them with much less interesting graphics as is the usual way of such things.

This also seems like a moment to say something about AI. I've always expressed a qualified interest in the use of AI in the creative process. I'm not out there with my pitchfork and flaming torch, yelling about how it's a sign of the end times. I make AI images for my own amusement and find quite a lot of them aesthetically pleasing.

It's just a tool, though, and one with considerable limitations still. No AI-generated image is going to stand up to competition like this. These pictures have a warmth (Ironic, given the setting and subject matter.) and a humanity (Ditto.) that AI, at least so far, can't match. I very much doubt we'll be seeing AI-generated images in games that rely on illustrations for ambience or impact any time soon although I've played plenty of games where the human-created pictures were nothing to write home about, so there may be some bleed-through around the edges..

The writing is similarly characterful, oozing with personality and leaving no-one who's played any of the Fallen London series of games in much doubt over the provenance of this one. It's a pretty fair bet that anyone who's interested in Nighthawks will be more than happy to read the equivalent of a novel's worth of prose in order to play it but just in case anyone's in any doubt, that's exactly what's expected of you. 

Several novels, in fact. 800,000 words. That's half as long again as War and Peace, always cited as the benchmark for a very long novel. Of course, this being an RPG with multiple starting points and branching plot-lines, you're never going to have to read all those words in a single play-through.

As I began the demo, it felt for a while that it was going to be all reading, all the time. I'd been playing for a fair while before the first voice actor piped up. Once the dialog began, though, the game turned out to be fully-voiced. The voice acting is good, too. Not flashy or overdone and enjoyable enough that I wanted to hear it all, even though I'd sometimes read to the end of the conversation before the actor had reached the end of the first sentence.

The game is set in the one city where it's acceptable to be a vampire.Vampires have recently been revealed to the human population as facts not fantasies but that doesn't mean they've been accepted, let alone welcomed. Tolerated is the word and not even that by everyone.

Since this is an RPG, the demo begins with a series of questions you need to answer and choices you have to make to decide who you're going to play. I've always liked these systems, where you express a variety of preferences and dislikes and select some slivers of back-story for the game to weave into a personality you can build on. It takes all the effort out of coming up with a characterization.

The demo itself is probably quite replayable because of this. The end card suggests you might like to go round again with a different "Sire" to see what happens. I haven't done that yet but I very well might at some point. It'll be something to do while I wait for the full release, which is still "TBA".

Only having played the one character so far, I'm not sure if everyone starts at the bottom of the heap but I certainly did. No masked balls or opulent bedrooms dripping with velvet, brocade and crystal chandeliers for me.  

 

The demo begins in the filthy backstreets of Cradlebridge as you search for some traitor your sire has tasked you with finding. Your home, such as it is, is a flophouse room in the ironically-named Halcyon Hotel and your evening meal is the bitter blood of an old woman.

Well, mine was, although I immediately regretted it. Very early on, you get the choice to let the woman go or sink your fangs into her and since I was somewhat nervous about the low levels in my blood-meter, I opted for the latter. Her blood turned out to be barely worth drinking but the act of taking it from an unwilling victim locked me out of any chance of becoming one of those benign vampires who only drinks from consenting donors.

I guess that makes this one of those "Choices Matter" games although I can't say for sure that it would have mattered that I made that specific choice. I might have preferred a warning at this very early stage, all the same. But then, I did know I was doing a Bad Thing. I just chose to do it anyway. I shouldn't complain when the obvious consequences followed.

The gameplay is harder to describe than it could be. Nighthawks is consistently labelled "an RPG" and it has a lot of the tropes and mechanics of one but it also shows its Wadjet Eye detection/adventure heritage quite strongly. There's a good deal of opening drawers and looking under beds for evidence or clues in the demo as well as an even greater reliance on long conversations in which you tease information out of the various people you meet.

Mechanically, the game uses a system similar to the one I mentioned in a couple of other demos this time around, where instead of moving around a room and clicking on things to see what they do or examining them to find out what they are, you select much the same kinds of actions from a list. This seems to be the way some developers are handling things these days and I like it - up to a point.

I'm guessing that's the influence of  the Visual Novel genre, where there has to be something for you to click or you might as well be reading a book but there's not much leeway for independent thought or action. Not that there's much more of those in traditional adventure gaming. You do have a lot more freedom there to wander around, poking things, picking them up and putting them in your pockets but in the end there's generally only one solution to the puzzles and only a set number of ways you can combine the objects.

The downside of the "select an action from a menu" approach is that it feels more obviously linear. It's possible that, in the full game, selecting one option might close down others but in the demo I didn't notice that happening. I ended up clicking through everything in the end. On the positive side, though, it avoids all those super-annoying times where you just keep looking at the same things over and over, trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. Or, worse, where gameplay turns into a minute inspection of the screen, pixel by pixel, just in case you might have missed something.

On balance, I think I prefer to have all the options laid out in front of me, whether that's done, as in Nighthawks, with a menu or as in some games by having a key that makes all the interactable objects light up. In the end, I want to have fun and hear stories, not solve puzzles.

That said, it may well be that the finished game will offer a mix of mechanics. There is one screen in the demo that deviates from the pattern. When you walk into the bar at the nightclub, instead of a menu and dialog panel on the right, there's just a full screen picture with "Talk to Bartender" along the bottom. Maybe they haven't finalized everything just yet.

The eventual game is supposed to have some elements of management simulation, where you end up running the nightclub. There's no hint of that in the demo, where the club is very firmly in the hands of an undead mobster. How you would come to be the one in charge instead of him is not immediately obvious.

You do get to see something of the game's combat system, which is nominal at best. It's the purest of RPG combat, where the game decides everything on the basis of your stats and gives you the result without any active involvement required from you, the player. 

I made the mistake of taking on a couple of masked ant-vamp vigilantes even though the game warned me I was over-matched. There was a lot of grunting and thumping and blood-spatters all across the screen as they kicked my ass. Later, I sparred with a vampire enforcer in the boxing ring. That went a lot better although the visuals and sounds were identical.

I'm more than happy with that sort of combat in a game of this kind. It sure beats some irritating quick-time event involving a lot of meaningless button-mashing. You do have access to certain special abilities, called Gifts, too, so there may be some way to bring those into play during combat although I didn't come across anything like it in the demo. I did get to use my Beast Within gift once but that was during a conversation. (Well, if you call being shot at a conversation...)

The full game has upwards of eighty voiced characters, ten companions you can ask to join you and "Multiple adorable rats, some of which you can pet." In the demo I think I met maybe half a dozen NPCs, only one of whom I could have teamed up with, had I so chosen. (I did not.) Didn't see a single rat, adorable or otherwise. 

That took me about three-quarters of an hour. I would have carried on for longer but the demo has a timer in the form of a clock that ticks away in the background, warning you not to stay out too late in case the sun comes up and presumably turns you into a pile of ash. 

I'm speculating there - the exact mechanics of vampirism in the game aren't laid out in the demo. It may not be about extreme light-sensitivity at all. The game wanted me safely tucked in bed by midnight, which seems like an unnecessarily cautious margin for error.

I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available. Can't offer any better recommendation than that.