A Girl And Her Dog

I did it! I went to the cinema to see the Supergirl movie. The first time I've been to the cinema since before the pandemic and even back then it wasn't like I was going often. Maybe once a year, if that.

It wasn't always that way. I used to see a lot of movies on the big screen. Well, on a screen bigger than a TV at least. Screens in the '70s could be tiny. There might actually be TVs bigger than that now.

When I was at university it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say I went several times a week. That was because I was at Cambridge, a collegiate university, and every one of the 30+ colleges had its own Film Society, most of which showed a film pretty much every week during term. I saw a lot of classic films and subtitled foreign movies that way and I saw some of the big, new releases (Like The Empire Strikes Back and Superman.) at the actual cinema in town, too.

After I graduated and moved back home, all through the 'eighties I lived in the middle of a big city with at least three arthouse cinemas and a couple of commercial cinemas all in easy walking distance. I saw a lot of films all through that decade. 

By the '90s I'd moved. I didn't have a cinema I could easily walk to any more. My cinema-going was slowing down but I still used to get to the pictures maybe six or eight times a year. By the turn of the century that was down to two or three and by the time Covid shut the cinemas I was already going a whole year between visits.

So, yes, it certainly takes something special to get me to make the effort, these days. Why Supergirl? And was it worth it? 

First question: I guess Supergirl because I've always liked her and also because I didn't make the effort for Superman last year. I felt I owed it her. Plus the trailers made it look hella fun.

As for the second, Hell, yes! I loved it! No, I fucking loved it! It was everything I hoped it would be and more. The movie, that is. The cinema experience itself? Ehh... that was okay.

But then, what can you expect when you see a movie at half-past nine in the morning? I was literally the only person in the screening. It was in an out-of-town multiplex with a dozen or more screens and my showing was in one of the smaller rooms. Still big enough for about 130 people though. Or it would have, if anyone other than me had wanted to see Supergirl right after breakfast on a Thursday. 

I'm quite a proponent of the value of seeing a movie as part of an audience. I know it has its downsides but you don't need an evolutionary biologist to point out the synergies of a shared experience. There's also the Big Screen Effect, where the more of your field of view the image occupies, the harder your brain finds it to separate the image from reality, which is great for immersion. 

Whether it's worth leaving your house to watch a movie alone, on a screen that's not really all that big, well that's another question. I just didn't want to have to wait six months for the DVD to come out. Although I will be buying that DVD. This is a movie I'll be watching more than once.

So much for the experience. What about the movie? So I liked it. Big deal. Why did I like it? (Might be some mild spoilers in this part but nothing very specific. Probably safe to carry on.)

For a start it's a good movie as a movie, which is very definitely not something you can say about all superhero films. Probably not about most of them. Supergirl has a coherent, linear plot. It starts at the beginning and goes through to the end with precious few diversions. 

There are some well-judged flashbacks that add depth and nuance to the narrative and illuminate certain things about the central character and that's it. None of the usual darting about from place to place and time to time you usually get in comic-book movies. Also it's quite a small cast which helps to keep things focused.

The movie's an adaptation of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, a strong story in itself, but the movie script cuts a lot of the sometimes over-complicated to-and-from of the comic. It condenses the action from a few weeks to just three days. The ending, which we'll get to, is very different. I think Woman of Tomorrow may be a better story but sticking closely to it would make a much worse film. 

That's one of the big, BIG problems with superhero movies in general. Comics have so much more time to tell their stories and so much more freedom to be completely confusing about it and get away with it. Comics fans are nothing if not tolerant of cruft. They relish it, for the most part. The kind of excruciating detail that has comic fans arguing deep into the night just about kills any movie stupid enough to include a small fraction of it. 

Supergirl keeps things tight. The plot is a revenge arc yoked to two coming of age stories and the writers and director wisely recognize that's plenty. Even so, they still manage to throw in an origin story and make it feel like a natural progression. Origin stories wreck far too many superhero movies. If you're going to do it, this is how. Really, really good work.

Continuity is another bane of superhero franchises. James Gunn has been tasked with rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe so of course this film has to dovetail with the recent Superman movie, something it does perfectly. David Corenswet, an excellent Superman, appears just as often as he needs to and there's just enough cross-fertilization to bang home the message of his own recent movie, that Superman needs to be a force not just for good but for restraint and tolerance.

Supergirl is a force for good and also a bit of a wild card. There's an argument to be made that she's tolerant and restrained, alright: just of the wrong things.

As her mother, Lara, tells her just before she dies and Supergirl leaves doomed Argo City in a pod with her puppy, she needs to be good but she doesn't need to be nice. And she's not nice. But she's more than just good. As Ruthye tells her late on, she's kind. Kind and good does it for me. Screw nice.

I know some Supergirl fans won't like it. Supergirl's been nice all her life. Too bloody nice if you ask me. 

Well, some Supergirls have. This is the other big, BIG problem with superhero movies. Any superhero a mainstream audience recognizes will already have been a dozen different people in the comics before they even get to the screen. And like Swifties, comic fans always have their favorite eras. 

I've known Supergirl since I was about five years old. I have a couple of favorite eras myself but I think this is my favorite now. Milly Alcock is a superb Kara. She looks the part but that's easy. Any blonde can wear the suit. But as she says to Ruthye "It's just a suit". 

Except it's the suit. Not anyone can wear the suit. She can. Magnificently, she spends almost the whole movie not wearing it. She strides about looking seriously cool as fuck in a duster coat. Then, when she puts on the suit, it's like the sun coming up. And you know what happens when the sun comes up. Well, you will if you watch this movie.

Many, many things about the writing and the acting worked for me. I love Kara's pub crawling bad girl act. I love that it isn't an act and yet it so obviously is. Also isn't it interesting she calls it a pub crawl not a bar crawl?

I think the way the movie goes through a whole sequence of adventures with Supergirl winning fights without her powers is genius. She isn't just a badass because the yellow sun made her one. She was born badass is my guess. And if she wasn't, hardship and trauma made her one. I bet on both.

Her relationship with Krypto is just wonderful but so is the relationship she builds with Ruthye, the thirteen year-old orphan who just watched her whole family getting slaughtered and plans on doing something about it. Of course, that relationship also relies on Ruthye and Eve Ridley is stone solid in the part. They're mirror images, through a shattered mirror. 

It should be said that I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. People doing the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing, just makes me happy. And also makes me cry. I cried a lot during Supergirl. At one point I actually sobbed. I was glad I was the only one there. 

I tend to cry a lot at movies, though, especially when anyone does something unselfish or noble or when something happy happens. Sad things tend not to do it for me or not to the same degree. I didn't tear up when Krypto got shot but I did when Supergirl told him "See Buddy? I told you I'd be back" at the end.

I laughed a lot, too. Out loud. There are some great lines. I think I missed a couple when Lobo and Supergirl were exchanging quips mid-fight. Fights are loud in cinema-sound. Jason Momoa as Lobo is... well, he's Lobo. He doesn't get to do a lot else but then when was Lobo ever anything but Lobo?

While I'm praising the plot and the writing I'll also mention a couple of things that absolutely don't ring true and yet ring completely true in comic book terms. Kara shouldn't win some of the fights she wins without her powers. Ruthye absolutely shouldn't win her one fight. They're both fighting way out of their weight class. But they win and they should win.

They win because they're heroes. Heroines. Whatever. They win because comic book stories are myth. If you don't get that you're probably in the wrong movie.

And then there's the ending. This hasn't been too spoilery so far but here's a big one. I'll stick something under this paragraph in the edit so there's a break and you can leave if you want.

 So. At the end, Kara kills Krem. Krem's the main villain. He has no actual personality, no backstory, no arc. He's evil. That's it. Oh, and nasty. The two aren't always the same. 

Having a villain so straightforwardly villainous and unredeemable simplifies things. I was sitting there wondering just how they were going to resolve the storyline without killing the bastard when Supergirl killed the bastard. She ran him through the neck with Ruthye's sword after talking Ruthye out of doing the exact same thing. Oh, and first she stabbed him somewhere else because of what he did to Krypto. "That's for my dog".

In the source material, Supergirl does not kill Krem. She sends him to the Phantom Zone where he serves three hundred years. At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, he's released as a very old man. And he's learned right from wrong. It took him three centuries but he's done it. Rehabilitation worked. 

He apologizes to Ruthye, also very old by now because living three hundred years will do that to you. She clubs him with her stick and then hits him a few more times when he's down. But she doesn't kill him. She, too, has learned something in three hundred years. 

That's a good ending for the comic. It would be a terrible ending for the movie. We're supposed to wait three hundred years for catharsis and then it's an old woman clubbing an old man while Supergirl stands by and watches? I don't think so.

All this Phantom Zone stuff, anyway - and the damn place has a history as complicated as Ancient Rome - just doesn't play on screen. It barely plays in the comics, frankly.Calling the authorities isn't going to fly. Who they'd even be in this scenario, god only knows. Clearly Krem and his crew are doing whatever they want already. If there was an authority capable of stopping them or holding them, wouldn't they be doing it already?

I'm 100% against capital punishment in real life but this isn't real life. It's myth. Krem has to die. There's just no other ending that's going to work.

I know some fans agree with that but think it shouldn't have been down to Kara to do the killing. Lobo's right there. He's up on a ridge, watching it all go down. Lobo, as Supergirl warns Ruthye when they meet him in  bar, killed his entire planet. If you want some killing done, he's your boy. 

Except if Supergirl lets Lobo do this one instead of doing it herself, it doesn't define her as somehow above the act, it devalues her as too weak to do the difficult thing herself. Plus Lobo already saved her from what looked like (But obviously wouldn't have been, somehow.) certain death. How many times is he going to fix things for her? 

The two  or the three moments in whole movie I didn't like all make Supergirl look briefly like she's not in control but at least in those she's mostly just unlucky. If Lobo swooped down on his big bike and killed Krem for her, it would make her look weak and indecisive. 

Supergirl is neither of those things. She's angry and bitter and sad and good and kind and strong and brave and irresponsible and responsible and human all the way through. And she needs to kill Krem, so she does. She's good. She does the right thing and, in that situation, that's it.

It's possibly the most responsible thing she does in the whole movie, ironically. And then she goes home and tells her cousin she's grown up. 

Except she doesn't tell him what she's done and she doesn't tell him she's grown up either. Not in those words. She doesn't have to. He knows and we know. He can see it. We can see it. He can hear it. We can hear it.

Coming of age story, remember?

I could go on, at much greater length. Sometimes I wish I was back at college so I could write a dissertation on something that fires me up like this instead of bloody William Blake. I like Blake but I never wanted to write five thousand words about him. I'd happily write five thousand words about Supergirl.. 

I won't though. I'll just say the music is great and so are the special effects, the fights and the mise-en-scène. A lot of the scenes are lit really dark but I always could see what was going on. It's a mood piece so it works.

I won't say it's a masterpiece. It's not that. It's a great movie though and not just a great superhero movie. It has the feel of those bleak, existential seventies films I grew up with; Five Easy Pieces, Brewster McCloud, Dog Day Afternoon. Like that. Except in space and with lots of people punching each other up into the air.

It was nice to be back in the cinema. I'm glad I took the trouble.  Maybe I'll go again. 

What's My Motivation?

I'm having a slight problem just now, what with with this being, ostensibly at least, a gaming blog: I'm not playing any games. 

I haven't reached some kind of existential crisis, where I find I've outgrown or lost interest in what, for convenience, I'll call "The Hobby". I've noticed a few erstwhile games bloggers hitting that wall lately but I'm not one of them. I'm still enjoying my gaming. 

I'm not really even in a lull or slump, one of those times when interest wanes temporarily as you wait for some new game to grab your attention and pull you back in; a state of mind familiar, I'm sure, to plenty of people reading this.

No, it's more of an enforced hiatus, just while I sort out a new gaming PC. The one I'm using to write this post seems entirely reliable so long as I don't ask it to play games but I've decided, rather than try to rehabilitate it for that purpose, it's going to be relegated to a media center role downstairs. I'm still looking into what will replace it. Until I make up my mind about that, I'm kind of off games for now, whether I like it or not.

I've found taking an enforced break from gaming these past few days has been quite useful in clarifying a couple of things for me. I've mentioned a few times that I don't play games as often these days as I used to, or for as long, when I do. It made me wonder if my interest in the hobby might be winding down. 

I'm happy to say I'm now reasonably sure that's not what's happening. I found myself getting quite twitchy, not being able to play my games, Neverness To Everness in particular. 

Not being able to play, I've been reading about them instead. Nimgimli posted about the upcoming 1.2 update, which looks amazing. I didn't find time for the full hour-long preview but I did watch the almost eight-minute trailer.

It's impressive. Not to say insane. So much packed in to what's going to be a six-weekly update cadence. How do they do it?

Raph Koster was reported by MassivelyOP the other day as saying the theme park model for MMORPGs was unsustainable because of the cost of producing content and the speed at which players get through it, which seems fair enough until you consider games like NTE, Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact and the rest of the gacha gang. 

I left a comment wondering, among other things, what the difference was in terms of production costs, to which Raph replied with a terse two word answer: "Server costs". I'm not quite clear how that explains the way gacha games can pump out as much plotted, scripted, written, voice-acted content on a six-week cycle as the average Western MMORPG can manage in six months...

The second update for NTE adds an entire game-within-a-game, a fantasy RPG inside the magitech shell, the conceit of which is that the characters themselves will be playing it. I love that part. It even makes the medieval fantasy element palatable. It's permanent content, too, which is just as well for me since I may not have a machine capable of running it before the new update becomes the old update in a few weeks and we're on to the next thing.

My uninformed, outsider's take on how it's possible is that MMORPGs these days just aren't popular enough to generate the kind of income that supports this pace of content production. In that respect, Raph's quite right that the Western model isn't sustainable. 

We can see it, over and over, with every new attempt to break the market open. The locust swarm pitches up, strips a new game bare of content then flies away before the first update arrives. When it eventually comes, some come back for a fraction as long as the first visit and after that there's no getting them back at all. With ninety per cent of the customers gone, who can afford to keep making new content for the few that stay?

With the open world gacha titles, though, there's always another substantial content drop on the way. Even then, players still complain about not having enough to do or finishing everything too fast but instead of having to wait months for the next hit they're into the hype cycle almost immediately and the fix lands a week or two after the cravings begin.

Are theme park MMORPGs unsustainable or just inefficient? Is it inherently harder or more expensive to produce content for servers holding hundreds or thousands of players than for those serving solo or co-op play, even when the nature of the content is very similar? I have absolutely no idea but I'll take Raph's word for it that it is, somehow.

Even then, surely server costs can't directly affect the rate at which the content itself is produced, can they? Not even if it's orders of magnitude more expensive to get that content in front of the players. The issue of content drought, endemic in MMORPGs for many years, seems like it would be independent of the cost of keeping the servers up. 

And when, even in the glory days of World of Warcraft, did MMORPGs ever get content flow at this volume and speed? (I'll answer that one: First five years of EverQuest, that's when. And never since that I've seen.)

But what do I know? Or, frankly, care? My concern with Western theme park MMORPGs these days isn't so much whether they can provide me with content fast enough as whether they can produce content that interests me at any pace. If you remove nostalgia, loyalty and familiarity, the main factors that keep me playing some old favorites, I can't easily come up with many good reasons even to look at most of the MMORPGs I see being promoted or developed these days. They just don't look very... erm... modern.

All of which makes it quite ironic that my current darling, Neverness To Everness, a game a huge part of whose appeal for me is just how very modern it does feel, has chosen to add, for only its second update... a traditional, western medieval fantasy RPG. If they'd asked me what I wanted it wouldn't have been that.

Oh, wait! They did ask me! Several times. And what did I say? Like Mailvaltar, I said I wanted more city. 

Still, I'm not complaining. 999 Nights, which in a magnificently confident coup de theatre we're told should be read as ‘One Thousand Less One Nights’, looks very interesting. I'd love to give it a go.

Luckily for me, as is generally the case in games of this kind, most of the content won't go away when the next update arrives. The big FOMO push is always for the banner characters, none of which particularly interest me this time around, and the various mini-games and events. The substantive elements, scripted content, items, gameplay additions and innovations, those tend to hang around.

In this case there are a whole load of costumes I might be interested in, including some that have something I did ask for - customization. Okay, it's only colors and hiding some panels, not swapping whole pieces between outfits, but it's a start. And I really want that "Unassuming Warrior" outfit for Flora. Anything that looks like regular clothes is good with me.

There doesn't appear to be much, if any, new story content, which is fine with me, this once. It'll keep me from falling behind while I sort out my hardware problems, something I feel quite motivated to do now.

I'm not saying I'm going to buy a whole, new expensive computer just to play NTE but having a game I really want to play does clarify things a little. I was wondering if I needed to bother getting a gaming computer at all or if I couldn't just make do with this one and do without the gaming part altogether.

Yeah. Not happening! Bring on the One Thousand Less One Nights.

Sticking The Ending (Not Saying Where)

One of the beneficial side-effects of the recent heatwave was that I managed to catch up with some TV-watching, while I was downstairs keeping Beryl company. I finished the current (Fourth.) season of The Legend of Vox Machina and I finally got around to the final (Third) season of Good Omens. 

They didn't have much in common other than that I wasn't one hundred per cent happy with the ending of either but since I can still just about remember what happened in each of them, I'm going to wodge the pair into this one post anyway.

There will inevitably be some spoilers so now's your chance to bail. 

Here, I'll stick in one of the trailers as a buffer, just in case.

The Legend of Vox Machina - Season 4

I'm starting to realize I've been watching this one wrong. I didn't even realize it was the people from Critical Role until sometime in Season 2 and even when I did, it didn't mean much to me since all I know about them is what I've read on blogs. Then, yesterday at work, someone ordered a couple of the graphic novel collections and I had a flip through one when I took it off the shelf, which was when it occurred to me the TV show presumably has greater resonance if you're already immersed in the backstory, of which there appears to be plenty.

I probably should have taken the time to watch at least a few episodes of the original YouTube series as soon as I figured out that was where the TV series came from but I never even thought of it until a few days ago. I guess I could start now. It's still there. I just checked.

Maybe I'll get round to it before Season 5 but for now I'm just going to have to treat the TV show as a stand-alone cartoon. And it is a cartoon, I guess, although we don't seem to use the term so much any more. It's not anime, that's for sure, even if you allow that anime can be made anywhere outside Japan.

The trouble is, I'm so used to watching anime now that regular cartoons can look slightly off, somehow, at least until I reacclimatize. The animation in Vox Machina S3 started out looking thin and flat to me so it didn't help that Amazon decided to spit it out in three episode chunks every Wednesday. I'd just get used to the storybook graphics and then I'd have to start all over again the following week.

What made it really awkward, though, were the commercials. Or, I should say, the placement of the ad breaks. I can handle ads in shows if the shows themselves have been created with specific narrative breaks designed to hold them, as used to be the norm with commercial television, at least in this country. It's harder to put up with the constant interruption, when the damn ads pop up seemingly randomly.

I complained about this last time I wrote about a Prime show, so I don't want to make this all about the ads again but damn! Just have set breaks FFS! It's not like I watch the ads anyway. If I'm watching on the laptop I tab out and read a blog or something but last week, when I was on the sofa in front of the TV, I literally brought a book. I went and got one when the ads started and from then on I muted the sound and read until until the ads went away.

Enough about the presentation. What about the content?

Confusing is the first word that comes to mind. There was a basic problem in that I couldn't remember much about the last series. I thought the recap at the start would help with that but it didn't, or not much. As the episodes went by I gradually remembered enough to figure out what was happening but it doesn't say a lot for Season 3 that all those dragons had completely faded from memory.

I remembered all the characters, though, and that's really 90% of the appeal of the show. You just wait for them to come on and do their schtick. It still worked to some extent but we seem to have hit the point where only bad things happen and everyone's either depressed or angry or despairing or all three at once, which somewhat limits the opportunities for merriment. In my opinion that doesn't make for great entertainment.

As always there's a world-threatening crisis but this time half the team wants nothing to do with averting it. Everyone's at odds with someone or having some kind of existential breakdown and it's all quite tiring, if not tiresome. 

Since most of the cast aren't making with the snappy one-liners and the class clown isn't even in most of the episodes at all, we get a new character who gets to do all the jokes all the time. He's incredibly annoying to begin with but of course there turns out to be More To Him Than We Thought. I did end up quite liking him but I also felt I'd been maneuvered into it, which is never ideal.

The plot ticks along nicely enough although parts of it never seem to make much sense until eventually it reaches what passes for a feel-good ending, at least in context of what's happened before... and then the writers pull the rug out from under it so fast the audience get carpet burns. 

Would a happy ending be too much to ask for? Yes, obviously it would.  

Here's the thing. If I wanted a bleak, miserable, downbeat animated show, one that would make me wonder why I'd bothered putting myself through the emotional wringer in the first place, if that was all the catharsis I was going to get, I could just go watch Bojak Horseman again. At least that way I'd be watching something that had earned the right to make me feel emotionally roughed-up, not some half-assed D&D nonsense with dueling heavy-metal guitar solos and characters who never stay dead.

I guess now I have to watch Season 5, just to see how in hell they pull themselves out of the mess they've gotten into, although right now I'd have to say that looks pretty much impossible. Then again, as I just said, no-one ever stays dead for long in this show so I expect they'll manage somehow.

Let's just hope Amazon doesn't kill off the show itself before we get a resolution. Not that I could really blame them if they did. It's starting to look like one of those shows that's already gone on a bit too long.

Good Omens - Season 3

 

I say "Season" because that's what Amazon called it. It's one episode. Can one episode be a season? I wouldn't have thought so, no matter how long it is. 

This one's an hour and thirty-nine minutes. The length of an old-fashioned movie. And that's what it is, pretty much: a shortish movie. Not a very good one, either.

Oh, it looks quite nice. The production values are okay and the art department seems to have done a job of work although it looks mostly as though they're using the same old sets or no sets at all. And of course the two principals are great, Tennant and Sheen, and the supporting cast, which isn't all that huge, is fine...

The plot, though...

It makes sense until close to the end although it never feels very involving. It's more of an outline of a plot than the real thing. There's a murder mystery in Heaven that seems like it could be interesting until it gets solved with no real build-up or tension. Jesus comes back for the second coming and it's all a bit Life of Brian for a few minutes but then that just stops, too. 

No-one has much of a reason for doing whatever it is they're doing. They just amble along, making the right noises about why they're doing it without ever sounding the least bit convincing or convinced. The solution to the mystery, such as it is, turns out to be that an immortal got so bored of being immortal they decided to destroy the universe so they wouldn't have to keep on being bored.

And that would be it except for the coda, which is beyond stupid. I'd call it fan service if I thought any fans were actually being served. Okay, I'm sure some were. If all you ever wanted out of the whole thing was to see David Tennant and Michael Sheen holding hands as they slip peacefully into an idyllic, comfortable retirement together, then consider yourself served.

I mean, I'm not saying that wasn't sweet but to get there, first God had to be persuaded by way of some extremely dubious arguments from the would-be happy couple to destroy the entire universe, then she had to recreate it without being in the new one herself, which is a good trick if you can do it. Then all we had to do was wait 13.8 billion years (Or maybe it was 13.4 - I didn't take notes when the caption came up.) for the Earth to somehow go through exactly the same process not just of evolution but civilization too, so the now-mortal lovers could find each other in the same fucking bookshop and fall in love all over again! 

I don't know about you but I just can't quite see that happening, somehow. It seems like there might be a logical flaw in there somewhere...

I realize I'm slating one show for having a feel-bad ending and the other for the exact opposite but the awkward truth is neither of them made me feel good. Of the two, at least Vox Machina made me feel bad because something bad happened. Good Omens just made me feel bad because the ending itself was so bad!

We all know why, of course. Naughty Neil Gaiman and his unfortunate extra-curricular activities or proclivities or whatever it is that made Jeff Bezos feel queasy enough to decide not to go ahead with the full six episode season as planned. Heaven forfend Amazon should take any reputational damage from someone's antisocial behavior!

Even so, if that was the plot they were intending to stretch out until it lasted three times as long, I'm not sure a full season would have helped. Bad things generally don't get better just because they last longer.

And come to think of it, Season 2 wasn't all that great, was it? What did I say about it? 

Hmm. It appears I thought it was "short, rushed and incomplete... quite unsatisfying at times." If that's true, then I guess Season 3 should have been a dozen episodes at least.

Really, only the first Season stands up as coherent, complete and satisfying and that's the one Terry Pratchett co-wrote. He had nothing to do with Season 2, being dead at the time, but Season 3 is partly based on a plotline he and Gaiman hashed out in a hotel room thirty-five years ago. I kind of doubt it would have stayed like that if he'd had time to work on it.

All of that said, I quite enjoyed Season 2 for all its flaws and Season 3 at least helped a hot afternoon to go by passably enough. Pretty sure the whole thing would have a better reputation if they'd just made the first season as a mini-series and left it that, though. 

The Question Everyone's Asking! What's New On The Beat Scene?

God! These things just flash by, don't they? Once again, I was wondering if it was too soon for another What I've been Listening To Lately and it turns out it's been nearly three weeks! Past time, then.

Lots to choose from. How many do I have set aside for consideration now? Let me count them... eighteen on the desktop... let me just check the laptop... five more there, so that's at least... far too many.

Sidebar: I don't want to pollute a nice, pure music post with messy computer stuff but since I've mentioned the desktop and the laptop I'll just say I have no clue what's going on now. "Ol' Reliable" turned out to be anything but. When I booted up this morning it wouldn't. It's stuck on some bios issue that I so far haven't been able to fix. But in trying to, I started swapping components between the two machines and now the new PC works again. Go figure. For the time being I'm keeping it on an Integrated Graphics, No Taxing Games diet so no NTE for a bit. We'll see how that goes. My Buy-A-Proper-Gaming-PC plan has been bumped right up the schedule, though, I can tell you that for nothing!

Back to the good stuff and it won't be all old favorites this time, for a change. OK, Blondshell just announced a new album (YAY!!) and several other faves, who also have new albums either out or about to be, have all been pumping out the videos, so we might have some of those. But I do have new names! Here's one now...

Grease Baby - Clutter

Isn't that a great way to start? We'll call it a palate cleanser, if you can cleanse your palate with grease. They're Swedish, as if that matters. That sound is the property of the world.

 What's New On The Beat Scene? - Perennial

Hahaha! And you thought the first one was retro? Although what specific era Perennial are retroactively invoking is less clear. It sounds like someone welded the Beastie Boys onto the back of the Sonics. And what the hell is that chorus? Bloody art-house punks!

Perennial are on the Ernest Jennings Record Co. label and as so often happens when I find something good on a label I never heard of, I took a look at what else was there. There was this...

 At War With The Dogcatchers - The Taxpayers

Who could resist a title like that? Still got no idea what it's about - and I've read the lyrics - but it sounds great. Reminds me really strongly of something, too, but I can't quite put my finger on what. When, though, that I can do. 85-95, around then. It's kinda Brotherhood of Lizards meets Neutral Milk Hotel. 

Hmm. We'll be here all day if I keep footnoting my references like that. Okay, just one more from Ernest Jennings and Co. and we'll move on.

 Really, Really, Really, Really Sad 

 Carla J. Easton

Too many reallys to fit on one line. What's the plural of really, anyway? I typed "reallies" first and that triggered a spell check but so does "reallys". What do they want me to do? Re-phrase to something awkward and clumsy like "Too many repetitions of the word "really" to fit..." ? I am not a fan of rephrasing perfectly good sentences just to appease some self-appointed grammar nazi! 

Whatever happened to Reese Lansangan anyway?

 VHS Aesthetic - Reese Langsangan

Oh wow! Never seen that before! It's fantastic. Well, the video is. The song's merely excellent. Shot on a visit to Tokyo with her sister. The video, that is. Not Reese. It wasn't sororicide. 

No wonder everyone wants to go to Japan. If I had access to some of those stores I wouldn't be able to get into my house! (Because I'd buy a lot of stuff in the stores. And take it home. And put it in my house. Where it would fill up all the rooms. Please try to keep up.)

That's the last thing she's posted and it was two years ago but then, she's hardly prolific. I think I'd better subscribe to her channel so I don't miss it the next time she drops a gem like this.

That was a nice surprise. The Philippines by way of Japan. Now, where shall we go next? I know. Australia! 

PQC - daine

Damn! I'm such a sucker for a chanted chorus. That's three in this post alone, although I suppose the Clutter is a chanted outro. 

I had to look PQC up because it meant nothing to me. All the responses in three full pages of google search, which was as far as I got before I gave up scrolling, thought it meant Post-Quantum Cryptography. That seemed unlikely so I asked Gemini what the acronym might stand for if it wasn't that. 

Gemini suggested either Pavement Quality Concrete, Production Quality Control or Protein Quaternary Structure, all of which sounded even less likely. 

Gemini, clearly puzzled by what I was up to, asked me "Are you asking out of pure curiosity, or are you looking into specific construction engineering or manufacturing standards?" to which I replied "I'm asking because of the song PQC by daine. I wanted to know what she was referring to in the lyrics and title. From context, none of the options seem likely."

This got me an eight paragraph dissertation on the meaning of the acronym in the context of the lyric, complete with links to a reddit thread (in which no-one knows what it means) and a piece at New Zealand website Sniffers, (where the acronym isn't even mentioned.) Gemini also linked to articles on Stereogum and Rolling Stone Australia as well as daine's own Bandcamp page, none of which make any attempt to explain it, either.

Despite the complete lack of evidence and entirely unsupported by any of the references it linked, Gemini still felt confident enough to tell me "The meaning of "PQC" in daine's song is intentionally left as a bit of a mystery, but it stands for "Plastic, Tragic, Overly-Romantic" (with the 'C' loosely standing for the "Choreography" / "Chorus" refrain or "Classic")." It was lucky that made no sense at all or I might have believed it.

This is a shining example of why I keep saying Gen AI would be great if it worked. It does not work. It hasn't gotten much better than when I first used it, just better at hiding its mistakes. Don't worry, though. It can and will get worse as this excellent observation by Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness concerning the potential disaster represented by AI Agents, chillingly foretells.  

Dunno what all that's doing in a music post. Still don't know what daine's talking about in the last line, either. Great song anyway.

 Election Day - Lily Seabird

There. That ought to clear all that silty AI out of our heads. Nothing like a bunch of scruffs rocking out in the woods to remind you what's real and what's not.

And speaking of...

 Violins - Blondshell

You knew it was coming... 

Look, I'm buying the album day of release so this is coming from a place of love but would it kill her to write something with a tune? This one does eventually flirt with melody - that lovely run-out from 3.00 on - but even then it's not exactly sing-in-the-shower material, is it?

And still I love it. I love how her voice rubs and rasps and abrades the air, how she holds every note just a little longer than she should, how here monotony is the melody, how she rides the guitar lines like the surf coming in over shale. She transcends. It's not so much song as it's sound, every time. 

I guess that is what grunge was, kind of, It was one of the reasons I never much liked it. But I like this. I more than like this.

 Voyager - P. J. Harvey

Here's someone else I like but who I almost never feature here. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I saw P.J. Harvey back in the '90s, when we still went to gigs. She was third on the bill to I forget who now. She was dressed head to toe in firetruck red vinyl and she was doing stuff off her raw, explosive debut album, Dry, which I'm not sure was even out yet. 

And now here she is, being invited by celebrity astrophysicist Dr. Brian Cox to write a song about the Voyager space probe for some theater tour he's threatening us with. Some people have the oddest career trajectories, Brian Cox among them.

 Drive - Fousheé

I do like a good walking through New York video. I know it's often done but if you lived there, why wouldn't you? Some cities do the heavy lifting for you. 

Siren - Tierra Whack

And you thought that Perennial song was short at 1.49! Tierra Whack says hold my beer.

Time for just a couple more. Let's bang it up.

He's Great  - Aitis Band

Aitis Band is a truly terrible name. Is it some kind of pun? It sounds like "Eighties Band" if you say it out loud but they don't sound like anyone I heard in the '80s. They sound like The Orb! It would be a terrible name for a bunch of fifty-something dads trying to recapture their youth by playing friends' parties and the back rooms of pubs but for someone that sounds like this it's just fucking stupid.

How did I ever come to click on it? It's another Ernest Jenning Record Co. signing, that's how. All the others who had much better names were good so I thought, hell, why not? Paid off, too.

 Common People - My Chemical Romance

Redbeard often refers back to the satanic panic. We didn't really have that over here but we've had an almost never-ending sequence of moral panics based around pop groups. Ban them! Deport them! Don't let them in! 

I think the first I can remember was that national institution and much loved all-round entertainer Alice Cooper. I remember the Daily Mail trying to get him banned when I was still at school. Then there were the Beastie Boys, of course, inciting their fans to snap the hood ornaments off Volkswagens, not to mention their supposed dissing of disabled kids in some made-up tabloid tale. The Shamen got it in the neck for promoting illegal rave drugs with their oh-so-clever choruses and My Chemical Romance were supposedly going to have our children slitting their wrists when, for some reason, listening to emo got conflated with having suicidal urges.

I never really paid much attention to MCR, I certainly didn't know they rocked out like this. Gerard Way, lead singer and also, somewhat surprisingly, the creative genius behind Umbrella Academy, puts all the anger into his performance that's always been there in the words but which Jarvis always undercuts with irony and that world-weary insouciance he's made his trademark. Really great version of a song all too easily reduced to a pub sing-along.

And finally. Saved 'til the end as a little treat for the persistent and because it's so new I only heard it for the first time a couple of hours ago, here's Charli! Be warned, this is NSFW even by Charli's always-unsafe standards.

Wink Wink - Charli xcx

Sounds like Arab Strap doing Jamie Oliver Petrol Station. And with that, I'm gone. 

REVOKED!

So that was a bit of a surprise. Also very dramatic. I just logged in and BOOM! there it was. A big, black window all over everything. 

My immediate thought was that I'd been banned from something for some reason. Not that I could remember doing anything wrong but then I got suspended from Pinterest a few weeks ago for violating some term of service or other and I don't even use Pinterest. 

I mean, it had to be something bad, didn't it? All that black background. The heavy bronze framing. The stern, sans serif font. Put it all together and it spells "You're in trouble". 

The choice of verb strongly reinforces the messaging that the person receiving the notice must have done something wrong. A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you. It must be your fault! You ungrateful little wretch!

Am I being over-sensitive? Oh, no. No, I am not. 

I don't have many areas of expertise but I do know what subtext is. I didn't spend three years on what was, at the time, broadly acknowledged to be the best undergraduate course in English Literature in the world not to be able to read subtext. What do you think all those practical criticism tutorials were for? Just so we could all sit around drinking sherry and eating cake?!

But if you doubt it, here are the examples Miriam Webster chose to use to illustrate the usage of the word "revoke":

"Your driver's license could be revoked after about three convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol; some people's licenses are even revoked for life. You could get your passport revoked if a judge thought you had violated the terms of your bail and suspected you might skip the country. And if you're out of prison on probation and violate the terms of probation, it will probably be revoked and you'll end up back in the slammer. "

See? If you throw around words like "revoke", those are the kinds of mental images you want to put into someone's head. My head. 

Do I sound pissed? (American usage.) I am, a bit, but that doesn't have much to do with Valve's inability to draft a polite, friendly memo. Mostly it's because it's the hottest day of the year and my PC just broke again and this time I don't think I'm going to magically get it working. Luckily I have Ol' Faithful here, which I was able to bring back into service in literally three minutes, thanks to having done it once already, a month ago. I was going to buy a decent gaming desktop and a gaming laptop this year anyway with my inheritance, when I finally get it, and I'm good on security updates for Windows 10 until October so I'm going to manage as I am until then. I'll strip the failing PC for parts, probably. I can't be bothered to send it back.

That should have been a sidebar, shouldn't it? Oh well, opportunity lost.

I'm not really cross about the Steam notice but, as Mrs Bhagpuss is fed up of hearing me say, some people really need to run their stuff past a decent marketing department before they send it out to the public. Any half-competent marketing person could re-draft that notice in five minutes to make it sound helpful and informative instead of passively-aggressive and vaguely threatening, the way it most definitely does.

They might even be able to do something about the confusion it causes too, although I'm not sure that would be within their competence. The whole situation is inherently confusing to begin with. Look at these two screenshots from Steam for a start.  

Both of those are from my one and only Steam account, the one to which the REVOKED notice was sent. The first, with the 13 hour played time, appears in the Steam Library as "Stars Reach". The second, with just three hours played, is listed as "Stars Reach Playtest". 

Since Stars Reach is and has only ever been in pre-alpha testing, they're both playtests of some sort. The first, which I'm assuming is the one to which my Steam key activation has been REVOKED, is the one I used from when the game first went into testing, which I applied for in the old-fashioned way and for which received first an acceptance and soon after an invitation to the creator program. Those 13 hours represent the testing I did and the research that was needed for the several posts I wrote.

At some point I also backed the Kickstarter and got a key for that. I think I may have even received a third key from somewhere, although I never used it. Maybe that's the one that's been REVOKED? 

Later still, Playable Worlds farmed the awkward business of issuing keys and linking accounts to something called firstlook.GG. I got some confusing instructions about linking accounts and registering keys through them, which I did my best to follow, but I was never sure which account had been linked to what.

I always use a separate email account for anything on Kickstarter and never use that email address for anything else, which does cause problems but I thought I'd gotten those sorted out. Maybe that was too optimistic. I can't say for sure if the Kickstarter pledge I made ever got converted into Steam access, as it was supposed to, since I already had access to the testing anyway.

And I still do! The first thing I did after I learned my access had been REVOKED was to go and see if it was true. It was not. Although a key must have been, I guess.

The notice specifically says, down in the small print and in a much more reasonable tone, that a key has been REVOKED because the test has ended. Only half of that can be true, at most. Unless I've missed something, there's only ever been the one testing program and it's still running. I'm still none the wiser as to what's really going on.

The first account up there, the one that says "Purchase" instead of Play looks like it was still working earlier this year. It says "LAST PLAYED Mar 27." I haven't tried it since then, because the last couple of times I played I made new characters to test the new-new player experience and for that I wanted to use a new account. I had a spare so I used it.

And that one still works. As you can see, I logged it in today. Both my new experience characters were there and I briefly logged them in and ran them around. All the in-game screenshots in the post are from that short session.

What I hope is going on is that my Kickstarter pledge key is attached to the account that still works, my creator/tester key has been REVOKED and my mysterious third key has vanished into the void, never to be seen. (I nearly said "never to be seen again" but as far as I can tell, I never saw it in the first place.)

I don't suppose I'll know for sure until the game goes into Early Access, as it's supposed to this summer. We're in summer now, come to think of it... That will presumably require yet more bureaucratic process and maybe it'll all become clear then. Ha!

I was always expecting that to be a problem anyway. I bet I'll end up having to send someone my Kickstarter pledge details to get into EA without paying twice. Always assuming I can find them.

All this for a game I'm pretty much certain I'll never want to play. At this point, the most fun I get out Stars Reach is trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the admin.

Certainly nothing much seems to be going on in the game itself. Once again, when I got in to the game today, I appeared to be the only person there. I probably was. I just checked the Steam charts and there are two people online right now. The 24-hour peak was 18.

The UI looked a bit different and the whole thing felt tidier but that good impression was counteracted by the very awkward character animations and the inordinate time it took to zone through a space portal to a planet. I had time to read nearly a dozen of those not very helpful tips they put up to keep you from being bored while you wait.

Worst of all, when I did finally arrive planet-side, I zoned in dead. Nothing killed me. I was just dead. I re-lifed and reappeared about five meters away. No corpse to retrieve. No clue what had happened. Not the greatest first impression.

Assuming I still have a Steam key that hasn't been REVOKED, I'll take another look when Early Access arrives. It's going to be very interesting to see how many other people turn up. And how long they stay.

Lacrimosa Moves In - Peace And Quiet Move Out

If there's one thing that might finally force me to keep a post short (Speaking of posts, if you want to skip right to the actual content, please click  ^[1] . Otherwise, please carry on!) it's having to type it on my laptop. No laptop keyboard is ever going to feel as natural and comfortable as my mechanical. 

Today, though, it's 35c out, which "feels like " 38 according to the ever-reliable Weather Underground. And it certainly feels all of that, at least upstairs where the heat rises, at the front of the house where the sun hits, which is where my study, if that's what we're calling it, is.

So here I am, downstairs at the back of the house, in the room we'll call the lounge for the sake of having something to call it, which is the coolest room in the house and likely to remain so until the sun comes round to shine directly through the windows around six in the evening. Typing on my lap may not be comfortable but at least I can see the keyboard without sweat dripping into my eyes. 

And because I'm down here, Beryl is too, which is good for her. You can tell it's hot. She stayed down here for a couple of hours on her own earlier on today, which is something she never likes to do. One more day of this, with tomorrow possibly being a degree or so hotter and then a gradual slip back to more normal summer temperatures over the weekend, at which point I will be at work anyway, where we have do have some sort of (Not very efficient.) air conditioning.

I like hot weather generally. I don't even mind it as hot and humid as this, these days. Humidity used to make my brain stop working but age seems to have tempered that. It's not good for Beryl, though, so I'll be glad when it drops a few degrees. I just hope we don't get any more thunderstorms in the transition. 

On Monday we had the biggest storm we've seen in thirty years, living here. It was like those news clips you see of tropical rainstorms or the tail-end of a hurricane. The drain at the back of the house was completely overwhelmed and we had three inches of water in the so-called conservatory, which is the first time that's ever happened. The conservatory roof leaked, too, although that's nothing new.

I had to stand ankle-deep in water, soaked to the skin from the torrential rain, constantly pulling the debris that was sweeping in out of the drain-grill to keep it clear for about fifteen minutes and then we spent an hour going through all the stuff that had gotten soaked to see what could be salvaged, which was most of it although some of that is never going to be the same again. 

 

Fortunately, water would need to rise more like six inches to get in the house itself. We got off lightly. Down the hill from us there was some more serious flash flooding with some damage to the streets that caused them to be closed to traffic next day. Never live at the bottom of a hill is my advice.

As well as the influx at the back, the storm brought down our giant rosebush at the front, blocking the path, so after I was done bailing out, I was out there, cutting it up and tying it back, still in the rain. And just to put the cap on the day, before any of that happened, while it was still hot and sunny and we had no idea what was coming (Absolutely no thunderstorms were forecast - they were supposed to miss us by twenty miles...), I managed to break the fridge, trying to force-defrost it. 

Never do that. It's the second time I've broken a fridge by removing ice build up too vigorously.

So that was Monday. But by Tuesday afternoon we had a new, improved fridge (This is why people still use Amazon despite complaining about them all the time.) and the conservatory was clean, dry and in better order than before. And of course, with it being so hot, everything that was wet is now dry and you might never know it happened. Although I bloody know, I can tell you!

Hmm. That's one long-ass intro to what I said was going to be a short post. I do like talking about weather. We just don't often get any weather worth talking about here, which I'm now seeing is a bit of a blessing. I suspect we might get more anecdote-worthy weather as climate change tightens its apocalyptic grip. Something to look forward to...

What I thought I was going to talk about was Neverness To Everness. I might have to go back to the top and put in a warning so people who might be interested in that sort of thing don't tab out before they even get there. Like this...

---

[1] Readers with no interest in my home life but who would still like to read about the home life of my imaginary friends, please carry on from here! Everyone else who just clicked out of curiosity to see what would happen  ^ back to top

Last time I posted about NTE I was saying how Flora wanted to get a bigger apartment and maybe ask Lacrimosa to move in with her. Both of those things happened. Flora's delighted with her new flat. Her new flatmate, though...

I love Lacrimosa. She's sweet and funny and charming and honestly you couldn't ask for a more co-operative housemate. If you remember, though, two of the reasons Flora was finding life with Mint a little trying were all the little sighs and strange noises she makes and how she keeps sleeping in Flora's bed. Or, rather, on it.

Sometimes you just don't know when you're well-off, do you? Lacrimosa makes a lot of strange noises, too, and she also talks in her sleep, which means she's making some kind of noise pretty much 24/7. And even though Flora's new apartment at Skyview Halls is enormous, somehow you can hear Lacrimosa all-too-easily, no matter where she is. 

Guess where she mostly is, though? Yep. In Flora's bed. Lacrimosa's favorite thing in the world to do is sleep so she's there a lot. Talking to herself. OK, fair enough, it's a big bed. There's plenty of room for both of them. But it's a big apartment! There's plenty of space for them to have a room each. Plus, I thought she slept in a coffin. Maybe she forgot to bring it with her in the rush...

So, having Lacrimosa move in was a bit of a mixed bag. Also, have I now effectively sublet my old apartment to Mint? She's still living there as far as  know, even though I'm not. Should she be paying rent? 

The really weird part was the way inviting Lacrimosa exactly coincided with a bond quest Flora got at the same time. You need Bond Level 4 to invite someone to live with you, which is also when you get a little bonding quest so you can get to know each other better.

Lacrimosa's quest involves helping her choose a suitable gift for her "Grandpa", who's had to go into hospital. I could write a dissertation on the subtext of this short quest but I'm going to restrict myself to a third of a blog post because it's important to retain a sense of proportion. 

Lacrimosa's "Grandpa" is no blood relation although he is a kind of tomato relative, since he lets Lacrimosa grow the plants in his garden, which is probably the same thing as far as Lacrimosa's concerned. Skia arranged for Lacrimosa to move out of dorm accommodation at BAC and into an apartment he found for her, in a block managed by an elderly couple, who he also asked to keep an eye on her. 

Lacrimosa calls the couple Grandma and Grandpa but as it transpires from conversations with her, she doesn't know them well. Grandpa has gotten ill suddenly with some unspecified ailment and Grandma is mostly absent, visiting him in hospital. Lacrimosa wants to visit too and she knows it's expected that a visitor brings fruit to a patient's bedside but the only fruit she knows anything about is the tomato.

Which is where you, the Appraiser, come in. Lacrimosa, like everyone you meet, seems to value your advice so she asks you to come help her choose a fruit for grandpa. And yes, there is discussion of whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Whichever it is, it's deemed inappropriate for the purpose.  

 

Flora ended up having to choose between I think it was apples, oranges and strawberries. She went for strawberries and Lacrimosa was happy with that although I got the impression she'd have been happy with a house-brick if that's what flora has suggested. Lacrimosa toddled off to catch Grandpa before visiting hours ended and that was the end of it.

Except, since I'd just asked Lacrimosa if she'd like to move into my new apartment, the timing seemed very much to suggest she was moving in with me because her current carers weren't able to give her the attention she needed and I was stepping in to help. That's absolutely how it went in my head canon but I can't help wondering if it isn't there in the writing as well.

It's quite firmly established that Lacrimosa isn't entirely capable of looking after herself and probably shouldn't be left on her own for too long. She's unworldly, to say the least. She knows very little about life outside the strict confines of her job and her extremely limited interests. 

She also talks about herself in the third person, always a sign of concern. And I just noticed that the Appraiser follows suit, always saying "Lacrimosa" where it would be more natural to say "you". I'm reading that as empathy or at least compassion on Floras' part. 

The Appraiser is of exemplary character, highly emotionally literate, or she is if you choose those responses. You could, if you were one yourself, play her as an insensitive jerk, but who'd do that? Not me. I'm pretty sure she has Lacrimosa living with her because that's what Lacrimosa needs right now.  

 

Whether there'll ever be a good moment for her to move back into her own place depends, I guess, on how Grandpa does. I suspect he might be in the hospital for a while. I imagine Flora's going to have to buy yet another bed.

And that, I think, is where I'm going to leave it for now. I've had about enough of typing on this laptop. I was going to do a whole thing about the Ghost Train Ticket quest but that's just going to have to wait. Good quest, though...

 

Notes about AI used in this post

I asked Gemini to do me some html code for the footnote. I've done footnotes before. I could have looked it up old school but why bother? Gemini did the basics, I did the rest. I'd have had to. If Gemini ever had a sense of humor, it seems to have lost it. I remember being mildly irritated by how chatty the AIs used to be. I kinda miss it now.

WILD! Go WILD! Go WILD In The City!

And so we come to the end, which is just as well for my page view stats. Here's my advice for anyone who wants to keep their traffic to a minimum without actually making their blog private: review game demos. Still, for the handful of people with literally nothing better to do than read a verbose description of a small part of a game that isn't available yet and which they almost certainly won't want to play when it is, here we go!

WILD Tactics   33 minutes - Not wishlisted...yet. Oh, wait... now it is!

Of all the demos this time around, Wild Tactics gave me the closest match between expectation and execution. I thought I was going to get an XCom clone with funny animals and that's what I got. I could leave it at that but then I'd have to think of something else to post about today so I'll go into a little more detail.

First off, all the indicators are firmly in the green. Wild Tactics looks great, as you can see from the screenshots. The characters are all very characterful, the backgrounds are as stylized as the flats in a professional production of Guys and Dolls, the dialog is snappy and sharp, the voice acting is energetic and engaging, the UI is clean, the gameplay is crisp and everything works like clockwork. 

If you're looking for a tactical, turn-based strategy game featuring anthropomorphic animals and you've already finished Mutant Year Zero, relax. You've found what you're after. Speaking of which, excuse me while I just go wishlist that one. I said I'd get it if it ever went on sale but then I forgot all about it.

And while I'm at it, I guess I might as well wishlist WILD Tactics, too. Wishlisting isn't a commitment after all. If something strikes you as decent when you play the demo, it's only polite to give it the nod. It's like leaving a tip. 

It's also worth adding games to the list just so I don't forget abnout them altogether, like I did with Mutant Year Zero. I know I won't want to play that or Wild Tactics at the moment, partly because, as I keep saying, summer isn't really my favorite time to play video games but also because I have an innate sense that certain genres are better enjoyed on long, dark evenings. 

For me, Winter games tend to come in three sizes: Long, Medium and Short. Big RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 take me away from the miserable, cold, wet world outside for weeks or even months on end. Point and click adventures with strong narratives and compelling plots take up all my attention for a week or two. Tactical strategy games work well in short, discrete sessions, where I finish a battle or two each evening, often as a palette-cleanser from the more story-driven games, when you just wish they'd all stop talking and kill something already!

I am quite fussy about tactical titles, though. They all play much the same on the surface but something as simple as one awkward key-binding or a clumsy camera can put me off completely. I also don't much go for being yelled at by the game, which was one of the main reasons I couldn't get on with XCom itself.

And I do prefer some humor with my massacres. All these games, or at least all the ones I've played, involve pro-actively murdering everyone who gets in your way. Generally, the writers try to set things up so it seems like a reasonable response:  the world is under attack by aliens and they don't subscribe to the Geneva Convention or you're a persecuted minority the authorities are trying to exterminate. Still, it can get a bit uncomfortable, the "shoot first, ask questions never" routine.

Wild Tactics is moderately light-hearted, if not actually a comedy. The demo gets the set-up out of the way very quickly, letting you know there's a crisis happening and the rule of law has to be put to one side for the moment just to stop everything descending into anarchy. Yeah, That's what all the fascists say, isn't it?

The nature of the crisis intrigued me a little, not least because it seems to be more than a little reminiscent of the basic premise of Beastars, a show I really ought to finish watching. The gist is, all the animals of Clawville live together in harmony except that carnivores aren't allowed to eat meat. It's illegal. But they wants it! THEY WANTS IT!!

Beastars is about a dozen orders of magnitude more subtle and nuanced about it. In Wild Tactics, it's basically Prohibition only meat not booze and supposedly with a " '50s aesthetic" although it looks pretty goddam '20s to me. And instead of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables you have the WILD squad (Is it an acronym? If it is, I missed the explanation of what it stands for.), which is pretty much DC's Suicide Squad only without the superpowers. 

OK, they're not all sociopathic criminals pulled out of prison and given a chance to be useful for a change. Only some of them. Some of them are brutal ex-cops or cynical ex-spies. The usual suspects in other words. And they all have personality defects and catchphrases and attitude problems and some of them can't stand each other and like that. 

The banter keeps things tripping along so you forget just what you're doing. Not that it hasn't been explained to you. Your handler back at HQ specifically tells you to shoot first and forget the body count. Which is exactly what I did.

Not that I had any option. Do any of these games ever let you take prisoners? Maybe once or twice, if it's for the plot...

In the demo at least, WILD Tactics has just about the shortest tutorial I can remember. You have to move your three-animal squad across a car park to a highlighted area. It takes two or three turns, during which you have to defeat precisely one enemy. He got clubbed to death with a baseball bat in one turn by my tank and that was that.

After that, there's a full mission in which you have to go into a night club, where The Golden Fang Clan is stashing... erm... something bad... maybe meat? I wasn't paying attention. You have to find the storage area, destroy whatever it is they're storing there and get out in one piece. Bonus points if you kill everyone in the club!

It was fun. Also easy, which might be why it was fun. It wasn't a walkover, though. The difficulty felt just right. No-one died but I had to use use several of the various healing options available. My tank, doing his job, took a lot of damage and everyone caught a bullet or got stomped. Most of the baddies were rhinos and they like to charge.

Crucially, I found both movement and combat to be intuitive and straightforward, something that's very much not always the case in games of this kind. Cover was clearly marked and easy to understand, targeting wasn't at all fiddly and everything felt logical. There's clear on-screen instruction when anything new comes up -  missions are a form of ongoing tutorial as they often are in these games, so you're coming across new tactics all the time - but I rarely needed the help. It was usually quite clear what was happening.

After the first mission you get to choose what you do next, as again is typical of the genre. You can also buy consumables or upgrades from the store at HQ and send injured team-mates to the medical center, although all my team were extremely unimpressed with the medical facilities and didn't hesitate to say so. I'm guessing upgrading those might be an option at some point.

About the only thing in WILD Tactics I can't remember having seen in a game like this before is the relationship element between the characters. When you select your team there's a diagram that tells you who's friends with whom and which of them can't stand each other. I did notice a little tension in the chatter between my crew as they fought but it seemed like it was there for color. Maybe it has some gameplay implications further in.

All told, I really liked the WILD Tactics demo. If it hadn't been so freakishly hot, I'd have played for longer than half an a hour. (We're in the middle of a another heatwave, a proper one this time, with all-time heat records set to fall over the next few days and a red warning issued for temperatures likely to pose "a risk to life for even the healthy population".)

I've wishlisted it but there's no release date yet. With luck it'll come out just in time for winter.