Or You Could Always, Y'know, Write Less?

All year I've been talking about not spending as much time playing video games as I used to but, coming into November, I think I might have hit a twenty-five year low. If I play more than a couple of hours a day now it's a big gaming day for me.

I'm not having one of those burnouts that used to be so common and which I always found so peculiar. I seem to hear a lot less about those lately. I guess most of the folks that were prone to them have flamed and faded now, leaving the rest of us slow-smoldering remnants slowly turning into gaming charcoal, barely glowing, giving off almost no heat at all.

No, I haven't had enough of gaming. Nor have I really chosen to take a break. It's just happening.

It's as if a lot of other things have drifted up and gently nudged me off the gaming highway I was on, leaving me to putter down the slow, meandering back roads of the hobby instead. I'm not even sorry about it, really, although it does feel odd, if I stop and think about it

I've commented before about how strange it is that the more free time I have in theory, the less free all my time feels in practice. I got a lot more gaming in when I was working full-time than I ever have since I reduced my hours and shifted down into semi-retirement, that's for sure. Also I watched a lot more movies then and read more books. 

I strongly recommend anyone who thinks they can safely defer their cultural experiences until they retire to think again. I had so many plans about what I'd use the extra time for when it came. Not a one of them feels realistic now I'm almost there. That whole "Ask a busy person" saw applies to leisure, too.

All of which might sound a little negative, which would be misleading. I'm enjoying my new routines. Well, by and large. For example, following her minor heart-attack in the summer, I have to go visit my 93-year-old mother three times a week now rather than the couple of times a month, which had been my schedule for years. It could have been a problem but it led me to acquire a car of my own for the first time in many years, which feels good and it's a very pleasant drive. I like driving anyway, so it's nice to have a reason to be doing it.

Then there's Beryl. One of the big eaters of time in recent years has been having a dog around. I spend more time almost every day taking her for walks and playing with her at home than I spend on gaming and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. 

I've always loved being outdoors, walking, in both city and country but I'd fallen a little out of the habit, particularly when my gaming time was at it's peak. Even when I made the effort, I wouldn't bother if the weather wasn't great. Now I'm out every day for at least a while, although it should be said that Beryl is not a fan of wet weather. If the rain isn't actually hammering down, though, we can usually find somewhere to go for a half-hour walk. If the weather's even halfway decent that'll often stretch to an hour and a half.

Luckily, she tends to lie fairly dormant during the day, which gives me a chance to do other things, like gaming. Except mostly I'm more likely to be doing this instead; writing a blog post about the gaming I'm not doing. Then, in the evening she wakes up and wants attention, meaning I don't often get to do much else but play with her, feed her and walk her between tea and bedtime.

When Beryl crashes out around eight or nine in the evening, I tend to go to bed, too. It's earlier than I've ever gone to bed since I was a child. I could stay up (I'm a grown-up. I can stay up as late as I want.) but since I got my (Refurbished.) laptop I've found it too tempting to lie down in comfort and use it instead of sitting up at my desk. 

For most of the year that's meant a few hours spent working on AI-assisted songwriting but very recently I've swapped back to watching TV and... playing games. Partly because I had a gap in my schedule with the music-making on hiatus but mostly because I'm still using the stand-in desktop pending Black Friday, it occurred to me it might be worth doing a little experimenting to see just what games would run on the decidedly non-gaming laptop. I tried it back at the start of the year, when I was playing several titles via an external SDD, most notably Cloudpunk, but I'd not done much about it since.

One of the things that nudged me into trying again was the news that Amazon's withdrawal from the gaming sector had led to a rebranding of Prime Gaming. They sent me an "important update" about it. 

Before I read the email, my first thought was that they were going to close the gaming offer down altogether. Then I thought maybe they were just going to stop giving away free games. Eventually, it dawned on me I could stop guessing and just read the email.

It turned out to be good news. Instead of closing the whole thing down, it looks as though Amazon has slightly expanded its Prime offer. There will still be new games to claim every month and access to all previously-claimed games continues (Although the fact they even had to mention it suggests it isn't considered a permanent right, which hadn't really occurred to me.) 

I can see how we might lose access to the games that were playable only on Amazon's own gaming service, should that be terminated at some future date, but I hadn't considered that the titles claimed via GOG or Epic might also disappear. Not, I should make it clear, that there's any suggestion of that happening just now. But the phrasing does make me wonder about the long-term prospects for those libraries.

The bonus for Prime members is that now, instead of having access to a selection of games on Luna, Amazon's remote gaming streaming service, now we have full access to everything on the "Standard" package. Also Prime Gaming has been rebranded as Luna Gaming, effectively if not officially. All claims are now made through the Luna website.

It nudged me into wondering just how many games in my Prime Gaming library would be playable on the laptop. As I've often mentioned, sometimes satirically, there's always been a tendency for Prime to hand out some very old games. My laptop may not be capable of running much that's new but some of these Prime giveaways are virtually pre-historic!

I installed Prime/Luna and also Good Old Games and started trying a few out. I began with Lake, which I'd almost finished on the desktop, but the save files would appear to be held locally. I could transfer them, I'm sure, but it seemed like too much trouble, especially since I'm most likely only a session or two from the end.

I tried The Academy, Dungeon Rushers and Dark Envoy. They all ran perfectly but none of them grabbed me. Next, I looked at the huge quantity of point&click adventures I'd claimed, all of which, I'm sure, the laptop would handle easily, but nothing caught my fancy. I really wanted something combat-oriented and turn-based, like Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. 

Surprisingly, DoN has become my benchmark for turn-based RPGs. Well, I guess that would still be Baldur's Gate but it's a long time since I played any of that series The German spoof is a lot fresher in my mind. And so far I've had very little success finding anything that feels both similar and satisfying.

It was in that frame of mind that I was going through the list of games I'd claimed, well over two hundred of them, when I spotted a familiar title. Familiarish, anyway: Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I'd completely forgotten about that one.

It's a standalone game set in the same dungeon as the original, featuring some of the same characters only instead of being an RPG, it's one of those management sims where you have to set up and maintain the dungeon so that NPCs can come in and do the adventuring. I've never really fancied that end of things, which seems like all the work for none of the glory or indeed the fun but I figured I might as well give it a go.

And it hooked me immediately. I've played every evening for the last few days, at least ninety minutes each time. There's a campaign storyline, which is where I chose to start, but there's also a sandbox version, which I'll very likely try after I lose the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I will lose it because I had no idea what I was doing for quite a while. The first two stories of my tower are a chaotic, muddled mess. The third, to which I've just gained access, is only any better because it's mostly empty still. I'm sure it'll be just as bad soon enough.

That I'm already considering my options for a second run through the campaign, and imagining what I might do in a sandbox setting, says everything that needs to be said about how enjoyable I'm finding the game. I'm not sure what it is about the Naheulbeuk series that works so well for me but clearly it's something.

That constitutes the main thrust of my gaming at the moment. Apart from NDM, the rest of my game-time of late has been limited to Overseer missions in EverQuest II and the occasional, short session in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. 

I did manage to stay logged into EQII long enough during the Nights of the Dead holiday to collect the new craft books and buy my Necromancer all the petamorph wands she was missing from years past. There were a lot. I also had her buy the new, prestige house, which looks great and will be far more manageable than the vast, sprawling castle she supposedly lives in but which she barely ever visits. Now I just have to find time to move her stuff across and start decorating.

The very interesting-looking new scenario for Once Human has arrived, along with the oddly appropriate crossover event with Palworld. I'm keen to do something about both of those but there are several things stopping me and only one of them is personal inertia.

Even though I thought the stand-in computer wouldn't be able to run a big, flashy, new game like Once Human, I patched it up anyway and logged in to test the theory, which proved to be false. The game runs acceptably on the same graphic settings I've always used and better still if I turn them down just a notch. 

That means I can't use my old PC as an excuse for not playing. Another get-out clause would be that I'm holding back from trying out the new scenario because I'd need to swap characters. The one I'd been playing has finally found herself on a Permanent server and I am not about to move her after the time it's taken to get her onto one. I could either start over from scratch yet again or I guess I could move my original and best-equipped character to a server running the new scenario. Still thinking on it.

The real reason, though, is that I don't think I'll be able to find the time to progress any character very far. At most I might manage a bit of dabbling. That's about all I'm good for at the moment - dabbling.

I noticed Syp saying he was planning on focusing more on CRPGs and less on MMOs in the future. I find I'm no longer able to make that much of a distinction. Unless I stop and think about it, I'm not always even sure to what degree some of the games I'm playing are multiplayer or otherwise. What I do notice now is that the level of regular commitment required to make consistent and meaningful progress in a traditional MMORPG is often beyond me.

Of course, as this blog evidences, I've always been a dabbler and a dilettante by nature when it comes to gaming, be that on or offline, solo or multiplayer. I haven't undergone any kind of sea-change in attitude or approach. It's more that where I used to dabble at gaming for hour after hour, day after day, these days I just dabble at dabbling. 

Not that any of the above is enough to stop me adding yet more games I won't really play to the pile. Today's post was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be a First Impressions piece about Duet Night Abyss, that not-a-gacha open-world RPG I said I probably wouldn't be playing. Except then I read a piece at MMOBomb where they said the story was quite good. They also made it sound as though there was a lot more to the game than just fighting, which made me think I ought to take a look at it after all.

I remembered DNA was on Steam, which always makes me more likely to give something a try. No wonder almost three-quarters of game developers feel Steam "has a monopoly on the PC games market." Unfortunately, when I went to the game's Store page to download it, I found a note saying "This game is not yet available on Steam". There's no release date, either.

I could download it from the game's own website but who knows if an account there will be transferable later and anyway I really do not want to be filling out another set of details. I'll wait until it comes to Steam, by which time, with a bit of luck, I'll also have a PC capable of playing it properly.

And that, I think, is likely to remain the state of play regarding my gaming for the immediate future. As soon as I do get a new machine, I intend to re-install New World and take a look at the very considerable amount of content I've missed. I'll also be playing the EQII expansion as soon as it arrives, whether or not I have a new machine to play  it on. If necessary, this one should cope well enough.

Whether any of these games, or any more I haven't thought of, will get enough play-time from me to make a lasting impression is another matter entirely. I don't see me freeing up much in the way of gaming-hours unless something quite unexpected happens. 

But then, none of us expected the pandemic, did we? So you never know. 

Sunny, Sleep!

I've watched Parks and Recreation almost twice. The first time I made it all the way through, the second I only got about two thirds of the way in, at which point I stopped, having decided it was a lot more annoying and the characters a lot less likeable than I remembered. 

On neither run did I pay an enormous amount of attention to Rashida Jones' character, Ann Perkins. She mostly seemed to be there as a foil for Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope and, latterly, as a vehicle for making certain socio-political points, something the show leaned into heavily and occasionally awkwardly. I hadn't really noticed that on my original watch, thanks to it also being extremely funny.

Even so, I remembered the actor's name well enough and sufficiently positively that, when I saw she was the lead in a Sci-Fi show called Sunny on AppleTV+, it was enough to make me consider watching it. I was in the market for a good sitcom. I'd just run out of Ted Lassos. 

Not that Sunny was ever going to be a direct replacement. On the face of it, the shows are in no way alike. One is a sports-based sitcom in a contemporary British setting, the other a science-fictional black comedy set in near-future Japan. They do have two things in common, though; they both have episodes that generally run for around half an hour (In the case of Ted Lasso, for the first season, anyway...) and they each feature a central character who's living and working in a country not their own, whose ways and mores they do not entirely grasp.

Of those two factors, it was the episode length that initially attracted me. I had a half-hour slot to fill and it was a good fit. And I wanted something that was going to stick to the brief. I was slightly irked by the way the episodes of Ted Lasso stretched and sprawled over the later seasons. Not that I thought the episodes were baggy or that they outstayed their welcome. It's just that when I start watching a half-hour sitcom series I would kind of like it to stay that way. It messes with my timings if it doesn't.

The other reason I picked it was the premise. (Apart from there not being exactly a wealth of other options. I do seem to have run through most of the half-hour sitcoms worth bothering with now.) Here's the pitch as made by someone in Apple's PR Dept:

 "Rashida Jones stars as a woman in Kyoto investigating her family’s disappearance with the help of a robot named Sunny." 

That's short and to the point, isn't it? There's a lot in there, though. 

First up, there's the name of the star. I've already said that that was a hook for me. Then there's the name of the city. Kyoto is intriguing. Japan is one of those countries that's been cool for decades now. Anything set there is going to have an innate appeal, even for me, though I'm not much of a Japanophile. But it's usually Tokyo, isn't it? Just like it's usually London or New York. Kyoto's a nice switch.

The show is also a mystery, as we learn from a few words in the middle of that single sentence. That's good. I like mysteries and investigations thereof. 

But the capper comes right at the end. There's a robot. And the robot, not Rashida Jones, is the title character. 

It's an exemplary piece of promotion. So much packed into as single sentence. It pulls you right in. Well, it did me.

Of course, the first thing I did before deciding whether I was going to go any further with it was to check how many episodes there were and how many seasons it ran or even if it was still running. That's standard procedure before starting any new series on a streaming platform these days. Don't want to get sucked into something that's going to come to a sudden stop after the first season, when the show doesn't get renewed.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened to Sunny. Ten episodes and gone. Which would be fine if it was a mini-series with a finite arc but it wasn't. It was supposed to carry on. It just didn't.

Why? Not because it was poorly received by the critics, that's for sure. Sunny has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn't do so well on Metacritic, where it just fails to make 70%, but even there both the critics and the viewers are of a "Generally Favorable" opinion. 

No, apparently what happened was that no-one watched it. It seems Rashida Jones' name can't open a TV show after all. Or maybe Apple didn't promote it vigorously enough, despite being able to write a killer one-liner for that exact purpose.

A few years ago, the knowledge that the show got canned after one season would have been enough to make me move on to look for something that lasted longer. That was before premature cancellation became the norm for most good shows. I decided a while back that to skip something just because the schedulers went cold on it at the first opportunity would be to deny myself some potentially good viewing, so these days I'm willing to watch anything that looks like it might be worthwhile, even when I know it's not going anywhere.

Before making the final decision, I watched the trailer. I almost always watch the trailer before deciding whether to watch a new show about which I know nothing. Trailers rarely tell you if you're going to enjoy something but they're not bad at letting you know you won't. If the acting or the script is unbearable in a two-minute trailer it's a fair bet it won't get any less so when there's more of it.

That's the trailer I watched. I hope you'll agree that it doesn't really scream "comedy". In fact, neither does that single sentence description I was so impressed by, now I come to think of it. It may well be that the only reasons I thought it was going to be a comedy were the length (There aren't many half-hour dramas.) and because I'd looked it up on Wikipedia, where it's described as a "black comedy".

All of which is a long preamble to say how I came to watch it in the first place. The real question is was it any good?

Better do the Spoiler Alert thing now...

Yes, it was good. Very good. Verging on excellent. 

Rashida Jones is much better in this than in Parks&Rec. Well, I thought she was. She has to make a depressed, miserable, grief-stricken character appealing, sympathetic and funny, which is an ask but she manages it. 

As always in these situations, no-one who's just experienced a truly traumatic, catastrophic event in their personal lives can behave realistically because if they did no-one would watch but both Rashida Jones character, Suzie, and her mother-in-law, Noriko (Played by Judy Ongg.) do a great job of conveying the depth of emotion they're experiencing, following the deaths in a plane crash of their respective husband and son/son and grandson, all their emotions and reactions being convincingly displayed through the filters of their different cultural backgrounds and expectations.

This isn't entirely a fish-out-of-water comedy like Ted Lasso because Suzie has been in Japan for long enough to get married and have a son, who appears to be about six or seven years old. She's lived and worked in Japan for at least that long, so she's no longer new to the culture. She just isn't really part of it. Nor, it appears, does she want to be. 

She hasn't even tried to learn the language, something which comes up several times as an indicator of how unwilling she is to integrate, although that interpretation is undermined to a degree by the fact that everyone uses a little in-ear device that fluently translates speech from one language to another. Once those become commonplace in the real world, I'm not sure how many people are going to bother learning another language any more.

That's one of the few indicators that we're sometime in the future. Other than that and the widespread presence of robots, there really isn't much to suggest this isn't a contemporary story. And realistically, it doesn't need to be more than a few years ahead of where we are now. The homebots look, if anything, somewhat behind the kind of technology that already exists, at least physically. Where they deviate is in the degree of self-awareness and genuine intelligence they display.

Which brings me to Sunny herself. Having watched the show, I don't think many people would say "itself". Mostly that's because Sunny is voiced by a human being, Joanna Sotamura. There's absolutely none of that "robot voice" nonsense. Sunny talks like a person. 

There's another major factor in accepting Sunny as a person herself, though, and that's her face. If engineers in robotics labs aren't taking notes and making prototypes based on the way it's done in the show, they should be. 

Sunny doesn't have a human face. She has a giant emoji. Her face is just a big, round, glowing screen on which very simple eyes, eyebrows and mouth can be displayed. With those few features she can express just about any emotion you care to name - happiness, amusement, sadness, anger, fear, curiosity, suspicion, even sarcasm and irony. It's astonishingly versatile, utterly convincing and I would imagine entirely technically possible with today's technology. 

What's perhaps less feasible is the way Sunny thinks. She clearly does think. She's also evidently self-aware. That's perhaps where it's most apparent we're in the future. A live link to an LLM would give you a good approximation of self-awareness but it would be a trick. This is the real thing.

And that's why Suzie, starting from a position of loathing close to hatred, comes to see Sunny as a friend. A good, close friend. Perhaps someone she loves. The show is indeed a mystery and a good one but the redemption arc has as much to do with Suzie coming to know herself through her relationship with Sunny as it does with finding out what really happened to he husband and son. 

As for the plot, it's relatively easy to follow even though, as always with these things, it's also ferociously complicated. It revolves around what happened to Masa, Suzies's husband, who always led her to believe he worked in refrigerator software. It turns out he was in robotics. I'm not entirely sure even now why he kept it a secret but it was probably something to do with the Yakuza, who are at the back of most of the bad stuff that happens in the story.

And there's a lot of bad stuff. The show was made by A24, a studio not known for holding back, and I found Sunny a tough watch at times, at least for a supposed comedy. There are several torture scenes and although the camera always cuts away long before anything terrible happens, there's enough for anyone with an active imagination to want to look away even sooner. There are also a couple of sudden explosions of violence that seemed slightly out of keeping with the rest of the show.

Mostly, though, it's people talking and walking and drinking. There's a lot of running away, too. One whole episode is dedicated to it. There's quite a lot of general milling about about in the streets of Kyoto, which gives ample opportunity for those neon-lit night shots so beloved of fans of Japanese pop culture. Also plenty of scenes in booths, stores, offices and temples to keep the cultural drip-feed pumping.

All of which I enjoyed. You expect it, don't you? Like you expect a lot of cars going down hills in shows set in San Francisco or street cafes in anything set in Paris. 

The reason everyone's after Suzie is because Suzie has Sunny and the reason everyone's after Sunny is because Sunny can hurt people. Homebots shouldn't be able to do that. Like Asimov's robots, homebots cannot harm a human although they can cut each other up with chainsaws well enough in back-street knock-offs of Robot Wars, which I don't think was something Asimov ever considered.  

Masa has spent his adult life teaching robots how to be more than just robots and it seems one of the side-effects of his breakthroughs in the field was to make them so attached to individual humans they'd break their programming to protect them. This is very well established by some quite detailed backstory and does make sense when, as I said earlier, you begin to see the robots as self-aware individuals. Your dog might attack someone to protect you, after all, no matter how friendly and well-behaved it was otherwise. 

The Yakuza want the code so they can get bots so assassinate people without the suspicion falling on them. The whole thing is complicated even further by an internal power struggle within a particular Yakuza family. Let's be honest, this show is packed with plot. I've seen movies with less than there is a single episode of this thing.

It all hangs together remarkably well. I never felt lost or thought things were going off the rails. It's complex in a good way. As are the characters, several of whom I haven't even mentioned. 

I'm not going to go through them all but I really have to say something about Mixxy. She's an "aspiring mixologist" who Suzie meets in a bar and ends up spending most of the rest of the show with. Mixxy is played by annie the clumsy. That is the actress's name, something I didn't know until about two minutes ago. If you're surprised, imagine how I feel...

annie the clumsy is "a singer and songwriter from Japan. Inspired by New Zealand-based comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, she has been making songs with her lovely ukulele, very clumsily, since 2011.
She produces her own Youtube show called the annie the clumsy show where she does random stuff very randomly." In Sunny she does not play the ukelele. Not even once. She's not even that random.

What she is is extremely watchable. She and Rashida Jones make a great double act. Mixxy is very funny and very endearing and I did not trust her for one single second from the first moment she appeared. 

She tells Suzie right at the start that she's a lesbian and she's just broken up with her girlfriend so I thought at first she had designs on her but a couple of very brief plot moments later on made it quite plain she had a very different agenda. Sunny absolutely does not trust Mixxy and Sunny is one hundred per cent right.

Except, by the end of the season, Sunny does come to trust Mixxy because Mixxy is just like a puppy. You couldn't not like her even though she is all kinds of trouble. 

All of which leads directly into the cliffhanger at the very, very end of the last show. The cliffhanger that perfectly sets up the second series, which will never come.

If you watch the show, which I strongly recommend you do, and you're uncomfortable with hanging plot threads and unresolved endings, I suggest you switch off about ninety seconds before the end of that last episode. At that point, everything is there or thereabouts resolved and happily, too. It's still a bit of an open-ended finish but it feels like a slice-of-life story where everyone carries on with their lives and we go our own way and leave them to it.

If you stay right til the end, though, you'll find out you were absolutely right about Mixxy. I believe my exact words were "I bloody knew it!" Sadly, I'll never know what happens next although logic tells me it would have been something bad followed by something worse followed by something good, which is how these things always go.

The show is based, very loosely I'd imagine, on a novel called The Dark Manual by Colin O'Sullivan. I've added it to my wishlist so with any luck someone might give it to me for Christmas. If they don't, I'll buy it myself. 

It might be the only way to find out what happened next.

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...