You Had One Job...

As I said yesterday, my daily routine these days concludes with a couple of hours of viewing time, all of which happens in bed, on my five year-old, 8" Kindle Fire. Having used the device for half a decade, I'm still in two minds over whether or not I'd recommend it. It very much depends on what you'd want to use it for, which I suppose applies to most things, but seems particularly foregrounded here.

The negatives became apparent fairly early on and have only gotten worse. You're at least theoretically locked into Amazon's ecosystem although one of the first things I did after I set the tablet up was to go online and research how to sideload Google Play. That gets you access to the whole of the wider Android marketplace but it doesn't do you a lot of good when most of the stuff you're interested in comes up as "Not available for your device".

The Kindle Fire is definitely not designed for playing games. It wasn't great at it when I bought it and half a decade later it won't run anything new that I want to try. That's how I ended up installing Bluestacks and re-installing Nox the other day, although as I said at the time, neither of those will run the one game I wanted to play, either. 

They will run pretty much everything else the Kindle Fire won't, though, and there's a third option I meant to mention but forgot, that being Google's own proto-PC-platform, Google Play Games. As the official description puts it 

"Google Play Games on PC brings the best of Google Play by enabling players to experience an immersive and seamless cross-platform gameplay."

The service is still in beta but a couple of weeks back Google rolled it out to 120 countries so it's pretty widely available. At some point I'll probably give it a fair run and post about how I find it but my initial impression is that it's slick and professional as you'd expect but with a limited choice of games as yet. 

It looks as though Google are trying to ensure the games on the service are playable natively using PC controls. There's some of this built into the service itself with key-mapping and games are categorised as either "compatible" or "optimized", depending on how much work the developer has done to port their titles across to PC. 

A quick check of what's available right now yields somewhat disappointing results. Genshin Impact is there, although why you'd need to use the mobile version on PC when there's an actual PC edition is hard to imagine. On the other hand, Honkai Star Rail, is not, so maybe the reverse logic also applies, an argument made neither more nor less convincing by the presence on Google Play Games of HSR's sister title, the oddly-named Honkai Impact 3rd which, although I'd never heard of it until now, is apparently also available on Steam.

Neither Black Desert Mobile nor Dragon Nest (Any version.) are included, unfortunately, and neither is Sky: Children of Light, the game I installed the service hoping to be able to play. For now, there seems to be no real reason to prefer Google Play Games over the established independent alternatives but I have no doubt that will soon change, provided whoever's sponsoring this one at Google doesn't lose interest and wander off.

Returning to the supposed topic, my Kindle Fire, I would also be hesitant to say anything very good about its Amazonian operating system. Derived from Android but heavily modified, FireOS is functional but limited. It chugs along, occasionally halting and requiring a reboot to get it going again. I'd blame that on the age of my Fire but that wouldn't be a convincing excuse; it's always done it.

As for web-browsing, I wouldn't say "forget it" but I would say "bring a book". I tend to use my Kindle within a few feet of the router with a five-bar signal strength rated "Excellent" by the Fire itself and yet it takes what seems like forever to load a new web page. Actually it's seconds but a second is forever in computer time.

Not a real Mondrian.

Worse, the Fire's ability to stream from a website seems inordinately inferior to the speed it can shunt information from one of its own authorised apps like Prime or Netflix. The YouTube app, which I really don't like, works much better than watching the same YouTube videos on Firefox or Chrome, where they sometimes display only as faux-Mondrian blocks of colored squares.

A minor but exceptionally irritating aspect of FireOs is its bull-headed refusal even to consider delivering notifications. As far as I can tell after extensive research it's literally impossible to get a Kindle Fire to cough up the code from a Google Notification, making certain apps entirely inaccessible to me if I'm foolish enough to try and use a Google account to log in. I don't actually approve of the Notification process to begin with but as with many things in life, you'd rather be able to have it and not use it than be denied entirely.

So much for the things the Kindle Fire does badly or not at all. Obviously it would have gone to the back of the cupboard under the stairs long ago if it didn't also have some powerful positives. Really, one positive: the display.

The Fire is designed as a media device by which Amazon really mean a screen on which to watch things you've bought from Amazon. As the name implies, it can act as a Kindle for reading text, a job it performs very well, if not quite as well as an old school Kindle with one of those screens that apes paper. Or so I assume. I've never used one.

Where the Kindle Fire really shines, though, is in video. The display is significantly better than my monitor and far better than my (Admittedly crappy.) television. Even though mine is a five year-old, basic model, the image is intensely crisp and sharp. I'm not sure my eyes are capable of interpreting better.

I didn't ask for a fox.

The thing I found most interesting about watching moving images on a handheld-screen when I first
started was how immersive it could be, even when the image was much smaller than those I was used to. The such first device I ever used was an MP4 player, the make and model of which I can no longer remember. It had a screen about two inches square, so small you'd have imagined it would be all but useless for anything more than reading the liner notes on an album, yet I was able to download TV shows and watch them at work in my lunch break with as much enjoyment as if I was sitting in front of my TV screen at home.

Later, I watched some of the same shows again on a much larger screen and was fascinated by the detail I'd missed but the more surprising discovery was that the lack of that extra visual information didn't seem to have reduced my pleasure or understanding to any meaningful degree. I'm of the opinion the imagination readily fills in the absent detail without the viewer even realising there's anything missing.

Fascinating as that process may be, it's irrelevant to the Kindle Fire. In fact, my experience suggests its rather the reverse. When I move between watching the same shows on my PC monitor and the Kindle Fire, it's the image on the smaller screen that feels more distinct. I prefer it and not just because when I'm watching the Fire I'm usually lying down - although that certainly doesn't hurt.

There's a lot of information available online about the optimal screen size to viewing distance ratio. The Fire display has clearly been optimized for viewing at a comfortable arm's length. If you have average-length arms, I guess. It feels natural, comfortable and immersive. I find it easier to get lost in the image with the Kindle Fire than with just about any other screen I've watched, large or small.

Now I did.

Finally but not at all unimportantly, the sound on the Kindle is really good. I'd prefer it if the speakers faced forward rather than straight up into the ceiling, but they still deliver gratifyingly clear audio at a consistent volume that doesn't vary between applications the way it does on my PC.

The two final positives I have to share about the Kindle Fire are also the two main reasons I bought it in the first place. Kindles are very cheap and very reliable. 

Prior to buying mine, I'd been through something like seven or eight tablets in four or five years. Either I broke them or they broke themselves. Some of them were objectively superior in some respects to the Kindle and most I'd been quite happy with while they lasted but I was fed up of paying good money for devices that barely limped past the manufacturer's minimum guarantee before falling over.

That my Fire, which cost me less than half the price of most of my previous tablets, is still working as well after five years as it did five minutes out of the box is enough to make me feel charitable towards its many flaws. That and the fact it does the one thing I really want it to do pretty much perfectly means there's every chance that, when it finally does expire I'll most likely buy another.

As I implied at the beginning, I wouldn't exactly recommend the thing but then I wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from buying one, either. For me, it has one job to do and it does it well, so I guess it gets a passing grade.

Insert Joke About "One Ring" Here...

This week's big mmorpg news has to be the out-of-the-blue announcement that Amazon's supposedly-abandoned plan to launch a new game based on the Lord of the Rings IP is back on. You could have picked this up anywhere. It was all over the media, from Variety to the Lord of the Rings Online forums, although I think I first spotted it at GamesIndustry.biz, where there was an interview with Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann about it.

Hartmann kind of skates over the reasons why the earlier deal with Tencent fell apart but he has some interesting things to say about the potential clash between the juggernaut he's driving and the horse-drawn haycart that is Standing Stone's LotRO:

"First of all, I have a lot of respect for them to keep it going that long. They have a, not huge, but a very dedicated fanbase. But looking just at the technology, where we're at now, and where we will be in a couple of years, it's just worlds apart. It's a little exaggeration if I say it's going to be like black and white movies to colour, but that's the approach I want to take. It's just a completely different world."

That seems not just fair but, if anything, a polite understatement. Let's assume Amazon's game will take at least three years to launch, although five would probably be more reasonable estimate. In three years, LotRO will be almost twenty years old and to be charitable it was hardly cutting-edge in 2007. As Wilhelm pointed out in a post only yesterday, LotRO is all but unplayable on a 3440×1440 monitor and the official launcher, as I can readily confirm, is one of the worst in the genre.

Aesthetically, LotRO may be a magnificent rendering of Tolkein's vision, holding true to both the spirit and the fact of the lore, but it's also a clunky, awkward video game that's showing its age a good deal more obviously than many of its contemporaries. While I think it's likely that Hartmann will be proved wrong in his belief that "the most likely scenario is… for people just to move over, because the other one is an old game", that's going to have more to do with the stubborn, set-in-their-ways attitude of the current playerbase than the intrinsic merits of the game. Well, that and the inevitable drag factor of sunk cost, fallacious as it may be.

Of course, the preferences of a few thousand LotRO players is most likely going to be neither here nor there. As Hartmann observes, their numbers are "not huge". Then again, are they all that much smaller than those for Amazon's one and only home-grown mmorpg to date, New World? That game sold more than a million copies in a matter of days but now, after all the very well-publicized problems it's had over its first year or so of operation, Steam shows it with an average concurrency of just 15k. 

Of course, when you have fifteen thousand people playing your game at the same time, that probably means at least fifty thousand playing in total. Maybe more, although a multiplier of more than five would seem over-optimistic. Let's say 75k, tops. 

Is that more than LotRO? I'd have thought so but apparently others disagree. MMORPG.gg, posing the question "Is LotRO Worth Playing in 2023?", reckon "The LOTRO population has seen a resurgence over the last year or so and is currently quite healthy with around 100K active players." Other equally unreliable sources talk about daily concurrencies of 30-50k, which sounds, frankly, insane to me.

How they come by any of those figures is anyone's guess but we can at least say for certain that LotRO does still have the potential to attract new or returning players after a decade and a half. As Brightlife reported about a year ago in a YouTube video entitled "LotRO is ALIVE in 2022!", GameSpot recorded the game's highest player count in ten years back in April of last year.

Sounds amazing until you realize that was still only 3,700 peak concurrent players on Steam. Now, given, Steam is very definitely not how most LotRO players access the game - most of them are still using that terrible launcher - but the Steam Charts do at least provide some comparative data. A year later, that average concurrent player count on Steam has fallen back by more than 75% to linger somewhere in the eight-hundreds.

All of which doesn't prove much. It does, however, demonstrate the hardiness of the game Turbine made and that Standing Stone (Or Daybreak, if you prefer the masks-off version.) continue to curate and develop. It's not unlikely that over the course of its lifetime LotRO has seen more players in total than New World or that it currently retains a greater percentage of those players after sixteen years than New World does after a year and a half.

If Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMORPG does put an end to LotRO, I very much doubt it will because of a bleed-over of population. I'd lay odds the huge majority of current players won't move across, just like the huge majority of EverQuest players didn't abandon that game in favor of EverQuest II. Just because two games share the same IP doesn't make them interchangeable.

What would seem to be the  greater threat would be some combination of legal or commercial circumstances outside of the games themselves, limiting or ending Standing Stones' ability to carry on with their version. By some accounts (The ones I believe.) it was something like that which led to the eventual closure of Star Wars Galaxies, when Star Wars: the Old Republic appeared over the event horizon.

I suspect, however, that some kind of "One Country, Two Systems" compromise will be the eventual outcome. Put another way, if Amazon's game is successful, LotRO will be too insignificant to matter and if it's not, no-one will care, anyway. Either way, benign neglect should see the older game through.

From a personal perspective, I'd love to see Amazon's game succeed. The press release makes it sound very appealing: "an open-world MMO adventure in a persistent world set in Middle-earth". I'd play that.

The proposed game will be developed by "Amazon Games Orange County, the studio behind Amazon Games’ open-world MMO game “New World.” That's good. I really like New World. The main reason I don't play any more is because my machine is too old to run it well and I got fed up with the restrictions that come with playing it on GeForce Now.

New World has certainly had its problems but the core game has always been fun to play, the world has always felt convincing and the team behind it has shown dedication, persistence and imagination. It's only reasonable to assume the studio has learned a lot from the experience of building and operating their first, major MMORPG and that that experience will serve them well in developing another.

My main concern is that if it takes five years, as it probably will, I'll be seventy when it arrives. I'm getting to the stage where it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to get too excited about projects that could take years to complete. I mean, imagine if it ended up taking as long as Camelot Unchained or Star Citizen...

On the bright side, if I am in a position to play Amazon's Lord of the Rings when it comes out, at least I should have a PC able to run the game by then. The one I've got isn't going to last another five years, that's for sure.

At my age, you have to take your wins where you can find them.

Nothing From LucasArts This Month? Are You Sure?

Another month, another bunch of freebies from Amazon, another post from me, telling you which I took, which I left and which I'll play. Hah! Just joking on that last one. Like I'll play any of them.

Still, free stuff, easy post... all of that...

So, what's new this month? Well, timeliness, for a start. For the first time in as long as I can remember the new offer actually popped on the first of the month. It was pure chance I spotted it, really. I just happened to be on the app yesterday, looking for something else, I forget what, and there they were; six brand new titles.

Let's go through them. It won't take long.

Doors: Paradox - "A relaxing puzzle escape game! Make your way through a variety of hand-crafted 3D dioramas, look for useful objects, find hidden clues and solve fun puzzles! Unravel this mysterious adventure about chaos, order and the surreal" £12.79 on Steam. Rating: Very Positive.  

Can you say high concept? The screenshots look like they were pulled straight from someone's Etsy page, not from a game. There are fifty-eight of these things, apparently, and all you have to do is "solve the puzzles, open the door, and travel to the next." 

Can't say I'm sold on the idea but the images are pretty enough and the puzzles are supposedly "fit for all players" so I might be able to manage them. I guess it might be worth a look. Claimed.

The Amazing American Circus  - "Roll up and play a deck building game like no other! Gather weird and wonderful performers, amaze audiences, explore Gilded Age America, and transform your run down circus into an entertainment empire. Play your cards right and you could claim the crown of greatest showman from P.T .Barnum!" £15.49 on Steam. Rating: Mostly Positive.

This one looks a bit more interesting. The graphics are moderately appealing, although that fin de siecle illustrative style never did a lot for me. It was a successfully-funded Kickstarter, which could be a positive or a negative. 

I quite like card battlers, which is what this is, according to some of the reviews, but only if they're pretty simple and straightforward, which this seems to be if the people who don't much like it are to be believed. It also has a storyline, which is good, and a heavy focus on resource management, which probably isn't.

Enough there, on balance, to make it worth a look, I think, even though it's highly unlikely I'd ever play it to a finish. Claimed.

Banners of Ruin - "Assemble your party. Answer the call. Win the war. Build a deck and fight a series of turn-based combats with up to 6 party characters through the city of Dawn's Point. Each character can unlock a set of unique cards and abilities that can augment your deck in powerful, exciting ways." £15.49 on Steam. Rating: Very Positive.

Oh, look! It's another card battler! Only this one has anthropomorphic animals! Now I'm interested! Also, the visual style is much more my sort of thing. The spot illos are gorgeous and the muted color palette with the chiaroscuro lighting effects does something for me.

On the downside, this one seems to be the opposite of Amazing American Circus in that most of the complaints revolve around mechanical complexity and unfair difficulty spikes. I suspect that, while I might like this game, it won't like me. 

Still, obviously not going to turn it down just for that. Claimed.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - "Guide two brothers on an epic fairy tale journey from visionary Swedish film director, Josef Fares and top-tier developer Starbreeze Studios. Control both brothers at once as you experience co-op play in single player mode, like never before." £10.99 on Steam. Rating: Very Positive.

This looks amazing. Visually, that is. The screenshots are stunning and the game looks even more impressive in the gameplay videos. I confess I have never heard of "visionary Swedish film director, Josef Fares", but I assume his involvement explains the cinematic feel of the whole thing. 

On the face of it, this seems like it would be a gimme but dig a little deeper and the warning signs begin to flash. It looks extremely wholesome, even child-friendly, in the promotional material, so it's a surprise to find this stern warning on the Steam page: "This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content".

That I could deal with but I have more of a problem with the even stricter caveat, in bold and with an orange border, presumably so you can't say you missed it and ask for your money back: "Notice: Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons requires a controller to play." 

And I could deal with that, too. I bought a controller a while back for just these sorts of situations. But not for situations like this: "Control both brothers at once as you experience co-op play in single player mode, like never before. Solve puzzles, explore the varied locations and fight boss battles, controlling one brother with each thumbstick."

Yeah, that sounds a bit much. Then again, maybe not. One reviewer disputes the necessity: "Despite Steam's notice, Brothers does not need a controller to play. " Guess I'll just to have to play it myself and find out. Claimed.

Desert Child - "You are a hungry, young hoverbike racer who needs to get off Earth before it E-X-P-L-O-D-E-S. Hunt bounties, throw races, and do whatever you can to get to Mars and win the Grand Prix." £8.99 on Steam. Rating: Mostly Positive.

I was going to throw this one a hard pass until I spotted something deep in the pitch: "Explore a pixel-art solar system inspired by Cowboy Bebop, Akira and Redline". And then this, too: "Chill to an original lo-fi hip-hop soundtrack". Some of those are things I like...

The reviews on Steam are fascinatingly polarised, veering from "one of the worst games I've reviewed for Steam, as I was physically repelled by the experience" to "a rare game that puts style over substance and still comes out compelling and fun, despite the extremely simple core." 

Why the hell not? Quite looking forward to trying it now. Claimed.

Spinch - "Transcend the material realm and assume your true form as Spinch, a hyper-agile organism consumed by the quest to rescue a litter of its missing offspring, in this side-scrolling, psychedelic platformer from the mind of award-winning Canadian cartoonist, Jesse Jacobs. " £11.39 on Steam. Rating: Mostly Positive.

Finally, something I can reject. I watched a few seconds of video and the aesthetic is a lot more pleasing in full sound and movement but I still wouldn't want to be stuck with it for more than a minute or two. Plus, y'know, side-scolling platformer. Not my thing at all. Not Claimed.

And that's it for the app. Let's just check the website because, as we know, there's always something more lurking over there...

Oh, yeah.. Quake.  There's that. I don't think I need to describe Quake to anyone, do I? Didn't play it back then, not going to play it now. Not Claimed. 

Finally, something called Rose Riddle 2: Werewolf Shadow, which momentarily looked intriguing but turned out to be yet another timewaster from Legacy Games. I think I've learned my lesson there. Not Claimed.

Quake needs a link from your Amazon account to the Epic Games store and Rose Riddle requires a similar link to Legacy. Just in case you were going to rush off to grab one of them.

So, on to the in-game loot for games I might one day play... except, for the first time ever, there isn't any. Well, there is but I've already claimed it all. 

Maybe the web page is still on Amazon time. I'll check back in a few days but if even I find anything new, I'll probably keep it to myself. I think once a month is plenty for posts like this. Let's all meet back here in January and we'll do it all over again.

They Come From A Land... Go On, You Can Finish The Rest.

I had a plan for today's post. That was my first mistake. Never plan ahead.

It started on Saturday, when I realised it was the first of October. I'd already done a post for that day and I wasn't intending to post at all on Sunday because I'd be working, so I mentally pencilled in Monday for the next instalment of "What's Amazon Giving Away This Month?"

Unfortunately, as I should have remembered, Amazon doesn't begin the month on the first. They're beyond that kind of conventional numbering. Last month's free offers don't expire until today. I just checked and there's nothing new up yet.

That post's going to have to wait until tomorrow, then. I did toy with the idea of not posting anything at all but I wasn't comfortable with skipping another day. I had a few other ideas but they didn't come together, so here we are with that old staple of quick fixes - a music post!

Luckily, I had one already simmering. A week or so ago, Magi Was Taken at Indiecator put up a post featuring some of his current favorite Australian bands. The selection wasn't entirely to my taste but I do very much agree with Magi that a lot of good music is coming out of Australia these days. 

After I read Magi's post I went trawling through YouTube, looking for some new-to-me bands from the other side of the planet I thought might be worth pointing up here. It really didn't take me very long at all to find some. 

I had to have somewhere to start, of course, and where better than a local radio station? Okay, with government funding, a national reach and a global presence by way of the worldwide web, it's stretching the definition of "local" to breaking point, but TripleJ is at least based in Australia and supposedly "places a greater emphasis on broadcasting Australian content compared to commercial stations", at least according to Wikipedia.

More to the point, I'm subbed to their covers series, Like A Version, so it's in my face every time I look at YouTube. I tried the most recent Australian act I saw there, which happened to be The Bouys. Not a very promising name but I knew the song they were covering and it was a very curious choice...

...which I'm not going to share. Yet. I'm saving it for Halloween. It's perfect.

That doesn't mean we aren't going to get anything by them. We are. We're getting this one.

Red Flags - The Bouys

Not crazy about the rawk guitar, if I'm honest, but I love the rest of it. Also, it's super-upbeat, which always makes me happy. I get why they're called "The Bouys" now, too. Most amusing.

That put a ton of interesting suggestions all down the right-hand side. It was hard to know where to go next but one title stood right out.

Canberra - Suzi

Can't really get more Australian than the name of the capital city. Suzi really brings that Australian accent to the fore, too. I wanted to check the full lyric before I said too much about the song but I can't find it on any of the usual sites. From what I can hear, though, I'm getting the feeling Suzi isn't feeling too enthusiastic about her home town. A line like "I'm never going back to Canberra" will tend to give that impression.

My next choice doesn't come from the YouTube algorithm for once. It's more of a personal suggestion from one of Suzi's band, Declan Long, the guitar player. Not that I know him personally, you understand. It's more the t-shirt he's wearing, which he helpfully doesn't change even when he's pretending to be a bartender in the video.

The t-shirt, which kinda looks like he made it himself, says "Teenage Joans". When I saw it I thought two things: 

1. Is that the name of a band? 
2. I really hope that's the name of a band!

It's the name of a band. And they're as good as their name suggests.

Something About Being Sixteen - Teenage Joans

I love the production on this. It's so thick. I love that guitar sound, too. I could live without yet another food fight video but at least the pastel colors make it a little less unpleasant to watch than most. 

Teenage Joans are two people, neither called Joan and pretty soon neither to be teenagers either. They've won a shedload of awards in Australia, which means no-one else on the planet has ever heard of them, I imagine. Must be hell for a musician, being so far from the center of the musical universe. Or maybe it's heaven. How would I know?

One idea for a music post that's been floating around in the shallows of my mind for a while is something about bands that use the word "Teen" or "Teenage", either in thier name or their song titles. There are plenty of them and it's a word redolent with associations, positive, negative and every other kind of tive.

If I ever get round to writing it I'm sure Teenage Joans will make another appearance and so will this next bunch, who did come up as a suggestion on YouTube.

Girl Sports - Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

Now that's a great riff. Also, can't beat a shouted response chorus. Killer dropout, too. This is one that sounds better every time you hear it and it sounded pretty damn good the first time.

I'm guessing it's no co-incidence their name sounds so reminiscent of another (in)famously aggressive, uncompromising female-led act, the incomparable Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Or maybe it is. 1978 was a very long time ago.

Write A Song Sounds Shit - Turpentine Babycino

While we're on the subject of band names or song titles that remind you of other band names or song titles but you're not quite sure if they're meant to... What are the chances these guys ever heard Baby Turpentine by Crazyhead? Part of the largely-forgotten Grebo scene of the late 'eighties, Crazyhead, if they're remembered at all, are probably best known for their #2 hit "What Gives You The Idea That You're So Amazing, Baby?" That's #2 on the indie charts. I don't believe they ever troubled the real Top 40.

It's not such a stretch to imagine a connection all the same. Write A Song Sounds Shit is the most pop-punk of all the tunes in this little collection but it does have something of that boho swagger Grebo tried so hard to become famous for. And if there was one thing Grebo bands understood better than almost anyone it was the value of an eyecatching title linked to an earworm of a chorus. This has both.

And finally... what's Australia best-known for? Kangaroos? Sharks? Unrealistic levels of self-confidence? No - endless sunshine, of course!

Factor 50 - Medicine Cabinet

Now that's about as unpromising a song/band name combo as you could hope to avoid, isn't it? Who calls their band "Medicine Cabinet" anyway, ffs? It reminds me of a band-naming session I once had when I was in my late teens and my friend Paul kept suggesting anything he could see around him - "The Walls", "The Floor" - presumably on the grounds it had worked out pretty well for The Doors, not to mention The Table.

It kinda works, though. I literally clicked through to see just how bad it could be and guess what? It was great! Reminds me the hell of something but I cannot for the life of me say what. Actually, several somethings, different songs in different places. It's a gestalt.

And that's all I have for now. It's enough, I reckon.

Amazon freebies tomorrow, assuming Jeff's minions have gotten their act together by then.

Things Fall Apart

Oh, god! Here we go again. Friday night and I got nothing. 

That's what happens if you spend all morning doing dailies and sorting inventory because it's about all you can manage with a small dog sleeping on your lap, then spend all afternoon watching the same small dog chewing up cardboard boxes and working herself into a frenzy over a grooming brush.

Not that I feel guilty about it. A solid run of meaty posts all week. I deserve a goof-off day. If it was only the one...

Must be something... oh, yes, what about that Twitter deal, eh? 

Do I care? Not really. You know those cars you see sometimes, parked up with grass growing around the tires? Rust all over the body, a window missing, birds nesting inside? That's my Twitter account, that is.

It's hard to imagine anything good will come of Elon Musk buying Twitter but then it's hard to imagine anything good coming from either of them separately, either. I'm not sure putting them together makes things worse.

There was going to be a paragraph here about how I don't get why Twitter even exists as a commercial entity since it doesn't make money and never has. Then I fact-checked and found that, contrary to popular opinion, it has been turning a small profit of late.

That about sums up how much I either know or care about Twitter. Let's have a picture of one of those cars I just described so we can all imagine my Twitter account, somewhere out there in the cyberwilds, slowly falling to digital bits.

That screenshot comes from the point and click adventure game I seem to have been playing for most of my natural life, Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis. The link goes to the game's Steam page and if I'd been playing it on Steam I'd be able to quantify just how many hours I've put in. It would be a lot.

I didn't buy SF2:PC on Steam, though. I got it free from Amazon, I can't exactly remember how long ago. I know I started playing it on January 6 and I'm still playing. Not every day and usually only for about an hour, although I've had a few longer sessions. It's the game I wind down on at the end of the evening before I go to bed, or one of them, anyway.

I have fifteen Save files, so at a conservative estimate I have probably played for about twenty hours over four months. Hard to be sure. The game just seems to meander, thematically and geographically, which makes it feel like it's going nowhere and never going to get there. I've been on a cruise ship in the North Sea, a ruined temple in the Indonesian jungle and now I'm putzing around a cemetery in Paris. 

The plot makes little sense, the voice acting is iffy, the writing is labored, the translation uncertain, the puzzles often obtuse. Sometimes there's even an embarassingly self-conscious, fourth-wall breaking, nod-and-wink meta-joke. And yet I enjoy it a lot, probably because it reminds me of Broken Sword as performed by an earnest tribute band.

Speaking of Broken Sword and tribute bands, I read an article at Gamesindustry.biz this week by Šarūnas and Žilvinas Ledas, the brothers behind Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit, a p&c adventure whose demo I played and wrote about a couple of months ago. 

The piece is part of a series called "Why I Love" and it does a good job of explaining the singular attraction of the Broken Sword series. The part where they talk about playing the second game "not exactly together" really took me back.  "We would play in turns, and it became a competition about who would solve a puzzle first. But during the off-screen time we would actually collaborate in figuring out how to move forward."

That's pretty much how Mrs. Bhagpuss and I played the first two Broken Sword games. We only had one computer at the time and one or other of us would play while the other sat and watched and made "helpful" suggestions. We'd get stuck and spend ages trying things, then one of us would be thinking about the problem at work the next day and we'd come back and tell each other and try it and... it wouldn't work and we'd go round again and on like that. We finished both games in the end and with no walkthroughs. It's a lot easier and more fun with two.

I wasn't very complimentary about the Crowns and Pawns demo, calling it "bland" and "a bit like adventure gaming by numbers." I feel a bit warmer towards it now I've read what motivated the brothers to write and produce it. I've added it to my Steam wishlist, something I didn't do after playing the demo, which just goes to show there's more than one way to promote a game.

A couple of musical items to finish with, I think. I had a nice surprise today when the third Let's Eat Grandma CD dropped through the letterbox, frightening the puppy, who ran into the kitchen and hid in her barrel. 

There have been four singles released from the album so far and I'm pretty sure I've featured all of them here. I seem to have fallen into a pattern of talking about every new release by a small, select group of bands (Band of groups?). I quite like doing it so I don't see why I should stop. 

Since there isn't anything new from the album to show you, how about the album itself? I have never really understood the attraction of unboxing videos but that's not going to stop me from using this one to fill up some space. It's the vinyl album that's being unboxed (Should be Unsleeved, surely?). I got the CD because CDs are better than vinyl in every conceivable way. Same cover though.

While we're on the subject, Superorganism dropped a second single from their upcoming album this week. I have that on pre-order too (The album, not the single.) but it's not out until mid-July. 

The song goes by the incredibly annoying name of crushed.zip. The first time I downloaded it my PC apparently believed it really was a .zip file and put it in an appropriate folder. I had to download it again and rename it with a space where the dot is to get it to behave.

On first listen I thought the track was a bit meh but it's a real grower, especially when the big ending kicks in. Looking forward to the album.

And that, I think, is about that for today. Tomorrow I'm on dog duty all day, while Mrs. Bhagpuss is out at work and we've got a puppy gate coming. (Really a baby gate but don't tell her. Beryl, that is, not Mrs Bhagpuss. She already knows - she paid for it. Mrs Bhagpuss that is, not Beryl.) I have to fit it at the top of the stairs to stop her tumbling ears over tail all the way down (The puppy, that is, not... oh, you're ahead of me...). 

With all of that, chances are tomorrow's post could be thin. Sunday I'm working, so then too. Fun, blogging, isn't it? There's a new month's worth of free games from Amazon on Sunday, at least. That'll probably be worth a post, although I guess I probably ought to finish the one I'm playing before I start another.

Not Everything's Connected (It Is, Though...)

Feeling super-lazy and uninspired today so I'm just going to throw out a few scraps and not even pretend there's a theme. If you usually skip the music posts, scroll down past the videos. Things get gamey down there. Also, honestly? The first part's not really about music. More about pets dying. So you might want to skip that anyway, if it's a trigger.

Everyone left good with that? Okay. Let's start with something sad.

We all like Best Coast, right? I mean, how could you not? They're like some kind of natural high. I've listened to plenty of their sun-fuzzed, out of focus tunes, although the only one I have in my files is this:

Snacks was Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino's cat but he was much more than that, as cats can be in this modern world. "He was not just my cat. He belonged to all of you. He was the third member of this band. Our mascot. Our cover star." she says. Now he's gone. Farewell Snacks. Sleep peacefully in the eternal California sun.

It might be I'm feeling a bit more alert than usual to potential pet trauma right now. There's been no animal in this house for quite a few years (Apart from those pesky mice that keep getting in through the pipes under the sink.) but we're getting a puppy in a few weeks (Well, Mrs. Bhagpuss is getting a puppy and that means I'm getting a puppy by association.) 

We have talked about getting a kitten at the same time so they'd grow up together but I think it might be a bit too much all in one go. Also, not to be morbid about it, but as the wonderful Pony Up put it...

... is that they die. Kind of puts you off getting involved in the first place, doesn't it? Although, heaven knows, it's hardly news to me. I've had enough pets that have died over the years. I'm not sure whether having two at a time would double the odds or halve them. It might be considered hedging your bets but then again it might just be reckless.

And at our age there's the ever more pertinent question of what happens if they outlive you? Like, I wonder what happened to Black Raoul? I'd never heard of Raoul until this morning but I'd heard of his owner, Pat Fish, sometimes known as The Jazz Butcher. I own at least one album by him and I saw him play live a couple of times. Pat, that is, not Raoul.

Raoul was Pat's cat and Pat died last year. I guess someone else feeds him now. Raoul, that is, not Pat. Despite being dead, The Jazz Butcher has a new album out this month, which is how these things work. I read a review of it right after I heard about Snacks. I imagine that's why one tiny fact buried in the meat of the piece popped out at me: "apparently the “Black Raoul” who Fish chants about is known to hardcore fans as his cat." And also to the rest of us, now.

I was never a hardcore fan of The Jazz Butcher (The name of the band, really, not its leader.) but there was a time I liked either him or them well enough to name my apazine after a lyric from one of their songs. I called it "Great Big Weather Kind of Outburst" because that's the kind of thing I thought was smart back then. And still do.

At least I think it was from one of their songs. Damned if I can remember which one and the internet's no help. Doesn't really matter, anyway. We were talking about Black Raoul and he gets his namecheck in the one I already linked.

Enough about dead pop stars and their cats. Or pop stars and their dead cats. Except to note that a) there are a lot of them b) there are more of them all the time and c) I could totally get another post out of this...

Change of subject.

Lost Ark is out this week. I know, because people have been writing about it and now they're playing it. Enough of them to bring Steam to its knees, apparently. And that's just in Early Access. Wait until the official launch tomorrow.

I have absolutely no interest in Lost Ark whatsoever. It's pretty much the poster child for "Games That Don't Interest Bhagpuss". (That was fun! Talking about yourself in the third person is tight! And so is stealing other peoples' catchphrases!) Even so, I've been bracing myself for an explosion of posts about the game across the blogosphere...

Hasn't really happened yet. Only a handful of people have mentioned it so far. I hadn't realised until I read Kaylriene's first impressions that Lost Ark was free to play. I'd assumed there'd be an up-front cost of some kind. And it's on Steam. I suppose that makes it marginally more likely I might end up trying it at some point but there's no room in my schedule right now even if I wanted to give it a go.

The final piece of news I propose to stuff screaming into this grab-bag of unrelated trivia is this. By the way, isn't it annoying, the way I'm hyperlinking all this stuff without context so the only way to find out what I'm talking about is to click through? I wonder if that's considered good practice or bad? I could see it going either way.

For those with mouse fatigue, here's the headline in question "Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit Movie Rights Up For Sale This Week" And here's the tag that follows "Amazon is considered a favorite to buy them." 

It's all a tad confusing. There seem to be a lot of rights involved in the sale. The package "includes many movie, merchandising, gaming, and live event rights" and some of them don't seem to be exclusive. Depending which report you read, it seems the existing owners and operators of related properties and spin-offs shouldn't be affected. Maybe.

Where that leaves Standing Stone and Lord of the Rings Online, I guess we'll find out. If Amazon do end up winning the bidding war, I wonder if they might even bring that mmorpg they killed back to life? Or maybe TenCent will buy the rights and start it up again.

Something new for LotRO players to worry about, anyway. There's always something, isn't there?

A Rambling Post About Twitter, New World, Sable, Japanese Breakfast, Posthumanism, Digital Feeds, Steam Sales And Pre-Orders, In Which I Push Declarative Post-Titling To Its Inevitable And Unsustainable Conclusion

This morning I have a few things rattling around inside my head that wouldn't make full posts. Or perhaps I should say ought not to be allowed to make full posts. There's not much doubt I could get a couple of thousand words out of any of them if I set my mind to it but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

If I was on Twitter I could just craft several delicious micro-posts and send them winging into the twittersphere to charm and delight, because that's how Twitter works, isn't it? I am on Twitter, as it happens, but I have never tweeted. Or have I? Let's see... 

Ok, that's quite disturbing. Twitter logs me in automatically even though I haven't knowingly used the service for over ten years. Where is it holding the information that allows it to recognize me without a login or password, I wonder? I never let anything do that, not even stuff I use every day.

I have tweeted five times, all in 2010, all auto-generated from Fallen London, which at that time required Twitter to play. I literally made my Twitter account to play it and that is all I ever used it for. 

I have one follower, a good friend of mine from a long time back. I'm following him too but I have not the least clue how that would have happened. I haven't seen or spoken to him for more than fifteen years. 

Other than that, apart from Failbetter Games, makers of Fallen London, who I had to follow to make the game work, the only other person I'm following is, for some inexplicable reason, Scott Hartsman. Maybe he played Fallen London. He seems like the kind of person who might have done.

It does occasionally occur to me to start using Twitter but I also seem to have set up my Twitter profile using some variant of my real name so if that ever happens it's not going to be on that account. I do appear to be @bhagpuss, though. That would be okay, I guess.

Seem to have strayed from the point a little, don't we? Not sure why I'm including anyone else in that. Share the responsibility, share the blame, eh?

As I was saying, I have a few odds and ends to mention and it's Friday so I thought I might steal Wilhelm's "Friday Bullet Points" idea and run through this and that. Except they're going to bleed into one another a little too much for bullet points, which is a shame, because I like bullet points. And now I've rambled so much I've forgotten what most of them were, anyway. 

It'll come back to me, I'm sure. I'll go and make myself a coffee. Get my thoughts in order. I knew I should have made some notes.

Right, New World! That was one of the things I was going to talk about. I had the email opposite from Amazon this morning.

A few things occurred to me in the light of Belghast's thoughts on the imminent arrival of Amazon Games big new thing/hail mary pass/nine day wonder (delete as applicable), along with the comments of a couple of people in the thread there, an earlier post by Syp about his launch plans and an apparently unrelated post by Tipa at Chasing Dings, which I read this morning.

Firstly, I'm weirdly unexcited by, even detached from this indisputibly major launch, even though there are plenty of reasons I should be super-keen. It's by far the biggest new AAA mmorpg to come along in years. I was in the first alpha, what, three years ago now and loved it. I pre-ordered at the earliest opportunity in 2019. Even though the game has changed almost out of recognition since then, I thoroughly enjoyed the two later betas, last summer and this spring. There's no doubt I want to play New World. I'm just not very excited about it.

I think it's something similar to the Valheim situation and, looking further back, Project Gorgon. I've already expended all the energy on getting excited about these games that I have to spare. They aren't "new" games any more, even though none of them has in fact launched yet. They're games that were "new" six months, three years, five years ago but they're still acting as though they just arrived and it doesn't quite feel real, somehow.

New World is in the better position in that it never had any kind of early access or non-wipe open beta phase. It is a proper launch following a series of proper alphas and betas as we would have understood the process ten or fifteen years ago. And yet it still feels like New World has been around a longish time because that's how we've been trained to feel about these things now.

What I really want, I realized recently, is for New World to have launched, to be running, to have become just another live game, one I can dip in and out of when the fancy takes me. I don't want to invest any special emotional effort or project any particular wishes or hopes onto it. I just want it to be there.

Think we should roll on Sitara? Yeah, maybe not.

I was considering the choice of servers, all 177 of them. It's really not that many to choose from, of course. Clearly I won't be playing on the Australian or South American ones, so that takes it down to 140. I try to avoid playing on EU servers where possible, which knocks out another sixty-four and given a choice of US locations I'd always go East Coast, meaning I really only have to choose from fifty or so names. 

Still a lot. I need to look at that website Bel linked that warns where the streamers are going, then pick somewhere else. I like a low-pop server if I can find one. I quite like the sound of Frislandia but my favorite would be Morrow, which makes me think of the great Gray Morrow.

I was interested to see that Bel had cancelled his Amazon pre-order in favor of buying the game directly through Steam. I wonder if that makes a difference since Amazon are apparently going to email Steam keys as the standard means of access anyway. I guess it depends a) how much you trust Amazon to send things out promptly and b) whether you care how soon you can get online.

As to a) I have had nothing but exemplary service from Amazon for a decade and a half but also as to b) on this particular occasion I'd be fine with getting my key a few hours or even a few days late. I'm not crazy keen to begin  with and even if I was, avoiding the initial feeding frenzy would probably be in my best interests. Letting the hordes move through the first couple of starter areas and then follow along at leisure seems like a good plan.

What I'd really like would be an option to buy a physical box and wait for it to drop through my letter box next week. As I mentioned in a comment to Tipa on the post linked above, I have a DVD case for Guild Wars 2's  Heart of Thorns sitting on a shelf in the bookcase to my right, even though the expansion was only ever available in digital form.

All the case contains is a piece of paper with a code on it. I could have gotten that code added directly to my account by clicking a box online but I chose to pre-order it from Amazon just to get that empty case. I would do that for all the games I'm actively interested in if I had the choice because I like to see the cases displayed in my room so I can handle them occasionally and feel some kind of tactile, physical connection.

As far as I can remember, Heart of Thorns was the last time I was able to do any of that. I was reading the other day how Gen Z buy more vinyl than Millennials. I think the death of physical media may have been overstated. Were not posthuman quite yet. We might have to wait for the singularity before people stop feeling the need to nest.

Conversely, and flipping round to touch Twitter if only tangentially, I do appreciate the speed and range of digital communication. Time was I'd have to wait 'til Thursday to get my fix of music news. These days I get it the same day, possibly the same hour, the journalists do.

 

I recently subscribed to (by which I mean added to Feedly, not payed money for) two additional music sources. I was getting the feeling Pitchfork was missing stuff here and there so I added Stereogum and my teenage mentor, NME.

What I didn't realize was that the 21st century digital NME is hard into gaming, too. I am now getting more gaming news from there than most of my gaming bookmarks. It's very odd but also very welcome, not least because the news items are short, concise and gloriously free of snark. 

Since NME used to be the very fountainhead of snark and also pretension that's a big reminder to me of how the world's changed. I do like me some snark and I live for pretension but it's nice to have the facts plain, no chaser, once in a while. 

Having all three sources in my feed might be a little too much, though. Some days I can't get though them all before a whole stack more have arrived. I mostly just scan the headlines. They tell me all I want to know about most things and give me that heady, fake feeling of not being out of touch with the world. The bits that matter, anyway.

I most likely will keep all of them. Naturally a lot of the news duplicates but you can never be sure which will focus on what. Pitchfork, for example, even though they don't carry a lot of gaming news, was the first to tell me Japanese Breakfast did the full soundtrack to Sable.

I wrote about Sable a while back and I've had it in my Steam wishlist ever since. Today, the same day I got the New World pre-order warning, I also got this (on the right) from Steam.

So there's another game I'm not going to buy. I want to play it but do I want to pay  twenty pounds for the chance? Probably not. Not because I don't think it's worth that much but because I don't need a new game right this moment. Too much going on already. 

Knowing the soundtrack is by someone I'd buy an album by and also knowing what a good game (I loved the demo) makes me considerably more likely to buy it eventually. It's like buying a game and album all in one. Bargain! And an even bigger bargain when it goes on sale.

I guess I am turning into one of those people who waits for things to go on Steam sale before they buy. Is that personal growth or just my standards slipping? Hard to say. 

So far this year, though, five of my wishlisted games have become available and I haven't bought one of them. And yet I'm going through with my pre-order of New World despite my aforementioned apathy.

This is why companies do pre-orders, you know. Lock in the excitement before it fades then trust to a combination of laziness, lack of attention and an uncomfortable sense of commitment to carry those sales through to the end.

It works, too.

Try The New World, Play The Game

I'm only writing this now because the New World beta servers are down. The in-game message says Amazon are investigating "server instability", which made me wonder if someone was trying to wreak vengeance on the game for supposed past misdemeanors but the forum gives chapter and verse on some bug fixes so it's probably nothing sinister. 

They'd already extended the downtime by thirty minutes when I went to log in or I wouldn't even have known. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had been for a long walk through wheatfields and woodland before the sun got too hot and I'd just sat myself down with a cold drink to decide whether to play New World or blog about it. I'd settled on playing, mostly so I'd have more to write about, and then I found I couldn't which is always annoying. I had to change tack.

Of course, just typing this has taken me to within a few minutes of the servers coming back up, so now I have to choose whether to carry on or go back to the original plan. I think it's going to be the latter. (It wasn't. Ed.)

It's not that I'm desperate to play, although I was having fun last night, mostly. The main reason I'd be well-advised to get on as soon as the servers come up is that it'll be the middle of the night in the USA.

Now with added freckles!

 

Last night was astonishingly busy on Roruva, the North American East Coast server I chose almost at random. I imagine it was busy on every server. At one point there were nearly two hundred thousand people logged in via Steam, according to reports. The 24-hour peak stands at 190,811 as I write.

The sheer volume of people, all trying to talk to the same NPCs and do the same quests, led to the usual bottlenecks, as well as the traditional opening day cavalcade of repetitive questions. Every third person seemed to want to know where the sheep were. Or, as one persistent if ungrammatical quester kept asking, "Where are sheeps?" There were, of course, no sheeps. Not live ones, anyway.

Despite the excessive crowding, I didn't run into any real problems in my first hour. The game begins with what I'm fairly sure is the exact same cinematic, the one that leads quite cleverly into character creation set in a ship's cabin. It's a nice introduction to the general theme and setting of the game.

I made the same character I've been making since the first alpha. I have screenshots from back then and she looks pretty much identical. Character options, still surprisingly limited, don't appear to have moved forward all that much over the last couple of years. There are still no sliders. You don't get to change your jawline or the length of your eyelashes although you can, at least, choose your eye-color, something I complained about not being able to do last time.

A year ago I also mentioned that you got a choice of two genders. You don't any more. Now you get a choice of two body types with no gender stated. You also get a choice of pronouns, although you have to dig into the settings to find that out. The default pronoun is They/Them, which makes sense. 

There are also multiple statements and explanations addressing the locale, setting and theme of the game. Amazon have taken some of the criticisms over cultural insensitivity to heart, it appears. I'm not wholly convinced that standing behind consultations with "experts" and their own "diverse workforce" is quite the get out of jail free card they seem to imagine but at least they're acknowledging the issues.

When it comes to player characters, there is a deal of diversity on show. There are twenty-one presets for the head and face, not all of which are young and good-looking. A couple of dozen or so hairstyles add more variety, although in my experience whatever hairstyle you choose pretty soon vanishes under some helmet or other. There are flesh tones, facial hair, scars and tattoos as well. It's plenty, although if you're used to something like Swords of Legend Online it might still feel like it's not all that much.

With your character made, before you can play you still need to choose a region. Europe, East Coast or West Coast USA, South America, Australasia, somewhere near you is hosting this game. Then it's on to servers, of which there are many. 

So far so familiar but here's a new one on me. You also have to choose a "World Set". There's no real explanation of what that means but there is a stern warning:

I imagine a "World Set" is what we usually refer to as a "server cluster". Why you can only have one character per "Set", though, I have no idea. Even with the dire warnings, I heard several players complaining they weren't able to join friends in other World Sets. People don't read signage, it's a fact.

Since I wasn't planning on meeting up with anyone and anyway it's beta, I just picked a name I liked the look of. There were a lot to choose from and most of them had no extrinsic meaning. I imagine they relate to places in the gameworld but that's a guess. They could be the names of the developers' pets for all I know.

Once in, everything seemed extremely familiar. If anything's changed in the tutorial since last summer's Preview, I didn't spot it. I wrote about it then and all of that still applies so I'm not going to go over it again. 

I had exactly the same issues with "lag" as last year, too. For about an hour the game played smoothly even with countless players bouncing around the screen. The game defaulted to "Low" for all my graphics settings which is interesting. My PC is unchanged since last year's Preview, when I noted that all but one of my settings defaulted to "High". I thought the point of optimization was to increase accessibility, not reduce it.

I changed everything to "High" to see what would happen and not much did. I played without any obvious problems for about an hour, going through all the quests on the beach without any noticeable frame rate issues. 

Curious definition of Medium Load there, Amazon.

 

When I got to the first town, though, I ran into exactly the same trouble as last year. Frame rates dropped, everything began to judder and eventually my whole machine ground to a halt. I couldn't play. I couldn't even close the game. I had to tab out, which itself took a couple of minutes, and close the game from the Task Manager.

Before that happened I did manage to do some of the quests in town. Last year I noted that none of the NPCs were voiced, which seemed odd. They all do now. Every character I spoke to had full voice acting although it was often hard to hear what they were saying even when I turned the sound right up. 

When I could hear them, most of the voice acting seemed... okay. The guy on the beach, the first questgiver you meet, speaks in a peculiar, arch tone that makes him sound like he's being sarcastic even when he's not but the folks in town mostly seemed matter-of-fact even when the lines they were delivering appeared to be intentionally humorous.  I can almost hear the director murmuring "Undersell it."

The game has housing now, something I think must have been added in the last year. It's hard not to be aware of it because you'll keep trying to go through open doors only to be stopped by an invisible barrier. I'm guessing it works somewhat like Black Desert, a smart mix of instanced and open world access, but since every house I looked at cost several thousand gold I don't imagine I'm going to find out for sure before beta ends.

One other change I noticed in the two or three hours I was on (I got to level nine) was the fashion. For a PvP game, the utilitarian look of the alpha made sense but once the game transitioned to a PvE model and invited in a whole new audience it was plain that plain wouldn't pass. PvE players like to strut. 

I hope that's been properly cured...

In just the opening few levels I had half a dozen different looks. Quested and dropped gear was abundant and most of it looked good. I was very impressed by the tunic made from a whole dead fox with its front paws bound together. The leather greatcoat was impressive too. The whole gender/body type discussion becomes moot when you're wrapped up in something like that.

After I was forced out of the game by frame rate issues I was in two minds whether to go back and try again but I've always found New World moreish. The addition of quests and achievements and all the paraphenalia of the theme park only make the draw stronger. 

When I logged back in, something odd happened. At first it was as unplayable as it had been before but then, as I struggled on, after maybe twenty minutes the stutter and grind just...went away. I was, by then, back on Low graphics to see if that would help but I'd changed those settings before I logged in and it hadn't appeared to make any difference at all, so unless it takes twenty minutes for the game to notice, that can't have been it. 

I played for quite a while, half an hour perhaps, with no difficulties whatsoever. There were, if anything, even more people than before and yet I could move, fight, talk to NPCs, open inventory, all with smooth fluidity. And then the lag came back, not quite as bad as before but bad enough to make me stop.

I went and checked the Minimum Specs. My PC meets them. Just barely, it's true. The GPU and the RAM are the lowest admissable, the CPU a couple of notches above that. I wouldn't expect to get great performance and I probably need to keep the graphics settings at Low, but it ought to run acceptably. Minimum spec does, after all, mean "This will work". 

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. I'd like to know why.

It does confirm what I already knew, namely that I need to upgrade. With the current worldwide shortage of  components and the crazy price of graphics cards, though, it's probably not going to happen this year.

I'm hoping, once New World settles down and the crowds disperse across the landscape, most of the pressure will subside. I'm probably going to wait until launch before pushing much beyond the starting area, anyway. There doesn't seem too much point committing a whole load of time to a character that will be wiped in a couple of weeks, nor in working through content I'm going to be repeating so soon. 

And, honestly, there doesn't feel any need to explore much further. It all feels very familiar still from last year. I knew I liked the game then and nothing bad seems to have happened to it while it was off the road with the hood up.

It does feel as though Amazon might have got this one right. I guess we'll know for sure come September.