Of Time And The Cities

When the promo videos for Neverness To Everness started popping up a year, two years ago, it looked like nothing I'd seen before. I couldn't entirely figure out what the game even was. I just knew it was cool and I wanted it.

Then it arrived and it was as amazing as I'd hoped it would, juste not exactly what I'd imagined. It felt a lot more relaxed, laid-back and less intense and it had the most remarkably detailed representation of an actual city I'd ever encountered in any video game.

Hethereau isn't just a few detailed areas amid some spectacular buildings for a backdrop. It's a completely convincing urban environment with districts and suburbs and parks and commercial residential districts and a full transport infrastructure that actually works. In many ways, in numerous locations, it reminds me quite specifically of actual cities I've visited and stayed in. 

I thought that would make it the benchmark for game cities for a good while to come, always excepting GTA6, as all video game discussions must, just now. If NTE made bank then, sure, I'd expect to see clones and copies cropping up all over but even at the highly accelerated production rates of the game mills in China and South Korea, it takes a while to build a city like Hethereau, let alone to fit a game around one. I certainly wasn't expecting to be writing about another this summer or even this year.

And then Nimgimli left a link in a comment on the last post here, pointing to a video on YouTube for a game called Moon Gaze, a name entirely new to me, either in that English version or under the original Mandarin title, Wang Yue.

I watched it immediately, of course. And here it is, so now you can, too.

It's an "Exploration" promo so it mostly shows movement around the city. There's not much in the way of gameplay per se. Or narrative. Or anything.

Looking for some context, I also watched a "Character and Scene" video and "Gameplay" trailer. The former doesn't give much away and the latter is both untranslated and also made before they completely redid the graphics, which they appear to have done to such an extent that it barely looks like the same game any more. That's why I'm only linking them, not embedding them. They may be misleading.

The new graphics do look extremely impressive. They're closer to photorealism than to the rather flat, cartoony look of the previous version or even the more polished, anime-inflected style of NTE.  

Tianyue City looks astonishingly convincing and immersive, visually at least. I certainly wouldn't say no to a few hours exploring it, when the game releases, which presumably won't be at least until next year. There's no date set and the game is still in closed testing, in China only.

Beyond that, I can't say I'm all that interested, let alone excited, by anything the developer, who goes by the unwieldy name of Guangzhou Shiyue Network Technology, has shown so far. Icy Veins seems more impressed, suggesting it might be "the most unusual gacha rpg" so far although how they figure that out beats me. Their bullet-point list of features is mostly a reiteration of what's already in NTE, except for the creature collecting, something I personally could do without, having had more than enough of it in other games by now.

There's also mention of "construction and building systems", which I admit does sound intriguing. It's apparently along the lines of what you can do in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, although that doesn't help me any, since I've never played. Still, building options are always welcome.

The problem is, regardless of the features, I don't get any sense of the vibrancy or zest that infuses everything that comes out of Hotta as they promote NTE. Everything they show just oozes individuality. 

For example, just take a look at this recent short, featuring Lacrimosa. It's a small work of art, hugely enjoyable even if you have no interest in playing the game.

The Moon Gaze material seems bland and generic by comparison, other than the character movement of course, which is breathtakingly well-done in places. I'd love to have a go on those roller skates. It doesn't help, of course, that the only narrative content on show hasn't been translated but I get no sense there's anything happening I'd be likely to care about, anyway. 

And if Moon Gaze doesn't come up to snuff against Neverness To Everness, imagine how it does when you put it up against this:

That's Ananta, another urban open-world RPG, developed by NetEase and Naked Rain. You may have heard of it. I didn't think I had but as usual I was wrong.

If you're getting a slight sense of deja vu, it'll probably be because I wrote about Ananta last September, in a post that included that same, seven-minute video along with another, even longer. 

If you don't remember, I forgive you. I didn't, either.

I make no apologies for embedding it again, partly because if nothing else the soundtrack is great but mostly because I've just had to re-write four paragraphs when I finally realised Ananta was not, after all, a brand new game to me that I'd just discovered. Not only had I posted about it eight months ago but at the time I had to remind myself it wasn't new to me then, either. 

That was the second time I'd written about it. This is the third. It's like Groundhog Day around here sometimes and I'm not Bill Murray. Tipa talks about having trouble remembering people. I can't even remember what I've posted, even when I've done it three times! Some of us need to be reminded about stuff as often as possible. I count this repetition as a public service.

More than just good taste in tuneage, Ananta would appear to have strong characters with distinct personalities capable of engaging in snappy repartee while carrying some kind of interesting plot. Not to mention an intriguing backstory. And then there's that stunning megalopolis to explore. You wait decades for a proper city and then three turn up at once!

Except not quite at once, I guess. NTE made it out the gate first and Ananta was supposed to be following close behind, with a projected release date of Summer 2026 but now that doesn't look like it's happening. If it was coming out in a a month or three, I'm pretty sure they'd be telling us all about it but there's been radio silence from the developer since I last wrote about the game. I pre-registered on the official website back then but I've heard not a single word since.

As this report by Gamesphere suggests, that release date may have slipped into next year. If so, it's a shame but at least it means not having to make a hard choice between Ananta and NTE just yet. Yes, obviously I could play both. At once, even, in theory. But I'm having a hard enough time right now, keeping up with just the one urban open world rpg. Two might be more fun than I could handle.

Also, in a more practical sense, a 2027 release date will give me time to upgrade my hardware to something capable of playing even the most demanding titles with ease. Not the best timing, perhaps, given the way the entire gaming hardware industry seems to be disappearing into the all-devouring maw of the AI leviathan but assuming there's still something left to buy later this year, I should be coming into a little money about then, so it could still be good timing for me.

If not, it shouldn't matter too much. Looking at all these games, you would think you'd have to have state of the art equipment to run any of them but no, apparently not. Leaving aside my recent technical issues, which I now think may have been initiated by running NTE from an external SDD via USB, it seems even a mediocre rig can cope. 

How that's even possible, when you look at the graphics and the gameplay, beats me. But then, I don't need to understand it. I just need to enjoy it.

And I plan to. 

I Could Have Made Three Legit Posts Out Of This. When Will I Ever Learn?

Friday is the traditional Grab Bag day around here but I'm not convinced I'll have time for one tomorrow and I do have a few random thoughts I could do with clearing out of the bottom drawer of my mind, so Thursday it is. There's no theme and I don't have any plan so we'll see where we end up. 

Of course, if, as so often happens, some kind of structure emerges as I go along, I'll come back and edit this so it looks like it's what I meant to do all along. And no-one will ever know. [Evil laughter...]

Where shall we begin? Better not start with anything to do with AI or there'll be people who who'll never read any further. Probably shouldn't even have mentioned it.

 How about this?

Ananta

I'd never heard of Ananta until Nimgimli posted about it a couple of days ago. (Fake News!! I posted about it last December but I only realized it when I went to add a tag and found there was one there already.) MassivelyOP followed up with a news item about it the next day, by which time I'd already been to the official website to register my interest. Or "Pre-Register" as they put it. 

I mean, who wouldn't, after watching this?

That's seven minutes of action I find hard to believe is taken directly from the game. But it is, apparently. Obviously it's been edited but as far as I can tell everything you see is gameplay footage.

And so is this, which just landed on YouTube. 

That's ten minutes of "Official Extended Gameplay" that absolutely looks like a movie. Specifically, the center-piece car chase from a pretty good movie. A movie I would certainly watch. 

My question isn't "Is this game going to be any good?" or "Will it be Pay-to-Win?" or any of those obvious things gamers always ask. It's not even "Will it run on my aging PC?", although that's a valid concern. 

No, my question is "How the hell is that even possible?" Apart from the oddly stilted walking animations, the video looks like a bunch of clips from a movie. MOP described it as a "sizzle reel" and that's really what it is. 

After watching it, I found myself thinking back to something that happened more than thirty years ago, which I've never forgotten. I happened to go into large store in a nearby city and I was walking through the electronics department when I saw, on a large screen (For those days.), a video game playing. It was a castle in a fantasy forest and it looked like just a movie. 

I never found out what the game was or what it was running on and I can't even remember now how I knew it was a game not a film. I'm pretty sure if I could see it now it would look like something you'd see in a PS1game. It probably was a PS1 game. It would have been around that time. Whatever it was, it looked like the future. Well, it looked like the past, what with it being a fantasy castle and all, but the past seen through the lens of the future.

 

Technologically, we are all living in the future now and we take it for granted. Things we pay no attention to or even get anoyed by today would have seemed like literal, actual magic just thirty years ago. If I find it hard to believe something like Ananta can even be real today, imagine how I'd have felt if I could have watched that trailer in 1995!

Something I hear often these days is that improved graphics can only take the games industry so far and that the limit may already have been reached. And that's probably true, as far as it goes. But what's hard to believe about this trailer isn't so much the visual quality, impressive though it is; it's the world-building. 

That's what draws me in to all of these new games, all these new worlds, from Wuthering Waves to Neverness To Everness to Ananta: their cinematic, novelistic storytelling. I see clips and I want to know who the characters are, what their lives are like, what they're doing. It's not new but it seems like it's new. It's the new future of our long, storytelling past.

Also, someone's bound to be wearing bunny ears in one of these things and that's always a bonus. I'd say you don't see that in real life but I saw two people wearing bunny ears in the street only this week...

On MMORPGs And Why They're Kinda Done

As big, mass-market affairs, that is. Not as small to medium sized niche services servicing small to medium size niches. They're still good there.

It was something Redbeard said in response to Wilhelm's post about Ship of Heroes yesterday that started me thinking. For some reason, the conversation took a detour into Guild Wars 2 and how a big part of the revenue system there relies on persuading players to part with cash to remove the inconveniences the devs have added in, seemingly for that exact purpose. 

It's a well-known mechanic in many MMOs. The very unpopular version is to put up obvious pay-walls for in-game services and systems most players believe should be part of the core gameplay. Star Wars: the Old Republic used to be the leader in that awkward field, charging money for everything up to and including enough hot bars to fit your skills. 

They toned that down over time and recently they've cut it right back to something closer to what players expected in the first place. It still leaves a whole lot of less controversial money-making opportunities in place, though, one of which is always storage.

GW2 has always had a serious storage problem. The game isn't overly generous with inventory space to begin with but it does allow you to expand it in various ways, all of which are technically free. As Redbeard points out, though, its much, much easier to get out your credit card and pay.

I never did and that's because I played GW2 like an old-school MMORPG. I played for a decade, virtually every day, often for several hours at a time. Just playing normally and not spending any real money, I ended up with a huge amount of inventory space across multiple accounts and characters. On my most-played characters I had all the bag and bank slots you were allowed. I hit the point where even real money wouldn't have gotten me any more and I hadn't paid a dime. 

It still wasn't enough. I made bigger bags and that wasn't enough. Nothing was ever enough. GW2 doesn't just have a storage problem, it has a loot problem. There's far, far, far too much of it. 

Which is also the key to not spending any money on storage. You have the choice, as Wilhelm suggests, of just throwing everything away. That'll fix it for free and right away. Or you can sell all of the good stuff you find and use the gold to buy Gems, the cash shop currency, then use those Gems to buy more storage space, which is what I did.

People complain all the time about not being able to make enough gold in GW2. I made thousands, easily. I still have most of it because I made far more than I ever needed. I didn't make any special effort, either. I had just two tricks for making gold:

1. Never, ever make any Legendaries. Sell all the mats for them you find to to those who do.
2. Play every hour god sends

The first isn't a problem. It's just sensible. No-one needs Legendary items in GW2. They do nothing for gameplay. They're convenience items and cosmetics. Let others waste their time and pay you for the privilege.

The second is the reason MMORPGs are and always will be a niche interest. They absolutely do not respect your time. 

Redbeard has inventory problems he can only, rationally, solve by paying real money because he doesn't play GW2 several hours a day, every day, year in, year out. If he did, the problem would solve itself, at least until there were no more slots left to buy with all that gold.

All MMORPGs are designed to be played for several hours a day, every day, forever. That's the business model. The reason the genre is being lapped by open-world RPGs and survival games is that those offer the same level of intensity and immersion that made MMORPGs successful in the first place but they don't go on forever and ever and ever like an eternal treadmill. They don't necessarily come with a Game Over title card but they have clear end-points that feel like a satisfying place to stop. And they have clear on-ramps every time they add DLC or major updates, meaning you can dip in and out without worrying about falling far behind.

Or something. It's a theory. I haven't really thought it through. Feel free to elaborate and iterate on it.

AI Ruins Everything

That's made a lot of people happy, I bet. I don't mean that it does. I mean that I said it. Do I mean it, though? Depends what you mean by "AI", doesn't it?

Greg Morris, whose blog I picked up in Blaugust, has a good take on it. He, like me, isn't existentially opposed to AI. He sees some merits and uses, as do I. He's just not very impressed with what people are doing with it just now.

"Widespread usage of generative products, particularly ChatGPT, by many people I come in contact with is making my life more difficult" he says. 

Yes, mine too. All of ours, I bet.

Like Greg, I am not as sanguine as I could be about my doctor's surgery moving to an AI triage system. Neither am I convinced that having AI answer the phone when I call to try and buy something is the best way of handling a commercial transaction. Unlike Greg, I'm happy to say I don't encounter AI in my work although no doubt it's only a matter of time, but I have very low confidence in any of the current LLMs being able to send emails that wouldn't have gotten me into trouble if I'd written them.

What I do think, perhaps over-optimistically, is that the AIs will either have to get a lot better or most of the companies and services that have adopted them so quickly will have to drop them again pretty quickly too, probably as soon as they notice how much money they're losing and how many lawsuits they're picking up. Those No Win No Fee lawyers must just love AI.

This is all LLMs, though. They're the bad AIs. Generative AI as a whole may be morally and ethically bad but only some of it is practically bad, too. The real problem with the rest is that it's getting to be too good at what it does. 

 

I've been a fan of line art since I was a child. I've spent well over half a century developing a fairly well-trained eye and a reasonably informed, historical understanding of line art and illustration, particularly comics. I have a reliably-formatted emotional and aesthetic reaction to every such image I see that allows me to parse it and contextualize it by way of decades of exposure.

And I like some of the AI images I'm seeing these days as well as or better than many, many similar pictures I've seen that were drawn by humans. Humans draw a lot of really bad line art and a lot of them don't know how bad it is. 

It doesn't matter if I know an image is by AI, either. It doesn't put me off. The image is the image (cf. Intentional Fallacy, as always.) It's not like I'm being tricked into thinking a human did it. AI images of a certain kind stimulate the same level of endorphin production or synaptic snap or whatever it is that makes me look at a line drawing and get a warm, tingly feeling. 

Doubly so if it's one I've caused to be made myself.

If I was making my living by drawing pictures, that would piss me off. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe I'd just see AI as a new kind of pencil and start drawing with it. At the moment, there's resistance to commissioned AI art but will that attitude last? In the end, don't people mostly want the right image for the purpose they've commissioned it? Is the provenance of the picture that important? And if your primary (Or ancillary.) motivation is to give work to the artist, does that have anything at all to do with aesthetics?

To some people, yes, obviously. But to the mass market? I doubt it. And I was never going to commission anyone to draw anything anyway so it's a moot point as far as my money is concerned.

The same applies to generative AI and music, another field where I can claim a longstanding interest. Or at least it applies to music I've made with AI, which I currently prefer to listen to over almost anything else. 

I have to say that I have yet to hear anything made by anyone else using AI that has the same impact. Most of it is horrible. But I suspect that says more about the musical tastes of the people who are making it than the capacity and potential of the AIs. When people who like the kind of music I like start making music with AI, I'm pretty sure I'll find plenty to enjoy.

Always assuming I even know, that is. If people don't say they used AI, who's going to know? 

There are some free apps around that purport to be able to tell if a song has been made by AI or not. I tried a couple. I'd give you the links but I forgot to bookmark them.

One is extremely accurate but that one works by analyzing the frequencies of the sample you submit rather than trying to make any aesthetic judgments. It's undeniable that AI has a particular sonic signature you can hear once your ear attunes to it and there's a technical accuracy to the timing that human musicians don't always achieve. I imagine that could be coded out if the people making AI wanted to hide it. 

That app, unsurprisingly, pegged everything I sent it as having been made by AI. Which it was. I should have dummied it with some human music but I was just dicking around, not running some kind of double-blind experiment.

The other app, which attempts something more along the lines of a critical analysis, looking at things like the structure and the lyrics as well as the music, was much less certain whether an AI was involved or not. It tended to think most of the songs I was sending it were mostly done by a human. 

And so they were. I wrote all the words. I came up with all the melodies. I gave the AI a guide vocal, which I made sure the AI followed very closely. In my opinion, those songs were indeed made by a human. A human using AI as an instrument.

I suspect most of the AI music being made doesn't have that degree of human input behind it, though. An astonishing amount of AI music is being uploaded to streaming sites every day. Millions of songs. Almost all of them made purely by AI from a short prompt. 

You can see why the platforms might want to filter it out. Except, if their customers are happily listening to it, why would they bother? 

Bad pushes out good is the old saw. But what if the bad gets good and the good isn't as good as all that?  

If We're All Sitting Comfortably... 

Gemini has a new trick. It'll make a picture-book for you. I was curious so I fed it the basic plot, such as it is, of a little series of vignettes I wrote in the 'nineties. It's the last of the fiction I'm turning into songs so it was in my thoughts at the time.

Gemini did an okay job. I've seen considerably worse published picture books in my time as a bookseller. I can definitely imagine using it to make picture books for small children, who'd absolutely love to see their pets or friends appearing in an illustrated story-book.

I think if I was going to produce an illustrated book of something I'd written, though, I'd keep my own prose and have one of the really good image generators produce the pictures. This is a bit gimmicky in my opinion.

If you want to take a look at the whole thing, here's the link. Don't expect too much. 

And here's a song I made from using the same source material. It's rather better, I hope you'll agree. 

 

Notes on AI Used in this post

Some of this is explained in the text but to be clear, the final image is from Gemini's newish storybook feature. The full prompt for the whole thing was an ad hoc precis of a whole series of fictional pieces I published in an APA back in the 90s. At some point I will be posting the originals, complete with the infinitely superior full text and collaged illustrations, so if you have any interest, you might want to wait for that:

 "Please make me a picture book for adults about a girl called Phoebe, aged about 12 or 13, who lives in a rambling old house with a walled garden. She shares the house and garden with a girl in her late teens called Cat, a young woman of indefinable age called Cathy and a woman in her early thirties called Rachel. Phoebe has never left the house and garden. She has no memories of ever being anywhere else. She thinks she had a brother but she doesn't really remember him. She reads, plays chess with Cat, and just generally gets through the day. She believes Cat and Cathy are ghosts. She believes she's a half-ghost. She believes Rachel is fully real. Cat is friendly and kind to her. Cathy is drifty and vague but unafraid of anything and protective of Phoebe. Rachel is often angry because she wants to leave to get back to her friends, about whom she often talks, but she doesn't know how to leave. Rachel, when she's in a good mood, creates firework displays and makes snow fall so she and Phoebe can build snow statues of Rachel's absent friends. One day, after this has been going on for a long time, two of Rachel's friends, Sally and Cado Babe, appear in the garden and soon after they and Rachel are gone. Phoebe is left on her own with Cat and Cathy. She wonders now if she, too, will ever leave. " 

The header image and the second one were both done with Google's Imagen 4.0 at NightCafe. For some reason, instead of taking a couple of screenshots from the Ananta videos, I thought it would be amusing to have an AI make them instead. The prompt for the top image was "An anime girl dressed in blue with bunny ears riding in an electric blue sports car along a freeway between the towering skyscrapers of a near-future city. Bright sunshine, blue sky. Anime line art, bright flat colors." For the second, I used the same prompt but added "A dark-haired young man wearing sunglasses is beside her in the passenger seat." All settings were left on whatever the defaults are.

The third image is one of the daily pictures I'm still producing to keep my NightCafe streak going. I'm still using the same prompt I posted about, "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism". This image was made with Qwen Image SD.

It's Grab Bag But It's Completely Different But Also Still Grab Bag!

Listmas Is Coming!

So, I just read (Skimmed, honestly.) Stereogum's Best Albums of 2024 list, which came out, a tad prematurely I'd say, on the second of December. I mean, do they have a time machine or a crystal ball or something? How do they know the best album of the year isn't coming out next week?

Anyway, as it happens, I was ripping the #1 album(s) on that list at the exact same time I was reading Abby Jones' emotional endorsement of it. (Them.). Yes, I still rip CDs. I bought myself a new MP3 player (Yes , I still use an MP3 player.) because my ten-year old  iPod Touch is all-but full and I don't want to go through the harrowing process of choosing what to cull so I figured I'd just start afresh somewhere else, which is why the world is in the mess it's in, I guess.

Brat & Brat And It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat topped this year's poll as a double bill, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure. It's been Charli XCX's year. I got the pair of them for my birthday but I haven't listened to either all the way through yet. I need them on the iPod for that. Obviously, most of the tracks I'm already familiar with from life online but once I get this thing up and running I can hear them in the wild.

Looking down the list, there's only one other album I own and that's Romance by Fontaines DC at #28. Well, I say I own it. I don't yet. It's on my Christmas list and I'm sure it's somewhere in the house. I just don't know where. 

There's also a copy of #29 in the house or more accurately in the car but it isn't mine. That's The Cure's Songs of a Lost World. I like The Cure but Mrs Bhagpuss loves them. I was going to give the CD to her for Christmas but she counldn't wait so she bought it herself. I thought the two singles off the album were excellent so I imagine the whole thing is pretty much on par.

I do also kind of own #8, Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee. For most of the year it only existed as a two hour block of sound on YouTube. I listened to it that way and downloaded a copy for posterity. It is now available on Bandcamp in various formats so I might get the CD one day, although postage is a killer. I guess I could cut out the middleman and just buy the digital download. I do like to have a hard copy, though.

Of the rest, there are eight more albums I bookmarked at least one track from to use on the blog although in most cases I never did because I used other stuff that was around at the time that I liked more. Then there's another eight where I listened to something from the album online but didn't like it enough even to bookmark it. There's a lot of mmm... okay, I guess on that list for my tastes.

Of the rest, I at least know who everyone is, except for a dozen names new to me. You'd think, considering they're in Stereogum's best-of-year list and I read the damn site every day, I'd at least have heard of them but apparently not. Must pay more attention in class.

Still, it's a huge improvement on where I was a few years ago. It's hard work, keeping up, but it needs to be done. I really hate the way I let myself lose touch for a decade or so. Not letting that happen again.

As for the repeated assertions in the comments that 2024 has been "the best year since 2020" I'd have to go look at what came out four years ago to figure out why that might be true or if it even is, what was so great about 2020. Every year is great for music as far as I can see. And probably always will be, even if we're reduced to banging rocks together in a cave again.  

My #1 album of 2024 actually came out in 2023 so obviously it's not there. It'll be on my Inventory Full Best of 2024 list though. My blog, my rules.

The Clock Ticks For Tik-Tok.

I mentioned in passing in Thursday's post that I'd heard if I installed NetEase's MuMu emulator it might steal my data. This morning I saw the latest on the proposed U.S. ban on TikTok, an app that, it's claimed, "could allow the Chinese government to gain access to the data of its millions of American users". It's tempting to ask "So, what's new?"

According to the article in NME, the EU, along with Canada and more than thirty US states, have already banned the use of TikTok on "government-owned devices", which kind of makes sense in terms of the data that might be at risk there but also makes you wonder what government officials were doing, using TikTok in the workplace to begin with.

If the ban goes through in January, it's going to be very interesting to see how it affects popular culture, particularly in the U.S.A. TikTok-driven trends dominate the media these days and drive both production and sales in multiple businesses. Will a ban lead to a resurgence of American Soft Power or will American teens and twenty-somethings find their grip on the zeitgesit slipping even further as the rest of the world continues to accelerate away from the 20th Century? Or will they just find ways around the ban that let them lope along behind the rest of the world, just slightly out of step with the fads of the moment?

Also, why pick on TikTok? Doesn't every app steal our data now? Is it even feasible to avoid it any more? 

I sat up and took notice when I saw that Tencent had acquired a majority stake in Kuro Games. That's the company behind Wuthering Waves so I guess whatever data they were gathering now goes to Tencent, often described as an unofficial arm of the Chinese government, although not by me because I have more sense.

Of course, if it's true, Tencent already have all my data from any number of other games I've played that they own or part-own or publish because Tencent has a piece of pretty much everything. There's really no point worrying about it any more than it's worth worrying about low-level air pollution or water contamination. It's not like you can stop drinking and breathing and it's not like you can go without games and social media either. It's not physically possible. We all know that.

Make Room! Make Room!

I was rifling through someone else's grab bag yesterday, Scopique's in fact, when I came across a mention of a game called Infinity Nikki. The name sounded awfully familiar. I could have sworn I posted something about it myself, once.

I took a look but I couldn't find a tag for it. A search on the blog found nothing either but when I went to the game's website to see if I saw anything that looked familiar, I absolutely did. 

I have a not-all-that vague memory not only of reading about the game itself but also doing some digging through the history of the franchise, which seems to have been around for a while. There's a very good article about it on the Epic Games site, of all places.

When, where and why I read about it before remains a mystery. About all I can think of is that it might have come up when I was researching that similarly-named but wholly unrelated NIKKE game I foolishly downloaded from an advertisement on MassivelyOP.

Infinity Nikki looks like it might be fun. I mean, open world dress-up? What's not to like? I was ready to find out by downloading it and giving it a go only it seems that even with four hard drives and a usb stick all connected to my PC at once, I'm still running out of storage space.

I really hate deleting things (See above.) especially when I just know I'm going end up downloading them again, which is why I keep all these dozens of MMORPGs hanging around even though I'm not planning on playing any of them right now. They take up a ton of space but so do all my video files that I keep multiple copies of on multiple drives for safety-blanket reasons. It seems four and a half terabytes of storage isn't enough. I guess I'd better buy some more.

Or I could just uninstall World of Warcraft. That's a hundred gigabytes on its own. I'll think about it and when I've decided, I'll give Infinity Nikki a whirl.

Make It Stop! No! Wait! Don't! I Like It!

Nikki's in pole but there's a line forming right behind her. I was only checking on Neverness to Everness just the other day. I thought I'd pre-registered already but I haven't been getting any updates so I guess I never got around to it. Well, I have now. 

The game went into closed beta recently so with luck it should be available relatively soon. Early reviews are solid and things are looking good.

Further back in development is Ananta, a somewhat similar but somehow entirely different title from NetEase. (Them again!) The name is bleh, especially by current naming conventions, but the trailer is full-on fantastic. I've seen it described as "Anime GTA6" but since I've never played a GTA I have no idea if that makes any kind of sense.

What I'm thinking is that if the most fun I've had in a game this year was driving around in Once Human, listening to the radio and occasionally jumping out to shoot bizarre monsters, I'm probably in the target market for games where you drive around, listening to the radio, occasionally jumping out to shoot bizarre monsters. 

I should look for more games like that, especially ones where you can wear bunny ears and look cute while you're doing it. The days when I dreamed of pretending to be a short, ugly gnome or a dwarf with a huge beard seem a long way behind me now.  I really ought to update that thumbnail on my profile.

Is This A Glock 9mm I See Before Me?

Okay, so that's Macbeth. It's all fricken' Shakespeare, right? I thought we might have had enough music for the moment so instead of ending with a song, since we were just talking about Grand Theft Auto, let's end with this instead.

One of the very first things I remember doing in EverQuest back around the turn of the millennium was spending Sunday evening in the theater in Freeport, watching the equivalent of open mic night for about an hour or so. And now here we are.

If you'd have told me then...