Picking At Scars And Other Questionable Activities

I've written a lot of long posts this week so I'm going to try and keep this one really short. Place your bets now...

Should be easy enough. It's just a recap of where I am with the games I'm playing and that's mostly been EverQuest II these last few days. 

I finished the Tradeskill Signature Questline from Scars of Destruction on Tuesday. It was short and simple and I'd be lying if I told you I really followed what it was supposed to be about. 

There was a bit with the Open Hand, the new, cultish organization introduced with the expansion, about whose background and motivation I still have no more idea than when I started. Nothing I saw or heard in the crafting quests made any of it any clearer.

Then there was some business with Raffik, the ratonga introduced long ago in an excellent crafting storyline devised by the much-missed Domino. Raffik was an orphaned child when we first met him, then he became a pirate and now he seems to be the captain of a merchant ship, working with the Far Seas Trading Company. It was good to see him again but I thought he seemed a bit less exuberant and more downbeat than usual, which didn't feel great, especially when his ship sank.

The last part of the questline involves yet another snarky gnome who thinks everyone else is an idiot, which is par for the course with gnomes in Norrath. They either behave like hyperactive, sugared-up toddlers or that one sarcastic teacher everyone loathed in school. If you haven't played EQII, just replace "Gnome" with "Asura" and you'll know exactly what I mean.

I didn't have a clock on it but I doubt the whole thing took me more than three hours, not counting the extra faction work in Port Woe, most of which I did as an adventurer. It certainly helped that my Weaponsmith, who was doing the quests, is also a max level Berserker. 

There are long sections when the narrative assumes you're going to be sneaking about or using the W.H.A.T. device that lets you astrally-project as a giant, non-aggro hand that can gather for you but mostly I didn't bother with any of that. I just plowed through the mobs and killed everything that got in my way. It was a lot faster.

The main reason I wanted to get the crafting timeline done first is that you get full flight privileges for the expansion at the end of it. That makes a truly enormous difference when you do the Adventure timeline, for which you don't get flight until all the hard work is over. It makes so much difference, in fact, it's hard to imagine there's anyone who doesn't max a craft skill on their main adventuring character just for the head start on flying, even if they actively hate crafting.

Once I had that out of the way, I went back to the Adventure Sig, on which I spent a couple of hours each day for the rest of the week. It's been fun, mostly because the fights are really easy. Either I've set myself up better this time around or the instances have been tuned almost exactly to my preferences for a change.

It's so lenient now that mobs in the instances, including bosses, are easier than stuff in the open world, which is a bit weird. The way it works in EQII these days, and has for a few years now, is that almost everything outdoors is an actual, solo mob but all the mobs in solo instances are heroic. You get a huge buff when you zone in so you can handle them. 

In the past that's been a slog at times but in Scars the "heroics" actually die much faster than the genuine solo mobs outside. It seems like a back-assward way to do things but I'll take it, especially now I can just fly over everything I don't want to waste time on outdoors.

Drops in the instances are good this time around, too. Lots of upgrades, some cosmetics and yesterday I even saw an Adept spell book! Those are like hen's teeth nowadays. It wasn't for my class, of course, but you can't have everything.

After what must be ten or twelve hours altogether by now, I'm still in the first of the two overland zones doing the Adventure questline. I've done three "dungeons", I think, and I'm about to start the fourth. I'm guessing that will probably move me on to the second zone, Western Wastes, which of course I have already explored as a crafter. 

Western Wastes quite attractive, for a Velious zone, particularly the mob density, which is generously sparse. I'm looking forward to adventuring there.

I'm also looking forward to the story beginning to make some kind of sense because it certainly doesn't yet. All I know is that Lucan d'Lere, the undead Overlord of Freeport, is in Western Wastes, possibly looking for a Dragon's Soul. Why, and more importantly why I should care, is not explained, other than by some very vague scaremongering along the lines of "Well it would be bad for everyone if he got his hands on one, even Freeport". 

My Ratonga Berserker is not convinced. He thinks it might be quite a good thing if Lucan got even more powerful - and why wouldn't he? He's met Lucan several times and Lucan has generally played straight with him. As for the Open Hand, the ones whispering all the bile about Lucan into his ear, who the hell are they, anyway, and why should he trust them?

I know no-one plays EQII for the plot but generally the expansion plotlines are at least coherent and convincing within their own terms of reference. This one, so far at least, is anything but. Paradoxically, that actually makes me more interested to get to the end of it, to find out if there's some twist coming or if it all comes together in the end. At the moment I'd bet against it but it does give me some motivation to push on and find out.

Other than EQII, I've not played much. I did buy Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete Edition as I said I probably would. It was £8.99, slightly less than I expected, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I knew I was too late to transfer my old character across but I made a Nintendo account anyway, just in case. No joy there but maybe it'll come in handy for something later. 

I can't say I'm sorry to be starting over. I wasn't very emotionally attached to my one and only character (Can you even have more than one per account? I don't think you can.) so I was quite happy to begin again without all the impedimenta of the past.

What did surprise me was how good it felt to see the good old campsite again. I'd be lying if I said I'd missed it but it felt nice to be back, all the same. 

The game runs beautifully on my new phone. The image is super-sharp, gameplay is very smooth and the phone barely seems to notice the game is running. I played the online version on my Kindle Fire and it was fine there but this looks and feels noticeably better. The experience feels so comfortable, in fact, that it's encouraging me to consider the possibility of playing more games that way. 

I might install Wuthering Waves. It should run well enough. It allows crossplay, so I could swap between phone and PC on the same character, which would work very well for all the talking that makes up more than fifty per cent of the gameplay, although I can't imagine doing the fighting or the fancy gliding and jumping and climbing with mobile controls. I mean, I'm sure some people can but I can't imagine it being anything I'd enjoy or even manage.

I also might consider Once Human on the phone, when the game eventually come to mobile. Not because I think it would be good that way - I very much doubt it will - but because I'm having huge problems updating it on Steam. 

I tried several times this week and it failed over and over again, something that's happened more than once before. I uninstalled and re-installed it and it still failed so now I've uninstalled it, possibly for good. It's a great game in everything but the patching, which has always been a problem. Maybe it'll update more fluently on mobile.

Other than that, I haven't really played anything. There's a Stars Reach testing session tomorrow evening that I hope to find time to attend. I caused a bit of a stir on a Massively OP comment thread about the game recently, when I mentioned I'd been invited to the test on three different email accounts. 

That got the attention of both Raph Koster and Carneros. I didn't realize it was going to be a big deal - I assumed it must be happening all the time but maybe other people just stick to a single email address and don't get themselves into these awkward situations.

The Kickstarter-proper should be up in a week or so, anyway, and at that point I imagine the current testing phase will become somewhat moot as we wait to learn the outcome of the campaign and what happens after. If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to see the level of attention the whole thing draws. Here's hoping it all turns out well.

And that, I think, is about it for today. Was that a short post or not? It was quick to write, which is what matters. 1,500 words in just over an hour. Wish I could knock these things out that fast every day...

Names From The Past, Names For The Future

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, otherwise known as the 1980s, I used to write an opinion column for the comics fanzine I co-created and that column was called "Scattershot". It's mildly unsettling that my original opening line for this post was going to start with "A few scattershot topics I've been wondering about...".  Seems like some things haven't changed as much as I like to tell myself.

The thing is, though, "Scattershot" was always a good name for a column. Maybe I should start using it again. In fact, maybe I should start thinking more in terms of columns and features with names and set topics. It would add a much-needed sense of structure. Maybe I'll do that, although now I think about it I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about it in Blogger.

Blogger is pretty inflexible when it come to layout, or or so it's always seemed to me, but then that has a lot to do with the decision I made, not long after I started, to use a custom template that isn't officially supported. I don't dare change anything now in case it breaks the whole blog, which is the main reason everything here has stayed almost exactly the same, at least visually, for more than a decade. I imagine it's only because Google has pretty much forgotten Blogger exists that I've been able to get away with it this long.

Still, at least it's not WordPress, right? They break things all the time from what I hear. Wilhelm was complaining again the other day about something else WordPress had broken. 

I made accounts with both platforms before I decided to go with Blogger. The main reason I went that way was that Blogger seemed less technical. Now I wonder if it even that's really true. Wilhelm was describing how awkward it is to add urls in WP these days. Blogger has an HTML editor as standard. I toggle between the regular word-processor screen and the HTML window all the time to fiddle around with the code. Can you do that in WP now?

I am curious, I admit. It's a constant background worry that one day Google will remember they own a blogging platform and decide they don't want one. If that happens I might have to consider WP as an alternative so, since I already have an account there, I am toying with the idea of starting a WP blog just as an experiment. Maybe I should call that one Scattershot. It's a good name.

So much for the introduction. On to the topics.

Back To Camp

I became unreasonably excited last week, when I read a post at Kay Talks Games about how Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was coming back as an offline title. The online version shut down last year and even though it had been a long time since I'd played and I hadn't been thinking of starting again, I was somewhat miffed to know I wouldn't be able to go back and play some more if I happened to get the urge.

If we're honest about it, I imagine that's how most people feel when they hear that games they once played are closing down. It's not that anyone really wants to play them again, it's just that no-one likes being told they can't. 

A suggestion (Or demand...) that often comes up at such times is for the game to be somehow converted into an offline version, so people can at least go on playing on their own, but the response from developers is almost always that it would be too expensive or that technical reasons make it impossible.

Nintendo, though, will always be Nintendo. They do what they want not what other companies do and apparently what they want is an offline version of ACPC, so now there is one. 

It's very expensive for a mobile game. The full price will be $20 but for the rest of this month you can get it for just half that. Ten dollars is still a lot for a phone game, all the same.

And yet I am almost certainly going to buy it. ACPC is the mobile game I've played the most. I have a Label for it on the blog with eleven entries, many of which are full posts. I started playing in lockdown, when everyone else was playing Animal Crossing New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch and then I kept playing almost every day for months, long after people stopped gosh-wowing about New Horizons.

At the time, I played the game on my Kindle Fire but as it happens I have just bought a new phone. It's a budget phone but a good one. It's a Samsung Galaxy A16 and supposedly it can play Genshin Impact, albeit at low settings, although I haven't tried it yet and won't believe it until I do. If it can run GI, though, it certainly ought to be able to manage Pocket Camp. 

As well as Kay's post, I read a long and helpful review of the offline version at Eurogamer and just reading about it made me feel nostalgic for the many hours I wasted, talking to peculiar animals about their utterly pointless obsessions. 

I could do that again. I think I will. It'll be £10 well spent, I'm sure.

Free At Last?

On a thematically-related topic, there was a news item on MassivelyOP recently about another somewhat twee game I used to play and would quite like to play again: Free Realms. FR went under in the Great SOE Purge of 2014 but ever since there's been a bubbling, roiling, mumbling demand for some kind of return for the game that apparently everyone loved but no-one wanted to spend money on, something John "Smed" Smedley blamed on the players being mostly kids, although that never seemed to hold Runescape or Roblox back much.

For most of the last decade, the only runner in the Free Realms emulator race has been FR Sunrise, a project that began almost as soon as the game shut down and which has made many promises and released several videos but has so far produced nothing whatsoever of interest to anyone outside the walled garden in which it's supposedly growing.

Now, though, there's competition in the form of an open-source project described as "a reversed engineered walking emulator", meaning that so far all you can do is wander around an empty theme park, imagining the fun you'd have if the rides were switched on. 

I'm a little unclear on the exact timing behind this new initiative, which has been up and running for a good few months now, but the apparent lack of clarity over who actually owns the Free Realms IP these days might have something to do with it. That and the inability or unwillingness of the FRSunrise crew to get a functioning build to market, I guess.

The team behind the open-source project is looking for help to try to rebuild the content so feel free to pile on if you have the skills. I'll join you when there's a working game and I'll lay odds that will happen before we see any kind of publicly playable release from FRSunrise, whose beta sign-ups opened four years ago, which was when I signed up, but whose actual testing program, as far as I can tell, has yet to begin.

Metaversion

Here's a 21st century koan for you: if a virtual popstar performs in a virtual world, do they make a sound? Well, now's your chance to find out because Hatsune Miku is currently appearing in Fortnite Festival Season 7. She'll be there, for whatever value you care to assign to "be" and "there", until 8 April.

Three or four years ago, that news would have made me very excited. I'd have patched up Fortnite to log in and check it out and I'd have taken a bunch of screenshots and written a whole post about it. I will most likely get around to taking a look by way of Amazon Luna - I should really have done that before I wrote the post - but these vague, occluded hints of our true future no longer make my blood rush the way they once did.

And that's a good thing. It means that, just as I predicted, the real metaverse is already building itself around us as we ignore it. All the lunatic, self-serving, self-aggrandizing claims of the money-is-all cult have predictably come to nothing, while the infrastructure seeds and replicates with no external plan or purpose. 

The downside, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness has found to her irritation, is that early adopters attracted to the quirkiness and unpredictability of the tools now find themselves bored and uninterested by the much more consistent and reliable output of their successors. I find myself, as she says, "uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing", which is why you may have noticed a lot less discussion about it here of late. 

What applies to GenAI applies equally to the metaverse. Still, I do like Hatsune Miku and I do find the idea of her "performing" inside a video game attractively irreal. We are slowly getting to where I want us to go even if we don't always notice it's happening.

Get Weird On Me, Baby

Since I've mentioned AIWeirdness and video games in the same paragraph, I ought to link to Janelle's latest post, especially since I'm about to cannibalize it for my own purposes. She rarely finds anything weird enough to comment on these days but she made an exception for a "generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else."

Never having played Minecraft, it's not something I feel I need to see for myself, which is just as well because it doesn't want to run on my laptop.  If you'd like to take a look, here's the link. It's called Oasis, it only runs in Chrome, and it's supposedly "the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model". 

As Janelle suggests, it's also ultimately pointless. As it stands it's a curiosity precisely because of how little it reassembles an actual, functioning game but if it ever manages to become one, "this will be simply the human-programmed Minecraft we already have, except far more expensive to run." Now, if they could get generative AI to replicate Free Realms, then we'd be getting somewhere...

And that'll do for now. There's more but when isn't there? You have to stop somewhere.

I guess we'll end with a song because that's traditional around here. So, what d'you reckon the chances are of there being a song called "Scattershot"? And if there is, of it being any good?

I'll take it.

 

Notes on AI used in this post. 

Ironically, having gone on about not bothering much with AI any more, I immediately realized AI would be ideal for the header image. It's a great example of how un-weird the apps have become and thereby how useful but also not really worth talking about any more.

I wanted a picture of Hatsune Miku in Pocket Camp so I just typed in "Hatsune Miko in Animal Crossing Pocket Camp" and that's what I got. Kinda takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?

The model I used was Flux Schnell at NightCafe.

You Do Realise You Could Have Gotten A Full Week Of Posts Out Of This Little Lot, Right?

Friday Grab-Bag for real this time. No one story hijacking the post and running away with it like last week. Probably. I have eight or nine possibles bookmarked. Let's see how many I can get through before the whole thing collapses under its own weight. I'm going to take them in the order I found them so don't expect any kind of coherent through-line.

Also, anyone liking the introductory paragraph above the first illustration here? I think it works quite well for a portmanteau post. I have kinda spoilt the effect with this second para though...

Oops! I Clicked On One Of Those Side-Loading Ads On MassivelyOP And Look What Happened!

Seriously, what even are those? They're so annoying! I get that websites depend on advertising to exist and ad blockers screw that up but the reason people use ad blockers in the first place is because of how infuriating the ads are. Making them even more intrusive so they can circumvent the blocks isn't going to get anyone to click on them!

So, anyway, I clicked on this ad...

It was for a game called NIKKE. All caps, which should have warned me. The full name is actually NIKKE: GODDESS OF VICTORY, still all caps only the second part in smaller caps. Like that, sort of. 

The game describes itself as an "Immersive Sci-Fi RPG Shooter With Adorable NIKKES". Again with all caps all the way but enough of that. And what the heck are NIKKES? Is that a thing? Google doesn't think so. Not outside the game anyway. 

Inside the game? Well apparently that's a subject of some debate...

I lasted about ten minutes before quitting and uninstalling. From the website, I thought I was going to get a cut-price Hoyoverse knock-off  but what I actually got was an indescribable hotch-potch of hyper-sexualized robots with gameplay that ressembled duck shooting at the county fair, all set to a crashing soundtrack that had me turning my speakers down in the first five seconds because I couldn't wait long enough to find the in-game audio controls.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, MOP has you covered, although I note that although they promote it, they don't write about it. I wonder why that might be?

Do The Ostrich

Somewhere downstairs in one of my boxes of vinyl 45s I have a couple of singles I bought in the 1970s or maybe the 1980s, each of which features a couple of songs written by Lou Reed before he was famous. From memory, one of those is Do The Ostrich, in which Lou exhorts us all to do the ostrich as he attempts to kick-start a new dance craze. I haven't heard it for about forty years but I can still remember exactly how it goes, which isn't all that surprising when you consider the entire lyrics consist of "Do the Ostrich", repeated endlessly.

I can't remember who that one is credited to (It's by The Primitives.) but I can remember one of the others is "You're Driving Me Insane" by The Beachnuts. Or maybe they did "Little Cycle Annie". (They did. I just checked. It was The Roughnecks that did Driving Me Insane.) 

I can still sing the choruses of both of those after all these years, too, which suggests that Lou's early sixties stint as an in-house songwriter for schlock pop music factory Pickwick wasn't the misfire you might imagine. The guy had a knack with a chorus, for sure.

If you, like me, would love to hear all the songs he wrote for them then I'm very happy to tell you your dreams are about to come true. All twenty-five of them (!!) are due to be released in a compilation called "Why Don't You Smile Now?" - which now I hear it I realise is yet another one I already own.

I'll be getting a copy. Who'd want to miss Spongy and the Dolls doing “Really - Really - Really - Really - Really - Really Love” ? Not me!

Ashes Of Credibility

Back around the time the saber-tooths died out, just before the discovery of bronze, I pledged a kickstarter for a game called Ashes of Creation. Because all I really wanted was the base game and a quick look at it before it started but mostly because I'm cheap, I only pledged one of the lowest tiers. 

From memory, it gave me access to Beta 2. Might possibly have been Beta 1. I imagine there's some account I could log into to check but if I had the details I lost them long ago. I'm still going to get the game eventually, though, because developers Intrepid send me monthly emails about it so they must  have my details even if I don't. 

At the time, I was sufficiently enthused to take a second pledge for Mrs Bhagpuss as well, so we're going to get two of the damn things some day. The chances of me playing it for more than a session or two are slim. The chances of Mrs Bhagpuss even logging in are none.

I wrote the cost off as lost long ago but even so I found it more than a tad itrritating to hear Intrepid crowing about a new, year-long "Alpha Two", starting in October, that you can buy into for an extortionate amount. 

Initially, your hundred dollars was going to get you alpha 2 access and that was all because everything Intrepid have ever said about the game and everything they ever send me suggests they have a hyper-inflated sense of their own importance and we should all feel eternally grateful they even deign to let us kneel and touch the hem of their garment...

Ahem. Anyway, the reaction to that idea was... not favorable and now they've extended the offer to include Beta 1 and 2 and a month's subscription at launch. It's somewhat galling to realize that if I'd kept my credit card in my wallet way back when, for the price of those two $50 pledges I could have bought one $100 package now and been playing next May, which is likely still at least a couple of years before whatever passes for launch.

Not that I want to play the damn game any more. I wonder if it's too late to get my $100 back? The weirdest thing about the whole affair, though, is that the first two phases of Alpha Two won't have an NDA but the final one will. What's that about?

Robrat Summer

Back in the lockdown years I was quite excited for the future of the metaverse as I understood it, which was mostly as a way of watching live events in a three-dimensional virtual environment. There was a lot of that going on back then and I made an effort to join in where I could.

One of the more memorable meta-events I attended was PinkPantheress in Roblox. It was fun in a "This is New!" kind of way although in retrospect PinkPantheress's gentle, introverted re-interpolation of 90s drum'n'bass scarcely seems like the most obvious choice for the platform. Charli XCX seems like a much better fit, which makes it a shame the current Brat-themed Dress To Impress offer in Roblox is just some clothes and emotes not a virtual stage appearance by one of the acts of the summer.

Absent the novelty factor, it seems as though there's as much or more value in just watching events livestreaming in flat 2D or even in plain old sound-only. I've been listening to the recording of a French radio live broadcast of Lana del Rey's set at Rock en Seine in Paris last night for the whole time I've been writing this post and even faux-live and without visuals it does a pretty fair job of making me feel I was there.

The tech for immersive performance doesn't quite seem to be there yet. I still think it's the real USP VR has been searching for - I know I'd buy a headset tomorrow if it meant I could "attend" live performances all over the world from the comfort of my sofa - but apparently that's just me.

And So It Begins

Next month sees the debut of SM Entertainment's newest would-be KPop Idol, nævis . Not something I'd normally bother to mention only there's something a little different about nævis and it's not just that she spells her name all in lower case with a really annoying dipthong, either.

I'd forgotten until I started writing this section but we've met nævis here on the blog before. Back in 2023 I explained she was merely "a fictional AI who "connects" a real band [Aespa] to that band's virtual doppelgangers". Now it seems she's done with facilitating the success of others. She's out to become an Idol in her own right as an "AI-generated singer".

I'm not entirely sure how one of those differs from an already well-established virtual star like Hatsune Miko, other than that the vocaloid tech that underwrites Hatsune was specifically developed using vocal samples from a single, specific human performer, voice actor Saki Fujita., rather than whatever gestalt is likely to lie behind nævis. The NME article where I first read about her says "the virtual K-pop idol was created using computer graphics and AI voicing technologies, while her upcoming content will be produced using generative AI" but it seems a fine distinction.

Honestly, I don't really care about the exact methodology behind the project. I just love the whole idea. The metafictionality is dizzying. About the only thing I don't like about it are all those bloody dipthongs that make the names so damn hard to type. 

I'm going to namecheck Carole and Tuesday again, as you'd expect. We'll be in their world faster than you can imagine. We're halfway there already.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction (All I get Is Early Access, Baby!)

Nah, I'm happy enough. I just thought of the line and couldn't resist. If you can't make self-indulgent in-jokes and drop references no-one is going to get in your own blog then what's the point of having one?

I really enjoyed my hundred or so hours with Nightingale. I was looking forward to it and it did not disappoint. If it had been a single-player, offline title then the time I've spent with the game would have been a very solid return on the £22.49 I paid for it. Better yet, it had a linear storyline that made me feel I'd "finished" it, which is probably why I've barely touched the game since.

Or perhaps I should say I thought it had a linear storyline. It seems not everyone agrees. The upcoming Realms Rebuilt update doesn't just add new mechanics and content, it also includes a revamped central storyline:

"While the fundamental premise of the story remains the same (Earth has fallen, the Portal network collapsed, and what remains of humanity is adrift looking for Nightingale), in Realms Rebuilt the player journey has been…well….rebuilt!"

I have very mixed feelings about this. For one thing, I was more than fine with the story and progression as it was. It made sense, it was logical for the most part and I found it interesting but not so interesting that I want to see the extended Director's Cut. Especially not if, as I suspect, that would involve making a new character and going through it all from scratch. 

This is what you get with Early Access titles these days, though. It's not just that you come in at a relatively early development stage and accept there's content missing, which I think used to be generally thought of as the deal. EA is starting to feel much more like a beta or sometimes even an alpha, where everything is mutable right down to the fundemental premise of the game. 

I think that's why I'm starting to think of Early Access titles, even for games that strive to be Live Service titles or MMOs, as more like finite, buy-and-play-once games. Valheim is a great example. It was an amazing game when I got it and I put in over three hundred and fifty hours, almost all of which was in that initial run. 

I find now I don't much care that Iron Crown is still working on it. I finished the version of Valheim I bought. Whatever they're doing to it now might as well be a sequel or an expansion to a game I no longer play and I think I might feel much the same about Nightingale and quite probably every other Early Access title I'll buy in the future. 

It's fine. I just need to re-align my expectations.

(Also, I notice MassivelyOP is now using the form "Tencent's Inflexion Games", just like they're calling Funcom "Tencent-Owned Funcom". Not sure exactly what's going on there but I have my suspicions.)

Extinction Level Event Detected

And now some sad news: Nintendo finally noticed they've been giving something away for free so they're going to put a stop to it.  

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, the free-to-play mobile Animal Crossing game that's been running since 2017 and which I played, wrote about and very much enjoyed during the pandemic, when everyone who wasn't playing Valheim was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch, is sunsetting on 28 November.

I haven't played it in a long while. It was fun for a good few months but it gets repetitive eventually, like most games. Still, I wouldn't have said I was totally done with it so it's a bit annoying to hear that I won't be able to visit my characters any more.

Except, hey, guess what? I will! If I pay a ransom. 

After Animal Crossing Pocket Camp the free version ends it will be replaced (Possibly immediately, possibly a little later, it's not clear yet.) by a Premium, paid edition. How much that will cost and what, if any, will be the difference in gameplay remains to be seen but it is confirmed that you will be able to transfer your F2P characters into the new game.

Gee, thanks. I suppose it would be worse if the game was just closing down altogether and your characters would be lost forever but still, it feels like a really tacky move. I don't imagine I'll bother transferring mine but I have a couple of months to think about it. 

I might, if the new game is on Google Play Games, currently still in beta. Do they have paid games on there? Maybe I should look into it.

End With A Big Number

 

OMG! I have so many tunes backed up, waiting to their chance to shine in one of my famous music posts! Did you know my most-viewed post of all time is a music post? It's this one from March of this year and according to Blogger's own stats it has been viewed 188,531 times! And they say blogging is dead! 

If you want to know why I don't believe any of my stats, there's your answer. 

So, the question is, which of the hundred or so "possibles" do I choose for this single slot? I suppose I could let the dice decide...

Nah. I'm gonna go with something I think a few people might actually want to watch for once. I think it might be an idea to end these portmanteau posts with a cover. Let's start the tradition right here.

Don't go chasing any rabbits now.

Ikonei Island: Open Beta. Very First Impressions

Remember, back at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? I wanted to play, too but AC:NH is a Switch exclusive. You can't play it on PC. 

Well, you can, if you want to download an emulator and jump through a bunch of hoops, some of which look highly dubious to me. I don't think I'm even going to link to the site with the instructions. I'm sure you can all find it the same way I did if you're curious.

I considered buying a Switch just to play New Horizons but as far as I remember availability was poor. It would have been aberrant behavior for me anyway, buying a console just to play one game. It was 2020, just after the first lockdown and I was still on furlough so that may have had something to do with it

In the end, I found a much cheaper and more reasonable cure for my rare case of FOMO. I installed Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on my Kindle Fire instead. As I'm sure everyone knows, AC:PC is considered a hugely inferior entry in the Animal Crossing canon but I liked it. I posted about a few times, played just about every day for several weeks and then sporadically for a few months more until I eventually, inevitably, drifted away. 

I occasionally think about playing Pocket Camp again but I'd forgotten all about New Horizons. Or I had forgotten about it until this morning, when I read this post at MassivelyOP. Describing a new game I'd never heard of, Ikonei Island, a quote from the developers namechecks both Animal Crossing and another game I've read a lot about over the years, Stardew Valley.

Srtardew Valley has never appealed to me, partly because of the graphics, which lean very heavily into a nostalgia for a period of gaming that means nothing to me, but also because farming games are boring as hell. Part of what appealed to me about New Horizons as I was reading about it was the way it didn't seem to revolve around planting and watering. 

GIven that level of disinterest, I'd probably have carried on by had it not been for the two embedded videos. Particularly the second.

Four and a quarter minutes of piratical hurdy-gurdying is a hard ask, for sure, although I'd totally rock a red velvet frock coat like Patty's. It says something about the game and its developers that they thought it would make an effective - or even appropriate - promotional tool. I guess they must have been on to something, though. I mean, it landed me.

I watched as much as I could take of the video, which was about a minute, then I took a look at the gameplay trailer. At just over ninety seconds it's a lot more approachable and it shows the game to good advantage - or it does if you can tune out the bilious voiceover. Cheese and ham, anyone?

It immediately reminded me not of the two mentioned games I haven't played but of another I have: Yonder the Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder was one of the first games I bought on Steam. I played and posted about it several times, most recently in June 2020, when I picked it up again after a long layoff for precisely the same reason I've ended up writing about it today: I saw something that reminded me of it.

I have never finished Yonder. I haven't given it a fair crack, even. I realised that as I was reading Kluwes' commentary on his own time with the game. I'd always struggled to find the thread of the narrative when I played, ending up rambling inconsequentially through the gorgeous scenery, getting nowhere and not really minding. Kluwes made it seem a much more coherent, completable game than I'd ever felt it to be. He 100%ed the entire thing and made it sound easy.

I was seriously considering starting Yonder over from scratch but of course I haven't done anything so dramatic. Or decisive. Instead, I seem to have jumped on the first available train heading the other way. 

As soon as I'd watched the videos I opened Steam, found the Ikonei Island store page and registered for the open beta. Acceptance was immediate so I downloaded it and started playing.

It says "Beta" in the description but the version number (bottom left) says "Alpha". Feels more like an alpha build to me.

First impressions are excellent. There's a charmingly illustrated introduction in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of four orphans - two humans, who look like they might be brother and sister, a lizard and a ... pig? - all of whom narrowly escape being taken by slavers (Who are also pigs for some reason.). 

They speed away on a raft powered by a magical wind released from a flask tossed to them by the mysterious narrator and end up, wrecked in a storm, cast up on the beach of some desert isle. It's a great beginning and the gameplay that follows backs it up admirably.

I would go into detail but I've only managed to play for about three-quarters of an hour.. Yes, okay, I could easily spin those forty-five minutes into a five post series if I had the mind to but I don't think that would do the game any favors. I want to leave a good impression because for the short time I was able to play, I really enjoyed myself.

"Rain, rain go away..." Or actually don't. I quite like it.

I can fill in a few notes, at least. The characters, animations and models are delightful, albeit a little hard to see, what with them being so tiny. There's seemingly being no way to zoom in with the fixed camera. The island, what little I saw of it (Mostly the shore and some ruins near the river.) is beautifully rendered in lush blues and greens, all softened contours and rounded edges. 

It rains all the time, which is both a plot point and an aesthetic pleasure. Everything looks and feels like it's been drawn in pastels then gently smdged with a damp cloth. Frogs hop, crabs burrow and occasionally an aggressive plant detaches itself from the undergrowth and has to be soundly clouted with your "sword", a branch with the leaves still attached.

Hedda is the only charracter I've tried so far. I think you can play all four of them although I haven't figured out how to swap yet.

The UI is clear and attractive and I found the controls quite manageable, which may put me in a a very small minority indeed. The game opens with a warning that it's best played with a controller because the mouse and keyboard options aren't optimised and there's a thread on the game's Discussion page, in which the OP describes the beta keyboard controls as "unbearable" and everyone else agrees. I'd have to say I've seen a lot worse. Try playing Final Fantasy XI sometime...

That said, the controls do need some tweaking and the developers have already said it won't happen in the current beta, so even though I'd encourage anyone who likes the look of the screenshots or the gameplay in the video to give it a try, do be aware that it's not even Early Access yet. It's a proper beta. Or maybe an alpha...

Fear my mighty leaf. Sword! I mean sword!

It's so much a work in progress, in fact, that I ran into a proper, gamebreaking bug. When I got to the second area of the island and a new cut-scene played, the game registered a fatal error and shut down. The same has happened each time I've returned to that area, which is why I stopped and wrote this post instead. 

Otherwise I'd still be playing.

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp: First Quarterly Report

Eugene

Eugene is believed to be suffering from identity issues, although exactly who he thinks he could be is not entirely clear . He may believe he's Elvis or possibly The Fonz. James Dean has been suggested. Eugene also has seperation issues, albeit not with people. He forms attachments with inanimate objects. These are becoming a cause for concern. On the positive side, Eugene doesn't lack self-awareness. He knows his behavior draws unfavorable attention from some of the other campers (and staff) but he hasn't yet reached the point where he's ready to ask for help. He still thinks he can, in his own jargon, "deal". An intervention may be called for.

Butch

We had a breakthrough with Butch. Long years of living up to his childhood nickname have taken a heavy toll but happily he is beginning to show signs of progress. He is now able to acknowledge his feelings, even though he struggles to express them. Butch no longer responds to demonstrations of affection with a growl, far less a bite. In due time it should be possible to dispense with the protective headgear when approaching him but please continue to carry the net (behind the back and out of sight, as per regulations), in case of a relapse.

Dotty 

 Dotty (please note that really is her name, not just an insensitive and hurtful epithet) suffers from increasingly disturbing delusions. In recent conversations she has been observed moving from an expression of paranoid belief in her "fame" (which, for her, means constantly being followed and watched by "fans" (a peculiarly widespread problem among her peer group)) to voicing predictions of unlikely and unsettling social trends. It is of paramount importance she not be allowed to communicate these suggestions to other campsite residents, many of whom are exceedingly suggestible.

Boots 

The campsite musical therapy program is starting to show some rewards for Boots, although he still seeks to subvert the process to shore up his individual, unrealistic worldview. An obsessive focus on insect life, something he shares with all too many campers, continues to make itself evident in unusual, bizarre and unsettling ways. (cf Dolly).

Freya 

Freya is doing well but ensuring campers remain appropriately dressed at all times continues to present a challenge. In particular, persuading any animal to wear clothing below the waist has proved impossible. It should be stressed that they are, after all, animals. Please remember to make that point, firmly but politely, when dealing with complaints (or visits from the authorities).

Lottie 

Lottie, sadly, has not been one of our success stories. She moved from trying to sell imaginary camping spaces to cajoling, and in some cases manipulating, other campers into highly inappropriate liasons, in the guise of her supposed "new job". For several weeks, Lottie all but took over the meditation garden, turning it into a kind of impromptu wedding chapel. Several campers were convinced Lottie did indeed have the legal authority solemnize marriages. In the end, decisive action had to be taken, for the wellbeing of all concerned. Lottie has now left the campsite. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

Cherry 

Enquiries are still in progress concerning Cherry's recent revelations. For the present, our working hypothesis remains that the revelations of her imagined (?) past represent no more than yet another manifestation of the antisocial - indeed asocial - tendencies that brought her to the campsite to begin with. Some of the claims are so specific, however, it would be socially irresponsible to ignore them completely. Cherry's unfortunate predilection for setting things on fire ("just to see the world burn") has not yet been brought fully under control (neither hers nor ours), as is often all too plain for all to see. Please continue keep Cherry on "fire watch" at all times. Also, please see the list of songs no longer to be played over the camp's loudspeaker system ("Ride", Born to Be Wild", "Bat Out Of Hell" etc.).

Apollo 
 

Apollo has his good days but they are balanced by periods of introspection, self-doubt and (fortunately, rarely) bleak, existential despair. His memory is failing and he doesn't always recognize other campers but he nevertheless remains a popular and much-loved resident, well-respected as the first to find his way through our gates.

Catching Clouds: Yonder

I started playing My Time At Portia because Tobold mentioned it as an alternative to Animal Crossing: New Horizons for people who wanted something similar but more traditional. At the time, following the suggestion of Jen of Book of Jen, I was already playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as my own alternative to not having a Switch.

Almost as soon as I began playing MTAP I was reminded of another game I'd bought, played and forgotten a few years back, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher. As I carried on playing I found I thought about that game more and more.

Last night I fired up Yonder for the first time in three years. As it was loading I read a little bit about it. Seems Yonder is now available for the Switch.

I played Yonder for an hour or so. It took me a while to get used to the slightly off-kilter controls and the floaty movement. After a while, though, I fell back into its comforting groove. It's a gentler, slower game than My Time At Portia. It might well be a better match for those who find Animal Crossing too formless but MTAP too rigid.

After a while I put down Yonder and picked up My Time At Portia again. I spent a good while there, looking at plans to expand my house and working out how to make some money to do that. I did a dungeon. There was fighting.

By the time I'd finished it was getting very late. When I went to bed, for the first time in what feels like a long while I didn't feel able to log into Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. I wanted to but it was just too late.

Only a week ago I felt I might be running out of ideas for what to play. Now I can't fit everything in.
It looks as though I may be back at work by the end of the week. Something will have to give. I hope it's not Animal Crossing.

It's a pity Tobold couldn't have discovered My Time At Portia a month ago...

I Like This Place, It's (Not) A Zoo

I have Tobold to thank for this one.

A while back, when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about, he asked his readers whether they thought he ought to buy it. I hadn't played it myself so I dropped a link to a very interesting article on Gamesindustry, which I thought might help him decide.

Tobold bought New Horizons, played it for a week or two, didn't much enjoy it and stopped. Since then he's had an eye out for "a better game of the same genre" and now he thinks he's found one.

It's called My Time At Portia, which is, I think, an extremely curious title for a video game. Especially that choice of preposition. The first thing that came into my head when I saw the name was "Last Year in Marienbad", closely followed by "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" and "My Dinner with Andre".

There is something of a naming convention going on here, isn't there? Or maybe it's just me. Then again, this whole genre, the so-called Life Sim, seems redolent of a particular inflection of post-modern irony, one that curves so far back around it meets its own faux-naif self-reflection coming the other way. It's children's entertainment sub-texting Baudrillard.

It also happens to be kind of the corner on which I live. Or where I'd like to. I would if I could. I'm very envious of everyone who's playing New Horizons (although I notice most people have gone quite quiet about it lately. That always happens.). If I had a Switch, I'd be playing it.

Instead I'm playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which is barely an Animal Crossing game at all by most AC fans' reckoning. And, yes, I am still playing it. Every day. And enjoying it, although it's so laggy some evenings about all I can manage is to craft a couple of things and send Pete around in his van to fob off all my animal friends with a few butterflies and fish. I'm surprised some of them can remember who I am.

It is the animal friends thing, isn't it? That's why Animal Crossing. This is what I was saying to Tobold. I realize that in video game industry terms AC:NH, Stardew Valley, MTAP and a whole bunch of others are part of a specific gaming genre but AC:NH broke out because of those animals, didn't it?

I know they're what does it for me. There's a koala bear, who reminds me of  Pump Up The Volume era Christian Slater, doing an Elvis impersonation in my cabin (My cabin? My Cabin!). I'm being quizzed about my sleep patterns by a superannuated extra from Animaniacs. It's orders of magnitude more compelling than having similar interactions with cartoon human beings.

You work with what you've got, though, and I don't got a Switch so I thought I'd give My Time At Portia a go. It's on sale on both Steam and the Epic Store right now. I very nearly bought it yesterday but then I noticed there was a demo so I downloaded that instead.

I love this map. Barnarock, the peninsula in the north-east, is where my character comes from. Portia, where she lives now, is around the coast to the south.

I played it today and now I'm a bit stuck. Not in the game, which is paramountly simple to understand. No, I'm stuck over whether to carry on playing the demo, which I'm very much enjoying or to stop and buy the game while it's on offer for cheap.

Here's the thing. Unlike most similar set-ups, progress in the demo is not transferrable to the game proper. Usually what happens with these things is you download the demo and play it and if you like it you pay some money and either it opens up the rest of the game or it allows you to transfer your save file when you start.

People have clearly complained because there's a big warning on Steam telling you that's not going to happen. I'm glad I read it in time. I don't know how long the demo is or how far you can get but I do know it would be very annoying to have to do it all over again if you weren't expecting it.

Demos exist to show potential customers enough of whatever it is for them to make a purchasing decision. The MTAP demo does an excellent job of that. I already know enough about the game to make my choice. It's a very good demo. The problem is, I'm just not a very good customer.

I know I want this game. I like it. I like the colors, the animations, the conversations, the gameplay. I could already critique it from the couple of hours I've seen. I took a lot of screenshots in preparation for a first impressions post, which this isn't. It would have been a very favorable review.

I'm sure it's not perfect. For once it doesn't seem to be in Early Access so I think we have to treat it as feature-complete. Replying to Tobold, Redbeard noted some translation issues and those are quite apparent even in the demo.

Only I really like "translation issues". They both amuse me and make me think. And anyway, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between text that's been mistranslated and an idiosyncratic prose style. When Oaks says "I'm kind of simple", is that poor use of idiom or is he expressing a political philosophy? I mean, he's walking around a technologically advanced city dressed in culottes and a bearskin cloak... it's hard to be sure.

So, there's no doubt in my mind that this is a game I'd enjoy. Except for one thing. It's single-player.

I have a problem that seems quite common among people who've played a lot of MMORPGs, which is that I find it very hard to commit time to games, even online games, that don't offer evidence of the presence of other players. It doesn't have to involve meaningful interaction; I just need to know they're there.

Take Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for an example. I play it one hundred per cent solo. There isn't even any mechanism for communicating with other players as far as I can see. You can't group with them or talk to them. But they are there.

I see them standing about. Just one in each of the tiny zones. I can see their names. I can see their outfits change. I can trade with them and make friends with them (in the most abstract way). Their mere presence somehow validates all the time I spend there, even though clearly it does nothing of the kind.

My Time At Portia is very reminiscent of a game I bought a few years back and about which I posted a few times. That game was Yonder. I liked it a lot, but According to Steam I played for just six hours. The last time I logged in was July 2017, which was also the month it released and the month I bought it. I played it a few times and then I stopped because I was the only one there.

If I could carry progress over I'd just keep playing the demo until there was nothing left to do. Put off any decision that way. But I can't because, if I did decide to buy the game, I'd have to do it all again. Not a terrible hardship, I know, but still...

You're either on the bus...

Then, Yonder was quite an empty sort of game. Very beautiful but without a huge amount to do. By most accounts, MTAP does a far better job of keeping players entertained and motivated. The very gaminess of it as compared to the beingness of Animal Crossing seems to be what drew Tobold to prefer it in the first place.

It wouldn't draw me but I can't play Animal Crossing without I buy a Switch and there aren't any and even if there were I am not ready to pay that much just to hang out with my animal so-called friends.

Maybe, with plenty to do, I won't find Portia empty. And I'm better at playing single player games now than I was in 2017. And it's only £9.99...

Sod it! I'm going to buy it. There, that's that sorted out. Thanks for the advice, everyone! This is what blogs are for!