Playing By The Rules

I took a day off posting yesterday for the very good reason that I couldn't immediately think of anything I wanted to post about. I could certainly have come up with something if I'd tried but I didn't feel like trying all that hard so I didn't bother. Everyone always said that Bart Simpson was a bad influence. 

Today I'd normally be working, so I wouldn't be posting anyway, but I'm on holiday, so since I didn't post yesterday I guess I should today. Is that how it works? I don't know. I lost my blogging rulebook a while ago.

The only problem is, I don't really have much more of an idea what to post about now than I did twenty-four hours ago. Maybe I'll just do one of those Friday Grab Bag posts but on a Sunday. Actually, Sunday seems like a better day for it, wouldn't you say?

The First Rule Of Fight Club

Let's start with something with some socio-cultural heft to it, why don't we? Although the hysteria over Non-Disclosure Agreements seems to have subsided somewhat of late. I remember a while back when it was a hot topic in mainstream news. I guess it might still be. I stopped paying attention the news about, oh, I guess it must be eighteen months ago now. 

I get a ton of cultural updates on everything from gaming to movies to the arts from a number of sources but I opted out of all politics and general news channels, both online and off, towards the end of the second pandemic year. What with Brexit and covid it had all become so deeply inflected and recursive there seemed little point listening any more. If anything important I genuinely need to know about happens, it either seeps into my attention via cultural osmosis or Mrs Bhagpuss will tell me. Otherwise, I don't need to hear about it.

Back when I was less hermetic, I remember there being a lot of talk about how NDAs were very bad things that were threatening the future of free speech as we know it. That mostly seemed to apply to the kind of documents handed out by one celebrity's lawyers to another's or from some megacorp's legal department to someone's literary agent. No-one was really talking about the NDAs I get asked to sign from time; the ones you have to accept before they let you test a video game these days.

My problem with NDAs for unreleased games is that these days I pretty much only want to "test" them so I can blog about what they're like. Once upon a time, in the ancient past, I wanted to get in because it was so gosh-darned thrilling just to be accepted. Like joining some kind of elite club. If I got in, I took the whole thing as seriously as if it was an actual job. Later, when beta tests ran for months, even years, I wanted to get in so I could play the game as though it was already live.

Familiarity killed the thrill and the commitment. Early Access killed the need. Nowadays, I'm happy to wait until the gates open to the public, which is generally around the same stage of development I'd have gotten into an old school closed beta anyway.

No-one puts an NDA on Early Access or open beta so it makes sense to wait. As I said, my main motivation is usually the opportunity to get a few blog posts out of the experience. Games like Noah's Heart that I go on playing day after day, month after month, are extreme outliers. A swift flick through the blog's back pages will show my average stay in a new mmorpg or fellow traveler rarely sees out the month.

Still doesn't stop me applying for testing programs, though. For one reason it's rarely clear up front whether there's going to be an NDA or not. Some developers follow the old "All publicity..." homily, even now. And then, not all NDAs are the same. Sometimes they're tight enough to choke on but other times there's plenty of give. I'm more than happy to sign up to a "No Livestreaming" clause if I'm allowed to  wax cynical in prose.

In the past year or two, I've made my decision at the point of signing. If I get an invite, I read the NDA. All of it. Carefully. Mostly, that's the end of it. I decline to sign and move on. On that basis, I've skipped a couple of in-development games I really wanted to see, which I'll almost certainly buy and play when they release. In at least one case, I'm still not convinced declining was the best decision, either. 

Then, a couple of days ago, for some reason and none, I signed one. And that's the last I'm going to say about that. I have another couple of applications pending for games I'm arguably more interested in. If either of those comes through I'll probably sign up there, too. Or maybe I won't. Whether I do or not, no-one's going to know about it. These things are so strict you can't even tell anyone you've been accepted. 

Fight Club has a lot to answer for. 

I've never seen Fight Club, by the way. Or maybe I have. If I had, I wouldn't tell you, now would I?

The First Rule of Tufty Club

My god, that ages me. Or does it? Tufty Club feels like it was even before my time. I only heard about it. I never was in it. 

Oh, wait, does everyone know what Tufty Club was? Because I'm awkward and because it amuses me, I'm going to give you this link to explain it. Apparently Tufty was doing his thing right into the seventies but I swear I only ever knew him as something that happened before I was born.

Anyway, the point of Tufty Club was to tell everyone about road safety, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm going to say here. I only mentioned it at all because I was trying to think of the antithesis of Fight Club and it was the first club that popped into my mind. Which, I guess, tells you plenty about what's in there. 

The extremely labored and unconvincing segue I was going for would have had something to do with secrecy and openness but I think we can all agree it's not going to come together. Also, the first rule of Tufty Club would have probably been "Look both ways before you cross the road", which is just confusing the issue even more. All it was supposed to do was introduce a little "What I've Been Playing" section, anyway. Geez! What a totally overblown and unecessary introduction for such a mundane topic. 

Anyway, we got there eventually. So, what have I been playing? Noah's Heart, obvs. I'm level 99 now, closing in on the big three figures. It doesn't stop there, either. I saw someone who was level 105 the other day. I could give you about a dozen more kinds of levels I'm chasing there as well but I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say I'm playing every day and enjoying it a lot, still.

Other than that, one of the big games of my week has been the really excellent Artifact Krewe, which is not only one of the most aesthetically pleasing, visually gorgeous games I've ever played but also a lot more nuanced and layered than I expected. Skrool, the develper, really ought to think about remaking it without the proprietary Guild Wars 2 content and releasing it commercially. It's more than good enough.

The other is Nine Noir Lives, which has also turned out to be deeper than I expected. Okay, not deeper. It's still a jokey, "wouldn't it be funny if everyone was a cat?", Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe pastiche. Nothing's changed there. The depth I'm talking about is the sheer quantity of dialog chains and the exceptionally diligent way the developers seem to have anticipated every possible interaction and crafted an appropriate response for it. 

There are some generic "That doesn't need peanuts" results when you try to add peanuts to someone's shoe (Just as a frinstance.) but most everything gets an individual outcome, which just makes me want to ram all the things together to see what happens. That'll be why I'm still in Act One but loving it.

Some of the puzzles are a bit too puzzling for me but I have a solid walkthrough to help with that. I've only needed to glance at it a handful times and only for long enough to get a hint. The solutions are all very fair, once you get a nudge in the right direction.

I did start Blacksad and liked the graphics, characters and writing quite a bit but it's waaaaay more actiony than I expected. The quicktime games are relentless. I'd have to be in the mood and I mostly haven't been. 

As for Baldur's Gate, I claimed it, downloaded it, installed it, made a character and logged out. It looks very slick on the screen. A good job of bringing it up to date, I'd say. I spent a while investigating voice packs to see if I could track down the old Daria set I used to have but since the top Google search for "Daria soundpack Baldur's Gate"goes to a post on this blog, I think I can forget about it. I'm never reliving that experience, sad to say.

The First Rule of Celebrity Club

Okay, I know "Celebrity Club"'s not a thing but it is really, isn't it? We all know it. Just like we all know the first rule there has to be "Have famous parents". 

There's been a lot of kerfuffle in my media feeds of late concerning "Nepo Babies", which is a band name if ever I heard one. It seems like the most ridiculous twaddle to me. So, knowing people in the line of work you hope to follow opens doors and having the same name gets you noticed. Big fricken deal. You still have to be able to Do The Work. 

Is it any different from a plumber or an elecrtrician or a garage mechanic? If it says Jenkins and Son over the door, does that mean Jenkins Jr. gets a pass on their HNDs or NVQs or whatever the hell set of initials you need these days? You still have to know which end to hold the spanner.

Why was I thinking about this? Because when you see something standing on its head it draws your attention. Last week NME informed me out of the blue that someone called Rob Grant had an album coming out. About the only person I could think of by that name was the guy who co-wrote the overrated SciFi sitcom, Red Dwarf. I very much would not want to listen to an album by him.

Setting Sail On A Distant Horizon - Rob Grant

The Rob Grant in question, though, is someone I find one whole helluva lot more interesting. He's Lana del Rey's father. 

Lana, as you will remember, started out as Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grant, before she changed her name to May Trainor, then Lana del Ray, before finally settling on the version we know today. Her dad, it transpires, is a bit of a piano player himself. He has a co-writer credit and also plays piano on one song, Sweet Carolina, on Lana's last album, Blue Banisters. 

Ahead of the June 9th release of ‘Lost At Sea’, Grant pere's debut album, two tracks have been pushed to YouTube for our perusal and they make for pretty pleasant listening. It's a stone certainty I'd never have given them a moment's attention were it not for his daughter's name but that would have been my loss. It seems beyond ridiculous to complain about fairness just because someone's playing the cards they've been dealt.

Off the back of this unusual twist, I was going to put a whole music post together featuring tracks by children of celebrities and I may well yet get around to that but for now I'll just drop this one in from my "What I've Been Listening To" slush pile.

Moonbath - Sateen Besson

I came across this organically, somehow. As I watched the video, which even now only has just over thirteen hundred views after four months on YouTube, I found myself wondering how she got that bed into the forest. It seemed like a little much for a home-made video for an unknown's first song.

It did, in fact, seem me like the sort of thing you might expect from a famous movie director known for startling, dreamlike imagery. Someone like Luc Besson, for example. So I googled her and of course "Sateen Besson is a French rising Instagram model, social media influencer, and actress who boasts a significant fan base on Instagram. Additionally, she is renowned for being the daughter of the famous French director and screenwriter Luc Besson".

It's a good tune and I'm glad to have heard it. I'm even gladder to have heard this one, which sadly doesn't have a dreamlike video to go with it. If Sateen's family connections add anything, it's interest above and beyond the work itself. You have to womder if she asked her dad for tips on how to get that bed out there. Not to mention how to get it back. 

In the end, everyone has a past, everyone has a family and as the saying goes, you can't choose your relations. If only, eh?

I have more but that's probably enough for a Sunday. Or any day, come to that.

Meet The Krewe

Last week I bought four new games so it was a racing certainty I'd end up downloading something else for free and playing that instead. This is why I so rarely pay money for anything - games, music, books, movies, tv shows - the very act of handing over the cash seems to guarantee the universe will feel duty-bound to let me know I could have had something just as good - or even better - for nothing.

In this case, the something in question turned out to be so peculiarly unlikely, I don't think there's any way I could have anticipated it. I was checking Feedly, as I do many times a day, being as addicted, in my fashion, to certain, relatively obscure forms of social media as any GenZer to their TikTok feed, when this popped up.

Artifact Krewe, available on itch.io for the extremely appealing price of no money at all, is "a Guild Wars 2 fangame, not associated with it". Wrap your head around that, if you can. It's also "a treasure hunt game taking place in a colorful world". Now you know that, you know pretty much everything the game's storefront has to tell you, other than the developer's name - Skrool.  

Skrool seems to have made just this one game. The only link on the "About" page goes to a Twitter account going by the name of "Not Really Skrool" that's been "temporarily restricted... because there has been some unusual activity from this account.

It seems that being restricted by Twitter doesn't actually stop people seeing what you've got to say; it just means anyone who wants to find out what that is has to click the equivalent of a "proceed at your own risk" warning. I clicked, so now I can tell you that Skrool "exists". And that's about all I got from Skrool's profile.

A scan of the recent timeline reveals that Skrool has been working on the game "these last years" and... er... that's about it. Diligent research on my part (I clicked on the link to Skrool's Tumblr, perhaps significantly named It's Really Skrool, although perhaps not, since there's another Tumblr just called Skrool) reveals that the game has actually taken two years to complete. 

Having had work in the Peacemaker Calendar of 1335AE, Skrool would appear to be very active in the creative side of GW2 fandom, an aspect of the game I've been aware of for a long time but rarely felt the need to pay much attention uintil now. On the evidence presented, Asurans and their culture would seem to be Skrool's main focus.

That's something I'm sure everyone reading this who's ever played GW2 must have worked out for themselves already, just from the name of the game. According to the GW2 wiki, "krewe", with that idiosyncratic spelling, refers to Asuran "work gangs or limited single task corporate entities" although the word itself has clearly been borrowed from the carnival traditions of Louisiana and nearby regions, where it refers to "a social organization that stages parades and/or balls for the Carnival season".

Whatever its provenance, Artifact Krewe is a fine divertissement. After reading about it on MassivelyOP, I immediately downloaded the game, which arrives in a neat zip file that unpacks to take up just over a gigabyte of hard drive space. For that, you get a lush, vibrant, colorful world in which to enjoy some very gentle, relaxing and curiously satisfying gameplay.

There's no character creation beyond giving your Asura a name. Pick something you don't mind seeing repeatedly because every NPC will use it as extensively while talking to you, as if they'd just come back from a weekend's residential marketing course. 

If the game has a weak point - and it's hardly even that - it would be the dialog, which often reads as though it's been written by someone for whom English is not a first language. Coming of the back of Noah's Heart, however, that feels like a churlish observation to make. Both the meaning and tone are always eminently clear, which puts the text well above many other supposedly professional games I've played lately.

Other than that, I really can't fault it. As well as looking gorgeous Artifact Krewe sounds charming and plays smoothly. I found the controls intuitive and comfortable. It was easy to work out what to do and how to do it. Movement feels fluid and expressive, although the woozy sweep of the camera could induce motion sickness in the sensitive.

The mechanics of locating and unearthing artefacts, using a device whos acronym escapes me for the moment, are simple and straightforward. Rather than cluttering up your inventory, each artifact found adds itself to a list as you look for clues to lead you to the lost laboratory of the celebrated but mysterious Vixx.

In the fairly short time I had to play I found half a dozen items, some buried in the ground, others on crops of rock only accessible by way of some light, GW2 vista style platforming. There was one that turned out to be concealed behind a locked door, openable only by rolling a large rock onto a pressure plate. The puzzles felt like fun. Nothing was difficult or annoying. 

"Fun" pretty much sums up what I've seen of the game so far. The whole experience is sun-drenched, celebratory and bright. It may be that the tasks and challenges get harder, later but somehow I doubt it. There's no combat in the game and it feels very much modeled on those whimsical, joyous, almost childlike events GW2 was known for in its earliest days. 

For someone who remembers the game as it was back then, it doesn't feel so much like a tribute as a reminder of what could have been. Right now, I'd rather play Artifact Krewe than log in to the game that inspired it.