Girl On A Motorcycle

A while back I wrote a post on how I don't have backlogs of games and don't entirely understand what they are. As usual, that turned out to be mostly a semantic problem. Almost everything is.

I may not have a backlog but increasingly I do have more and more games installed on my hard drive. There's a very straightforward reason for that: people keep giving them to me.

When I say "people", of course, I really mean "game companies". When I got into gaming, back in the 1980s, no-one ever gave games away. Oh, you could get "free" games with magazines. I got a ton of those. But you had to buy the magazine. And that cost about the same as buying a game.

As time went on, the price of games went up and up. Way beyond the price of magazines. Beyond even the annual subscription to a magazine. And the games I liked, MMORPGs, made you pay an up-front fee and a subscription. Keeping your hard drive clear wasn't a problem.

Then we had the Free to Play revolution and everything went the other way for a while. Instead of having to choose you could play all the things. So I did. My hard drives filled up with 30gb, 40gb, 60gb installs of games I'd play for a few weeks and then forget all about. Most of them are still there. I just bought more hard drives.

I'm watching Doom Patrol at the moment, the sweariest show I have ever seen. Swearing seems really funny all of a sudden.

Until recently, they were all MMORPGs. I didn't do single player. But at some point I was persuaded to sign up for Steam and at some later point I began to use it.

Once I had Steam, I was able to start trying things other bloggers recommended. Increasingly people I followed were drifting away from MMORPGs and writing about all kinds of games. I tried Dr. Langeskov and Doki Doki Literature Club on recommendations and liked what I found. Can you say "gateway drug"?

Somewhere along the line I installed Twitch. I think it was to watch a livestream, quite possibly one of the early hypefests for EQNext. Twitch began giving games away because now everyone was giving games away. It was some cross promotion with Amazon Prime because Amazon owned Twitch somehow and I had Prime, because it was free for three months and I got used to using it, (Can you say "the first hit is free"?) so I started downloading those too because why not?

Note to self: play more games.

Now I had games coming at me from all over. Endless free trials and free to play games from the MMORPG developers, monthly free single-player titles from Amazon/Twitch, free games from Steam...

And still they came. I installed Nox so I could play Android games on my desktop and that opened up a whole new free game ecology. I keep reading about free deals from Epic and EA and XBox Live on PC and who knows what-all else. So far I've resisted those but I'm sitting here and I might be sitting here for who knows how long - a month? Two? - and my resolve is weakening.

Not that I had much resolve to begin with. I mean. it's free stuff, right? And it comes to my house. I don't have to go and get it or speak to anyone or really do anything other than click a mouse a few times. Why would you not?

I remembered yesterday that it was a few days past the begining of the month so I went to see what Twitch had for me. An exit strategy, that's what. Now that Amazon Games is about to become a thing Amazon is distancing itself from Twitch. I don't know how social they're being about it.

Where do I start?

Amazon asked me if I'd like to deal direct and now I have a new folder on my third drive called Amazon Games. They offered me a choice of five titles for April and I picked two: Earthlock and Kathy Rain.

I tried Earthlock this morning. I lasted about fifteen minutes. The game itself seemed okay. It looks pretty enough. The plot, the tiny fragment I saw of it, might have been cribbed from the pilot of an uncomissioned Saturday morning cartoon from the late 1980s but there's nothing much wrong with that. The characters and the dialog wouldn't have challenged a seven year old but they had a certain naive charm. The combat, while pedestrian, was not without amusement.

The problem was the camera. It didn't have one. Rather, it did but I wasn't allowed to use it. You get to see what the game shows and that's that. In a 2D game, not a problem. In three dimensions with WASD controls, no. Just no.

Why do they have four beds in a room for two?

Kathy Rain is much, much better. I haven't played for long, maybe forty-five minutes, but I can say already that I'll be playing this until I get to the end. It will have an end because it's a point and click adventure mystery and they have to.

I was pretty much sold in the first thirty seconds. It has one of the most in medias res openings I've ever seen. No introduction, no tutorial, nothing. It loads, you see a room with someone at a desk, the door opens, Kathy walks in, hurls herself on the bed and starts to talk about how the room is spinning and she's about to throw up.

Her roommate, acting like this happens all the time and isn't worthy of notice, drops a revelation that instantly sobers Kathy up and next thing you know you're watching her take a motorbike ride to her estranged grandfather's funeral.

Go make it happen

Kathy wears black leather, rides a motorcycle and drinks to excess. In her backpack (it's an adventure game - of course she has a backpack) she has a journal, a taser and a pack of cigarettes. I have buttons. Go ahead, push them.

I'm not quite so sold on the retro 90s pixel art. As I've said before, I was glad to see the back of that look when technology killed it. I have no nostalgia for bad graphics. I spent a while trying to get it to look crisper but no dice. I'm getting used to it. It's starting to look good. (Can you say "habituation"?).

I also assumed, wrongly, that this was a game that actually came from the period it depicts. Not so. It was in fact released in 2016. It was a critical hit, won a bunch of awards and it currently has a "very positive" rating and four and a half stars out of five on Steam, where you can buy it for £10.99, if you like paying for things you could have for free.

I'm getting Morninglight vibes.

Everyone reading this probably played the game years ago, although I can't recall anyone mentioning it. Not going to stop me posting about it, anyway. If I do I'll try and avoid spoilers. It's just about conceivable someone is even further behind the curve than me.

So there we have it. Free games. You get a lot more than what you pay for. And literally in the time I was posting this I've acquired another. Paeroka flagged up something called Regions of Ruin, free on Steam as I write. It looked interesting so I downloaded it.

Seems I am building a backlog after all. (Can you say "addicted"?)

Don't Make Me Admit Stuff

There's a community thing going on right now called "Love Your Backlog", initiated by Later Levels and picked up, so far, by Time To Loot, Nerd Girl Thoughts, Shards of Imagination, Indiecator and probably more that I've missed. I'm following with interest and not a little puzzlement. If there's one gaming trope that makes no sense to me it's The Backlog.

Backlogs of unplayed games are clearly a thing in many people's lives but not in mine. It's not so much that I don't have games I haven't finished (or started), although I don't have all that many of either. I tend not to buy or download games unless I'm planning on playing them immediately.

It's more that I don't see games that I'm not currently playing as a "backlog". It's a word that has very specific and entirely negative connotations in my vocabulary. I would never apply it to anything I anticipated getting pleasure from.

My formative encounter with the word was in my first office job, a year out of university, working as a clerk in an insurance company. On my first day I was introduced to "the backlog". It was a line of cardboard boxes filled with files, dumped haphazardly on the floor, winding all the way around the walls of a side office and snaking back down the corridor. There were more than six months of claims in there that had never even been looked at, let alone dealt with. Guess who had to start sorting them for the next person up the chain? Not me, thank god - they had to bring in another company to handle it, things had gotten so out of hand.

That's what I think of when I hear the word "backlog": a crisis threatening to turn into a calamity. I have several piles of DVDs I haven't gotten around to watching yet and I always have piles of books waiting to be read but I don't have "backlogs" of movies or tv shows or novels to "get through". I have a treasure trove of potentially wonderful, exciting, hilarious entertainment to look forward to. There ought to be a word for it but I can't think of one. I can think of two though: treasure trove.

But we were talking about games, weren't we? I'm not sure I have much to contribute there. How about I try these conversation starters and see how we get on?

A game you’re eager to play, but haven’t yet started:

We're talking something I own, right? Nope. Can't think of one. Next.

A game you’ve started several times but haven’t yet finished:

Okay, this is easier. Let's exclude all MMORPGs because as we know you can't finish any of those. I have a few candidates but they don't really fit the ethos of the question since I have no interest in finishing them. I tend to play games until I'm not amused or entertained by them any more. Then I stop. If the game isn't holding my attention that's the game's problem, not mine.

The one game I own that I have started and that has a definite ending, which I would like to get to, is Broken Sword 5. The first two Broken Sword games were what started Mrs Bhagpuss and I on gaming back in the '90s, before we moved on to Might and Magic VI, Return to Krondor and then EverQuest.

I put  Broken Sword 5 on my Amazon wishlist years ago and a non-gaming friend bought it for me. At the time I had a Windows 10 Tablet and my plan was to play it on there, with Mrs Bhagpuss, when we were on holiday. I did take it away a couple of times but when I'm on holiday the last thing i want to do is play games. Then my Windows tablet broke and I replaced it with an Android one so that was the end of that.

I've started it a couple of times on the PC but I get a little way and then I think it's a shame to be playing it on my own so I stop. Maybe one day.

The most recent addition to your library.

I can answer that one! I posted about it last week and there will be another post soon. Californium. I'm playing it, though, so how does that count as "backlog"?

The game which has spent the most time on your backlog:

I think we already established I don't have a backlog as such but I do have a candidate that I think fits. Even though I said I was excluding MMORPGs, I think I'm going to put Project: Gorgon in for this one.

I first posted about P:G waaaay back in 2013 and I've written about it many times since then. I played all the various sneak peaks and alphas and betas after that. I kickstarted it the time it actually succeeded (and the time before, when it didn't). I linked my old account to the new version when it went into Early Access on Steam...

...and the closer it comes to being finished, the less often I log in and the less often I feel like logging in and the less likely it becomes I will ever log in again, let alone play the damn game like an actual MMORPG the way The Friendly Necromancer does.

There's another post to be written here about that, bouncing off Hardcore Casual and The Ancient Gaming Noob. I might get to it at the weekend.

The person responsible for adding the most entries to your backlog:

I buy my own games, by and large, although as I mentioned above I do occasionally add one to my Amazon wish list. Not very often, though. My friend bought me BS5 and Mrs Bhagpuss bought me the Legion expansion for WoW but I think that's about it.

I also won a prize of a Steam voucher from IntPiPoMo, twice, which accounts for much of my very small Steam Library. That's what paid for Californium (thanks Chestnut!) and I still have about $10 left.

I guess the answer is me.

Well, that didn't take long, did it? What would take a lot longer and probably fit into a Venn diagram of the underlying concepts involved would be a list of the games I both own and intend to play but don't actually get around to playing, either as often as I'd like or at all.

Just looking at my desktop I can see the icons for sixty-five games. I've finished four (Doki Doki Literature Club, A Raven Monologue, The Banner Saga and Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald) although all of them could be replayed for different endings, which is something I never do. There's also the demo for Neo Cab, which I've finished. I might buy the full game one day. I'm leaving it there to remind me.

Four are free games I got with my Twitch account: Age of Wonders III, Mable and The Wood, Wonder Boy:The Dragon's Trap and Banner Saga II. The first three I guess you could call a backlog if there was ever any chance I might play them. What they really are is the backlog to my Recycle Bin. I just haven't gotten around to deleting them yet. Banner Saga II I could conceivably play one day but I didn't like the first one that much so I probably never will.

Then there are a few that lead to things that have been cancelled but that I hope might come back in some form (Fallen Earth, Dragon Nest) or that went to limited-time trials or demos that have ended (Ashes of Creation Apocalypse... oh, wait, that's still going, in a lurching, undead kind of way) or to games I started and might get back to but probably won't (Tanzia, Yonder).

I guess other people might call those last two "backlog" titles. I don't call them anything. They're just there.

The rest, pretty much, are all MMORPGS which, as was established, can't be finished and therefore cannot qualify for "backlog" status. Or if you prefer all MMORPGS are in a permanent state of perpetual backlog.

Even though I'm putting most of my rejection of the term down to a combination of definition and personal psychology, I do wonder how durable the concept of a "backlog" is. With streaming largely  having taken over from buying or even downloading music and movies and even making significant in-roads into reading and with a multiplicity of major global players queuing up to offer the same kind of streaming services for gaming, how many people are going to bother paying to own games in future?

I know most people reading this are going to put their hands up but how representative a group are we? I mean, I still buy my movies on DVD and my music on CD - even though I literally watch the things I've bought on Amazon Prime on my Kindle Fire in preference to using a DVD player and I use the CDs solely to transfer the files to my iPod Touch.

We might all use Steam now but once there's an all you can play for $9.99 a month option that's reliable and efficient how many will jump ship? And how many new players will pick ownership over instant access to a huge library for a monthly fee?

I don't think a future devoid of personal ownership is cut and dried even for movies and music. These things can and do change, often generationally and not always predictably. For the immediate future, though, I suspect backlogs may be heading towards the "funny things old people do" shows.

And I'm pretty sure those are never going away.