That's Entertainment

I finally finished Broken Sword 5 this evening. According to Steam it took me 16.4 hours. As with so many of Steam's timings that feels way off, even though I'm sure it's accurate to the second. After all, if there's one thing computers can do it's read a clock.

Subjective perception of time is curious. I've seen my share of movies at the cinema, where I've checked the time after a couple of hours to see how much longer there is to go, only to find it's not even been an hour since the film started. That means the movie hasn't worked for me. I don't think I can come up with a single example where feeling a movie has gone on longer than it actually has suggests anything positive about about the experience.

For games it can work both ways. Sometimes, for example in a tedious instance or an attritional boss fight, fifteen minutes that passes like half an hour means exactly the same as it does in the cinema. When I say it feels as though I've been playing BS5 for at least twice as long as Steam says I have, though, that means exactly the opposite. I've been having a fine old time.

 

I think what happens is that for all those puzzles, when I'm doing nothing but problem-solving, staring at the screen, cogitating like crazy, mind whirring, lost to all other thought, subjective time stretches like a lazy cat. A few public minutes expand into personal hours. I can generally tell it's happened when I notice my backside has gone to sleep.

You can take that as an endorsement. Once again, I became thoroughly engrossed in George and Nico's adventures. I believe the accepted oppinion is that BS5 is far, far better than BS3 and 4, neither of which follows the traditional point-and-click format, but not quite up to the standard of BS1 and 2.

I can remember the first Broken Sword pretty well but I can't remember very much about the second (which probably means I should play it again). Based on my no doubt inaccurate memories, I'd say the fifth and so far final episode is on a par with the first two.

 

A lot of the strength lies with the two central characters, both of whom are likeable, amusing and good company. The voice acting is also extremely strong, particularly from Rolf Saxon, who plays George Stobbart in all five games. Nico has apparently changed actor more than once although the voice I've been listening to these last couple of weeks sounded exactly as I remembered it.

Most of the supporting cast are both well-written and well-played and the plot is good, solid pulp/noir adventure but for me the real stars of the fifth game have to be the artists. There aren't all that many locations in the game but almost all the ones we get to see are superbly detailed, intricate without ever being fussy, characterful without being quirky. I spent a lot of those sixteen hours peering into every corner of the screen.

It didn't hurt that several of the locations are places I've visited. Not just the cities or the countries but the specific places in the shots. The scenes in Paris and London are emblematic rather than representational but all the elements look entirely familiar. 

 

Well, perhaps not the junkyard right behind what appears to be the old Battersea Power Station. I'm pretty sure that never existed. The flying pig is a nice visual joke though.

The long section set in Catalonia brought back some memories. I've traveled a good deal in that part of Spain and while I'm not quite sure I've seen a valley exactly like the one where Senor Marques has his Castel (it looks more like the South of France to me), I have been to almost every one of the numerous towns and cities shown on the map that forms part of one of the puzzles.

 

The location that really surprised me was Montserat, the mountainside monastery. As a major tourist destination and somewhere I've visited a couple of times and passed by several more, the buildings and settings were instantly familiar. I've ridden on that cable car - albeit on the inside. Things like that do add something extra the experience. 

As for the gameplay, it was just about perfect for me. I found the pacing better than I expected (I remember getting very stuck at times on the first two games) and the puzzles seemed to be very well judged in the way the complexity ramps gently throughout. The in-game hints were very well-judged. I only had to use them a few times and in all cases it was because I knew what to do but couldn't quite figure out the mechanics of getting the game to let me do it.

Most of the solutions were at least feasible, if not always plausible and there were fewer times when I cocked my head at the screen and asked "Really?" than in most adventure games. I could have done without George adopting a cockroach as a pet and carrying it about in a matchbox for the entire game but maybe that's just me being picky.

The climax, including the unexpected, brief animated cut scene, was suitably spectacular. The best part was the coda. About bloody time is all I can say.

 

All in all, excellent entertainment. I suspect we have now seen the end of George and Nico's adventures but if not, count me in for whatever they get up to next.

Dead Can Dance

I got so wrapped up in the story, playing Broken Sword 5 this evening, I didn't leave myself enough time to write a post. Which is fine. I had no idea what I was going to write about anyway.

Since I don't want to skip a day, how about a little dance party?  Let's all join in with George Stobbart, our hero, as he gets down to the psychedelic sounds of Jasmine by the Hairy Lobsters. It got to #2 in Sweden. In 1975. 

His dance partner's the broken-hearted, recently-widowed Bijou, wife of murdered gallery owner Henri. He used to be in the band. That's why Bijou's playing their song. 

George thinks nothing of stealing a flower out of the open coffin for his lapel before clipping some hair from Bijou's stuffed dog and sticking it all over his face, just so he can trick the drunken widow into believing her husband's come back from the dead. He wants her to give him the key to their safe. He's so monumentally insensitive he even puts on his disguise while sitting at Bijou's dressing table, using her own make-up and accessories to make the illusion more convincing.

He's such a lovely guy!

That's the tune. Catchy, isn't it? And this is how they danced back then. 

It's how we all danced back then. And now you can, too!

Gallic Shrug

This morning Tobold posted something about his Steam library and how many unplayed games there are in it. It's one of those blogging perennials that come up now and then, here and there, predictable and ineradicable as weeds.

Time was when I could indulge myself with a smug, hipsterish drive-by, something along the lines of "Not a problem I recognize. I don't even use Steam". Yeah, those days are long gone. I've had to find other ways to annoy people. 

I'm not sure when I got myself a Steam account or when I started using it regularly, although I do know the latter came a good while after the former. I use it most days now. I've succumbed, slowly, at first reluctantly then later with some small enthusiasm, to its much-vaunted convenience. 

I'd still generally prefer to have games in standalone launchers on my desktop. It seems quicker and easier to me. Since Steam lets me launch individual games from my library from their desktop shortcuts, though, that's something of a moot point.

I only asked for the bill!

 

What is undoubtedly easier is buying games through Steam. It saves having to make new accounts, fill out new forms and come up with new user IDs and passwords. For that reason alone, if there's a straight choice between buying a game direct and buying it via Steam I tend to go through Valve's portal.

For all that, I don't yet think of myself as a Steam person. And neither does Steam. That was made objectively clear to me this morning when I tried to use the Steam Calculator Tobold linked to find out what my Steam stats might be. 

The calculator offers more than a dozen ways you can identify yourself, none of which meant anything to me. Never mind all that: "Just sign in via Steam and we'll do it for you." Yeah, no you won't. Apparently having a valid, recognized, working account isn't enough. You have to have a Profile too. 

I don't have one and I wasn't planning on getting one. I suppose I could have filled out the necessary paperwork but since avoiding paperwork is the primary reason I use Steam in the first place that didn't really appeal. Instead, I thought I'd do it the old-fashioned way. Just look at my Library and count the games.

Damp dufflecoats, patchouli and despair?

I can see why Tobold didn't do that. He has 445 of them. I have a nice, round fifty. I can almost see them all without scrolling down. 

Of those fifty there are just two that I've never played at all: Mixed Messages and Age of Wonders III. They were both free. The first I got because at one time a lot of people were blogging about it and I thought I might too but I never got around to it. The second looked like the kind of game people often blog about so... you get the picture.

Of the remaining forty-eight, I have finished twenty. I know! Surprised me, too. Although some of them are very short. 

Fourteen more are mmorpgs, meaning they can't be finished. I'm still playing all of those, at least for some value of "playing". I'm never not playing any mmorpg I have ever played unless it's actually closed down. Just not playing it at the moment. 

We're in France. It's not like it doesn't happen.

Come to think of it I think three of those mmos (Stash, Dragon Nest Europe and Bless Online) have closed down. I should probably uninstall those.

That leaves fourteen. Five of those I am still planning on finishing some day (Yonder, Tanzia, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, My Time At Portia), one is Valheim, of which no more need be said, and one is Broken Sword 5, about which this post was originally meant to be and still will be when I get there.

The residue are demos plus one game I tried and instantly disliked but never got around to uninstalling. That one's called What Never Was, appropriately.

How much the whole lot might be worth I can't say, neither what I paid for them, nor the market value, high or low. I can say that of fifty titles I paid some amount of money for eighteen of them. Two others (Rift and Project: Gorgon) I paid someone else money for then linked them to Steam. I'd be very surprised if I've paid more than a couple of hundred pounds for the lot although I did probably buy more than half of them in sales.

Trust me, I'm not a doctor.

Of all the unplayed (or underplayed) titles, Broken Sword 5 stands out. It was a birthday present that I asked for many years ago, suggesting I was, at least at the time, pretty keen on playing it. More to the point, it was the reason I signed up for a Steam account in the first place. You can't play it without one, even if you have the thing on DVD. Which I do.

Bearing that in mind, I thought maybe I should have another crack at it. The last time I tried I got stuck and since I didn't want to use a walkthrough I took a break hoping inspiration would strike. It didn't.

Not so much an achievement as an essential plot point.

Or at least that's how I remember it. I even remember roughly where and how I was stuck. Steam doesn't. When I went to log in and restore my most recent save there wasn't one. Instead I had the choice of starting a New Game at the Tutorial, at Chapter 1 or at Chapter 2. 

Hmm. Maybe I was at Chapter 2. Don't remember it that way but if I hadn't already finished Chapter 1, why would it even give me the option?

So I tried that and got a cut scene and a voiceover full of plot points that very definitely must have happened further on in the narrative than I ever reached. To avoid spoilers I quit out of that and tried Chapter 1 instead. It seemed... completely and utterly new. Not a single thing there that I recognized, other than George and Nico. 

Ah, but who cares? It was gorgeous to look at at and fun to play. The dialog was witty and amusing, the plot was intriguing, the puzzles were exactly the right difficulty so I kept going. It didn't seem to match anything about my memories of the previous times I'd played but what the hell. 

You can't beat a good joke about les évènements, that's what I always say.

I played for an hour and a half until I reached a convenient stopping point and then I stopped. I'd gotten a few achievements so I looked at those to see how many other people had managed them. 

It would appear a lot of people give up on the game right at the start because two of the achievements were for discoveries material to the plot and only sixty per cent of players have those. Pretty sure you can't get any further if you don't. Then again, maybe the rest just skip straight to Chapter 2 since apparently that's allowed.

Then I noticed I had another achievement. It was for completing the tutorial. I did that in October 2016. Maybe that's what I vaguely remember although since I also remember not being able to finish whatever it was I was doing that doesn't feel like it could be right.

Learned how, yes. Played the game, no.

Only just under thirty per cent of players get that achievement, suggesting most people skip the tutorial. Seems fair enough. By the time you get to the fifth game in a series you've probably figured out how to play.

We'll see how far I get this time. I do want to find out what happens although the mystery that really interest me isn't so much who stole the painting and why as what happened to my saves and the game I thought I was playing.

I imagine it'll all come clear in the end. Maybe I'll do the tutorial again and see if there are any clues there. I could probably use all the help I can get.

Didn't Know I Wanted: Trüberbrook

Life is weird, there's no denying it. Remember a few years back when we were all talking about how subscriptions were dead? Some of us were happy about it and some of us were angry but almost no-one pretended subscriptions had a future. (Yes, okay, maybe one or two...).

Now here we all are with subscriptions to everything. Music, television, movies, games, delivery services, phones... you name it, we're signing up to be billed monthly. And it changes things, doesn't it? The what and the how.

Yesterday I was writing about Stargirl. Would I have watched it if I didn't have a subscription? Well, maybe. But not the way I did, or when.

I'd have waited until it came out on DVD then I'd have put it on my wishlist and then I'd have waited until someone bought it for me for my birthday or Christmas and when they did I'd most likely have put it on my huge stack of DVDs waiting to be watched. I'd probably have gotten around to it about five years from now.

Did they really have palm-sized portable dictaphones in 1967?

This afternoon I spent the best part of three hours playing Trüberbrook. If Trüberbrook wasn't one of the games that comes free with Amazon Prime, not only would I not have been playing it, I would never even have heard of it.

This is far from an original observation. Quite a few people have pointed it out as part of the ongoing discussion over the wisdom of buying things on release, before release, at full price, in sales, in bundles and to which list we can now add getting them for "free" as part of some kind of membership or subscription.

I just mention it to put the core content of this post into some kind of historical perspective. I'm about to give my first impressions of a point-and-click adventure game that I neither sought out nor paid for. How did we get here?

Of course, on one level I did seek it out. Amazon Prime gives away a bunch of games every month and most of them I don't even download, far less play. I picked this one because it's a genre I generally enjoy, the thumbnail caught my eye and the short text description I read threw in a couple of keywords that triggered a Pavlovian reaction in me.

And why does it say "Gas Satation" up there in American English when we're in Bavaria?

"Inspired by TV series like Twin Peaks and The X-Files" will do it every time. Well, Twin Peaks will.  It's marketing shorthand for "we made this for people like you". Same thing goes for blurbs on the back of books that mention Catcher in the Rye. They're usually terrible but at least I can rely on them being my kind of terrible.

Trüberbrook is not at all terrible. It is peculiar, though. For one thing, it subverts the Twin Peaks trope by setting the game in 1960s Germany. 1967, to be precise. It's mostly made by Germans, I believe, so that explains the locale if not the time period.

Having played through the prologue and Chapter One, I'd have to say the game feels neither partiularly sixties nor especially German to me. It could be set in any generic central European country as imagined by someone who'd once spent a week or two staying in alpine guesthouses, doing a bit of hiking in the foothills. Some of the interiors look like pastiche Americana to me.

Not even when it's damn fine coffee?

As for it being the mid-sixties, other than a battered VW bus and a black and white cabinet tv, there's precious little that would have looked out of place on several recent holidays I've taken. Scenery is timeless and so are small hotels. And fashions don't really give much of a clue if all the characters wear either suits or windbreakers, hiking boots and blue jeans. The first world war spiked helmet is a giveaway, though, I'll give them that.

The milieu may not live up to the billing but the graphics most definitely do. Trüberbrook has an unusual design aesthetic, with all of the scenery and backdrops constructed as miniature scale models, then captured with a 3D scanner. The characters are digitally animated over the sets and the effect is odd, charming and delightful.

Graphically, the game is also fluid and functional. Moving from place to place is simple and straighforward with very few of those annoying stutters when you run up against somewhere the animators didn't intend for you to go. Character animations reminded me somewhat of stop-motion or possibly even puppetry. They're convincing without striving for naturalism.

Spookiest scene in Chapter One. Actually, the only spooky scene in Chapter One...

Point and click adventures live or die by the ease with which objects can be manipulated to solve problems. In that respect Trüberbrook is exemplary - providing you're not one of those people who thrives on picking up every possible object then stuffing them all in your voluminous backpacks so you can sort through all of them over and over before "using" everything on everything else until something clicks.

This game won't let you do that. Firstly, there really isn't all that much you can pick up and secondly if something can be used on something else the game generally tells you so. What's more, if a combination of different objects is required, the interaction will select all of them for you. 

I found that very helpful and perfectly satisfying. To an extent it does push the gameplay further down the slope towards "interactive movie" than some prefer but I always found plenty to think about and plenty to do.

Look away now if you don't want to know how to catch a fox in a box the hard way.

Another crucial component of a good point and click adventure is the puzzles. Without those you don't have any gameplay at all. My preference is for puzzles to be as logical and naturalistic as possible.

I do not favor the "pick the lock with a fishbone" approach. Far less do I favor those overly complex acquisition chains that expect you to first fashion a fishing rod from a car aerial and the elastic from an elderly aunt's surgical stocking so you can catch a suitable fish, before boning it with the twiddly bit on a Swiss army knife (the one that's usually reserved for removing stones from horse's hooves) which you won earlier in a game of gin rummy with a passing stable-lad.

When it comes to puzzles, Trüberbrook manages to be both simple and complex at the same time. The eventual solution to several of the puzzles, when played out, turns out to be positively bizarre and entirely unguessable. That would have been infuriating -  if I'd had to solve them myself. But I didn't.

Must have been some weasel!

What I mostly had to do was be assiduous in collecting the few useable items I found and diligent in using them when the game told me I could. At the point when I'd collected the correct items and was in the right place the game rewarded me with a sequence of events that on more than once occasion had me laughing out loud. Plus I got to feel clever without having to have done very much, always a nice feeling.

The final remaining pillar of a good point and click adventure is the story, along with which, for the purposes of this first impressions piece, I'm including dialog and voice acting. Let's take those three components in reverse order.

The voice acting is good. Everyone other than the nominal protagonist has a German accent of sorts. Probably an authentic one, given the game's provenance. The lead character is American, although given he's called Hans Tannhauser the nationality on his passport seems almost immaterial. Also I could have sworn he tells another character he's from Berlin at one point...

Fancy meeting you here!

I call him the "nominal" protagonist because he's not the only, or even the first, character the player gets to be. The pre-credit sequence, which I guess is a form of tutorial, all takes place from the perspective of Gretchen the paleoanthropologist. The two of them reminded me quite strongly of Nico and George from the Broken Sword series, a happy similarity, at least in my eyes, although where George and Nico like to engage in would-be sophisticated repartee, these two mostly deal in playground insults and pratfalls. .

The dialog itself is solid. I did notice a few solecisms that I'd put down to the writers either having been translated or not working in their first language but by and large all the characters sound like people having believable conversations.

The game describes itself as being "permeated with a subtle humor" which on the evidence I've seen so far might be pushing it a little. It is quite funny but I'm not sure I'd call it subtle. The promised Twin Peaks atmosphere comes and goes. The X-Files motif seems more consistent.

Yeah, but it's still up a tree. Explain that, Doc.

As for the central narrative, I'm not at all sure I've spotted it yet. What little plot there is seems to consist a quantum physicist and a paleoanthroplogist behaving like two seven year olds acting out their favorite Famous Five adventures.

So far, I'm having a very good time. Three hours in and I didn't once have to look anything up online, far less consult a walkthrough. That's a recommendation in itself.

Last and most certainly not least, there's a fox called Klaus that everyone seems to think is a cat. He climbs trees and likes fish, so maybe he is a cat. That's got to be worth the price of admission on its own.

The price of admission in my case, of course, being a subscription to Amazon Prime. Which I was already paying. So it's free. Or is it?

I don't know any more and, frankly, I don't care.

Five To Conquer

When I saw the replies begin to roll in on Krikket's post about her Five Favorite Games Series I was certain I wouldn't be joining in. I wasn't sure I'd even played five games series, let alone ones I could call favorites.

As I kept reading the posts, though, names began to bubble up from the swampland of my memory. Then the topic came up on the Blapril Discord and in thinking about it some more I found myself with four, then five, titles I had at least played.

Luckily I don't have Wilhelm's scruples on what counts as a series. I agree that including expansions to MMORPGs might be stretching a point but a check on the accepted definition finds "a number of similar or related events or things, one following another" from Cambridge University Press or "a number of things or events of the same class coming one after another in spatial or temporal succession" from Merriam-Webster.

There's no stipulation as to how large that number must be. For the purposes of this excercise, I'm going to allow it to be as low as two, although I don't genuinely believe that's  what we usually mean when we talk about a "series". If it was, we probably wouldn't talk about "pairs" or "couples" instead, would we?

I have considerably fewer qualms about the question, raised again by Wilhelm, of whether we need to have played all or most of the games in a series for it to count as a "favorite". In all seriousness and entirely without irony, I don't see any reason why we should have played any of the games in a series at all to consider it a favorite. 

I could perfectly reasonably include Pokemon based on the posts I've read and enjoyed about the games or Grand Theft Auto because of its cultural significance. I have favorite bands I've barely listened to and favorite authors I've scarcely read, after all. Why should games be any different?

I'm not going to do that, if only because I think I can come up with five series from which I have played at least two games. The first is blindingly obvious, of course.

EverQuest.

My first MMORPG. Responsible for a fundamental change in the direction of my life and for much of my last two decades. 

There are more EverQuest games in the series than you might immediately remember. I've played only two of them although I own three and wish I'd played four. I played EverQuest itself from November 1999 and EverQuest II from September 2004 (beta). I played both of them this morning.

I own a copy of Lords of EverQuest but I have yet to install, let alone play it. It's an offline RTS set in Norrath that came out in 2003 and I just discovered that it's available as a download from a website called MyAbandonware. I've downloaded it, which gets me one step closer to playing it, I guess.

There were three Pocket EverQuest games released for a forgotten device called the PocketPC. I wrote about them less than a year ago. I still haven't gotten around to trying that free trial.

Then there's the console mmorpg EverQuest Online Adventures. I regret never playing that one and hope I still might, even though it sunsetted long ago. There's an emulator project called Return Home I have bookmarked to that end.

And of course there's Landmark, once known as EQ Landmark. Or EQNext Landmark. Or something. I liked Landmark. I don't miss it, though. It was a time vampire.

Guild Wars

A series of two, so far. Speculation on a third seems to have no basis in fact.

I played Guild Wars for something like a couple of months, close to the time it came out. I wasn't all that interested when I thought it was a hardcore PvP title, which was how it was advertized prior to launch. When reviews started talking about the large amount of PvE content, though, Mrs Bhagpuss and I decided to give it a try.

I stuck with it long enough to reach Ascension on two characters. Took me about six weeks. I have the clearest memory of how frustrating some of the fights were. I remember having to stop one Sunday afternoon and go for a long walk because if I'd carried on playing I probably would either have had a stroke or thrown my PC through the window.

Mrs Bhagpuss carried on for a couple of weeks after I stopped, taking her characters into some fiery hellhole that passed for endgame back then. When she stopped too we forgot all about the game for many years, until the sequel went into open beta. At that point I bought all the expansions, nearly finished Eye of the North, messed around in the others and collected points for my Hall of Monuments in Guild Wars 2.

GW2 has been my main MMORPG, on and off but mostly on, for the last eight years.

 Baldur's Gate

Mrs Bhagpuss and I both played BG1 through to the end, including the expansion or add-on, whatever it was called. We used to watch each other playing, often, but we never played co-op. 

My memories of the game are colored by the voice and image pack I downloaded right at the start. I made a custom bard and gave her the character portrait and voice of Daria from the eponymous animated tv show. I wrote about it here.

Mrs Bhagpuss played Icewind Dale, which kind of counts as part of the series. I tried it but didn't like it. Too hack and slash. I bought Baldur's Gate 2, played it and finished it. Mrs Bhagpuss was deep into MMORPGs by then and didn't have any interest in making time for offline games.

I'm currently playing (actually on a break from playing but I'm close to the end) Divinity:Original Sin 2, whose creators are working on Baldur's Gate 3 as we speak. I will buy that and play it. I hope it's better than D:OS2.

Broken Sword

Mrs Bhagpuss and I played the first Broken Sword together when were still a one computer household. When the sequel arrived we played it the same way even though, by then, we already had a computer each. Back in the early eighties, when I was married to my first wife, the two of us played text adventures that way on the ZX Spectrum. I still think it's the best way to play adventure games. 

I've owned Broken Sword 5 for several years but I still haven't played it. Well, I've played a little on my own but I'm waiting for a suitable opportunity for us to play it together. The fact that it requires a Steam account has put a block on that, simply because it adds a level of irritation too many when it comes to setting it up so we can both play. I wanted to install it on a handheld device and take it on holiday but my Windows tablet died, which put a stop to that.

We still do impressions of Nico's fruity French accent sometimes. We're such a caution.

Might And Magic

This is the longest series on my list, with ten numbered games and a load of spin-offs. We only played two of them, VI, Mandate of Heaven and VII, For Blood and Honor. That was in 1998 and 1999, immediately before we discovered EverQuest and MMORPGs, which explains why we never bothered with the rest of the series. 

We both loved Mandate of Heaven. I wouldn't mind playing it again right now. Mrs Bhagpuss often mentions it, particularly when we're out walking and she thinks some piece of farmland looks like somewhere lizardmen might lurk.

Might and Magic seems to be one of those series where the controls and the gameplay change from game to game. We neither of us enjoyed Blood and Honor as much. 

That's always a problem with series of games. Series of novels or movies frequently all stick quite close to each other in style but games tend to careen around all over the place. I think that's why I don't feel the same kind of drive to follow them. It's often better to find a different game that plays closer to what you remember about an old favorite than it is to keep adjusting for the inevitable disappointment and confusion series insist on bringing.

I also notice this list of favorites ended up being a list of series Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. I don't think that can be a co-incidence.

Alright Then, Just A Small One...

I get plenty of use out of my iPod Touch. I listen to podcasts on it (mostly Mayo and Kermode, sometimes the odd MMOcast). I watch a lot of YouTube. I convert my DVD movies and watch them on the tiny little screen, where the experience survives astonishingly unimpaired. I even use it to listen to music (mostly Lana del Rey and Peggy Sue at the moment, thanks for asking).

Surprise surprise, attacked by a boar

One thing I don't often use my iPod Touch for is playing games. I've tried a few. Ravensword looks great and oozes atmosphere even though the two-fingered control system leaves half the screen obscured most of the time, but looks aren't everything and I soon found the combat very annoying. Battleheart I played once, which was one time too many. Fabled Lands I did enjoy to some degree but it's fundamentally an animated "Choose Your Own Adventure" book and I never liked those all that much to begin with. Author Dave Morris has a blog of the same name which I found a lot more interesting than the game.

Daily Mail sub-editor in missing preposition shock!

The one game I do regularly play on my iPod is Broken Sword, superbly converted for the new device with a lot of additional content. The iPod format suits a point-and-click adventure much better than it does any attempt to mimic the movement and combat controls of an MMO. Tapping objects or characters on the screen when you want to examine or use them is, if anything, more intuitive than using a mouse and in the case of Broken Sword the top-class voice acting and soundtrack are deeply immersive over earphones.

Was Ireland ever this sunny?

I guess the market leader in mobile MMOs is Pocket Legends. It was the first app I downloaded when I got the iPod and I played it for an hour, amazed just to be holding an MMO world in the palm of my hand. I don't think I ever logged in again. Maybe Order and Chaos has overtaken Pocket Legends as the small-screen brand leader in MMOs now. I wouldn't know. I haven't tried it. Maybe if they add pandas...

Anyway, I'd about given up on finding something that looks and plays like an MMO only at 1/10th scale. Then I came across Elemental Knights.

Explosivity to the max

I'm not saying that Elemental Knights is good. It's not, or not especially. It appears to be a standard Korean style grinder with anime graphics and a fairly obstreperous cash shop. But it very much is an MMO. It doesn't just have all the elements, it has them all in the right order and working as you'd expect. The quest-givers stand there giving out typical "kill this" "fetch that" quests, the mobs in the newbie yard hop about oblivious to their inevitable imminent demise, big damage numbers float into the air as you thrash about with your unfeasibly huge sword, junk goes into your inventory, lights flash as you level up etc etc etc.

The controls are extremely easy to use and unobtrusive. Your character can be steered with one hand, which means you can actually see most of the screen all the time, which is nice because what you're looking at is a quirky, attractive world. Well, the little I've seen of it so far. I'm not making any great claims for it, but I've played it half a dozen times so far and had a passably amusing time.

Plants have girls' names, boys have hair ribbons.

All in all, though, I find the iPod screen just too small for MMO gameplay. It's pretty hard to read the quest text and very fiddly to manipulate the menus and inventories. The same wouldn't apply to a Tablet device and that's where I would like to see some real, full-feature MMOs turning up. And a good one would give me that last push I need to make the purchasing decision that I've been putting off for the last 12 months.