Never Forever

Yesterday it was a music Grab Bag, today it's games. Once again, I don't have anything particularly substantial to offer but you do the best you can with what you have. 

How Long Is Forever, Anyway? 

I'll start with the news everyone already knows, which is that Fortnite isn't all it used to be. Given that it used to be pretty much everything, that still leaves a lot of territory to cover so let's not go writing the game off just yet but maybe the writing is on the wall.

Fortnite isn't a game so much as a phenomenon. Lots of games blow up out of nowhere to dominate the sales charts and the gaming news cycle for a while but few hold that kind of attention for more than a few months. Fads happen and keep on happening and will always happen.

More rarely, a game will break out of the gaming silo to make an impact in the mainstream media. Animal Crossing: New Horizons did it a few years back and World of Warcraft a long time before that. The number of games that establish a seemingly permanent foothold in the wider culture, though? Still very small.

Fortnite was one of those. Still is, I guess, although it's probably more a part of the infrastructure now, like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or FIFA. Games that get referenced a lot when journalists write color pieces about what sporting heroes or pop stars do in their time off. Not a lot different to playing golf, really. Just indoors.

Fortnite, though, like Second Life before it, made it out of the lifestyle pages into what passes for cultural analysis in the popular press. I read a number of articles about how Fortnite was changing the way a generation thought and behaved, how it was replacing the village pump, the water-cooler or the Junior Common Room. There was a school of thought that believed nothing would ever be the same again, now the kids had a virtual clubhouse the adults couldn't chaperone.

Epic Games believed it and still does, apparently. I was pretty sold on it, too. I wrote some posts about it during the pandemic, when it did seem like meeting up and going to gigs in a video game might be the future. Still did, too, not so long ago. Like a lot of people, I'm too easily swayed by the science fiction I've read, although most days now it does seem disturbingly likely we'll all get to live in Phil Dick's world if we live long enough. Mercer help us. 

It wasn't just excitable journalists and eager bloggers who got swept up in the Fortnite feeding frenzy. As GamesIndustry reports, as with WoW before it, a swathe of the gaming industry did, too. Just as we had a decade of companies making WoW-Killers that went on to fail in the marketplace, so Fortnite has left behind it a comet-trail of burned out Forever Games. We have Fortnite to thank for the largely failed or failing Live Service model, at least in part.

With hindsight, it seems obvious. Not so much the grandiose claims of Fortnite-as-Metaverse, which turned out to be fairly accurate at least in a technical sense. More the idea that people en masse would want to keep logging in to the same virtual space "forever".

People, by and large, just aren't that interested in going to the same places over and over again. They lose their mystique, their thrill, their attraction. For everything there is a season, as Roger McGuinn liked to say. (Alright! It was Pete Seeger! No-one likes a smart alec.) 

More prosaically, look at your local high street or shopping mall. That's if you even still have one. Not only have most of the names over the stores changed since you first went there but these days even the idea of going to one place to find everything feels out of fashion.

And with games, particularly zeitgeisty ones like Fortnite that spring up out of nowhere overnight, there's always the Older Sibling Problem. Everyone knows most kids over the age of eight or nine think pretty much everything their parents like is either incomprehensible or embarrassing but there's a similar vibe to the media most loved by older brothers and sisters, except the younger kids do understand it and want no part of it.

Fortnite has been around for a decade now. A decade is literally a lifetime for a ten year-old. Is it surprising there's some resistance creeping in? Fortnite might be too new to feel retro but it's also too old to feel fresh. 

It's not like the game is going away, of course. It's robust. It works. It has many, many millions of ex-players. But is it ever going to be cool again? Magic 8-Ball says Very Doubtful.

I guess the upside is that now game developers are going to have to find a new high to chase. The downside is it'll probably be something a lot less interesting than Fortnite looked for a while as if it might be.

Never Is Closer Than Ever

Less than a month! Neverness to Everness, the game I'm most looking forward to this year (Sorry, EverQuest Legends.) has a launch date. It's April 29th.

You can pre-register now. It takes about five seconds - an email address and a couple of clicks. If you do, you'll be joining more than thirty million people so far. The current target is 35 million although I imagine if they hit it the ticker will move along to reveal the 40 million milestone. 

So far, pre-registrants get 30,000 Beetle Coins, 20 Elite Hunter Guides, 5 Fabricated Dice and A character called Haniel. What any of that actually means I have absolutely no idea but I'm sure it's something very important.

The reward for getting to 35 million pre-registrants seems a bit lame. It's just another 15 Fabricated Dice. But then, maybe Fabricated Dice are a big deal in Hetherau. I wouldn't know because they never let me into the beta. Not that I'm bitter... 

There's also a Social Media target. That's a lot lower at just five million Official Account Followers and so far the game hasn't managed it, which is probably a data point that means something. If that many people sign up before launch they get a Whisker Glider Skin. Or maybe we all do. It's unclear.

I just subscribed to the official YouTube channel so I guess that means I'll get the glider either way, so long as 4,999,999 other people sign up as well. I actually thought I was already subbed to that channel. Maybe it was on my other YouTube account. If it was, would that count twice? 

I don't have any qualms about the quality of NTE. I'm certain it'll be as good as it looks. What I'm a lot less sure about is whether I’ll make time to play it, no matter how good it is. By all accounts, Wuthering Waves continues to be every bit as good as I kept saying it was, which was very good indeed. 

And yet I haven't played WW for months, not least because it got to be too good. I seem to have developed a quality ceiling for video games beyond which I find it ever harder to rise. Somewhere in my psyche, a fail-safe is tripping, preventing me from becoming too engaged. If it feels as immersive a movie, it gets treated like a movie and movies require a level of commitment at least an order of magnitude higher than games. 

It's a weird Catch 22. Don't get too good or I won't be able to play you. And I fear Neverness to Everness might just be too good.

Sunnydale Forever, Doubters Never!

I meant to mention the bad news that the Buffy revival has been canceled before it even got started but I never found a spot to fit it in and it turns out I'm glad I didn't because now there's this to talk about as well. I heard about it from NME, my ever-unlikely source of gaming news that doesn't get covered in the general gaming media.

There is - because of course there is - a campaign to reverse the decision or to reboot the reboot or to free the rights so someone else can take a run at it or something. I haven't virtually signed it or indeed read it. My feeling is that the Buffy IP is so strong, someone will do something with it it eventually but it won't be because Buffy fans ask nicely. It'll be because someone thinks they've figured out how to make money off it.

Meanwhile, as well as all the original seven seasons, the comics, the novelizations and the spin-offs (I'm halfway through Season Two of Angel now and boy does that take a left turn...) we now have a game. It's called Welcome To New Sunnydale. It's text-only. It plays in a Browser. And it was made by a fan.

And it looks interesting. I've only played around with it so far. I haven't played it. It isn't really my sort of thing or not any more although there was a time when it might have been. I don't have the patience for these kinds of textual puzzles any more. 

I know a few other bloggers around these parts do, though, and a lot of people like a bit of Buffy, so I offer the link above as something of a public service. I very much doubt the game will do anything to change the minds of anyone that matters but it's nice that people are trying.

And that's all I've got. I suppose I'd better find an actual topic for tomorrow's post. My Grab Bag pile's empty.  

Drug Of The Nation? I Wish...

I let slip a while ago that I'd finally gotten around to watching the first season of Arcane, the animated series commissioned by Riot Games and supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, League of Legends. Everyone else, of course, watched the show years ago. The first season came out in late 2021 and the second and final season, which I have just finished watching, premiered three years later. Talk about being late to the party...

Why did I wait so long? It's not like I wasn't aware of it or how good it was reported to  be. The show has stellar reviews. It won a shed-load of prestigious awards. I remember a bunch of bloggers raving about it when it was new and my close friend, who has very good taste in TV and movies, tried to get to me watch it ages ago. 

It was the League of Legends connection that put me off. I've never played the game and never wanted to, which makes for an educative data point alongside Cyberpunk 2077, a game I've also never played but have frequently considered buying. There's an animated series based on that one, too, Edgerunners, and I didn't have any interest in that either, at least not until I found out Rosa Walton of Lets Eat Grandma had done the theme song.

Apparently, the presence of a gaming IP, even one I approve of, can actively deter me from watching a TV show. For corroborative evidence I offer Fallout, another highly-regarded show I have yet to see. This is clearly a personal foible and one I need to address. It's self-evidently preventing me from enjoying some of the very best work in the field.

Having watched Edgerunners I judged it "very, very good". I'm going to have to come up with something a lot more complimentary for Arcane. 

Arcane is possibly the best animated series I've ever seen. If there's a better one, I can't immediately think what might be. I'm sure most people reading this will already have watched it so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of hyperbolic detail about why it's so good. Everyone already knows and if they don't I strongly suggest they stop wasting time like I did and go find out what they've been missing. It's a lot.

The animation is almost literally breathtaking. It did make me draw in breath in surprise or awe a few times. I've spent a lifetime watching animated movies and television shows and I've never seen anything as rich and deep. The level of detail is astonishing but more astonishing still is the extent to which that detail informs the narrative. It's one thing to dress a set, another to reveal a world.

The writing is novelistic. Characters have inner and outer lives that extend beneath, above and beyond the text. There are no ciphers or stereotypes. Even the minor characters have substance.

The plot is labyrinthine, yet always navigable. The story works on multiple levels, from coming of age to family saga to epic myth, and somehow manages to keep all of them balanced throughout. 

Well, almost. The end shows signs of the elision from five seasons to two as Riot decided they'd accrued enough prestige from patronizing the arts and decided to cut their losses as costs spiraled. The fact that the show bears, by all accounts I've read, almost no resemblance to the video game and consequently had little to no impact on that game's profile or profitability, presumably factored strongly in the decision to fold.

Even so, the truncated ending is barely noticeable. The finale leans hard into the cosmic and it works. It might not be immediately comprehensible but it carries.

Who knows what would have happened across five seasons? Would the quality have held up? Maybe it's better it ended when and as it did.

I was certainly satisfied. And satiated. It was a hard watch in the sense that each episode drained me. I could not have watched two in a row without losing something. I'm bitterly aware of how much I missed but the thought of re-watching is overwhelming. In a year or two maybe. 

One thing Arcane did make me want to do was re-watch Edgerunners. I know it won't be an experience on the same level but now I'm wondering how much I might have missed there, too. One watch is never enough for anything, let alone something good.

I haven't gone back to Edgerunners just yet though. What I'm watching, now I have a space in my schedule, is more Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off from 1999, doubling up from one episode a night to two.

I've had the box set on DVD for years and never even opened it. Once again, my main reason, other than sheer inertia, was that I thought I knew what it would be like. I always know. I'm often wrong.

I thought it would be dark, brooding and serious. Angel, as a character in Buffy, never seemed to have much going for him other than moody good looks and some bad-boy attitude, especially when his come-and-go soul went. Even though I knew the first four seasons of his own show also featured Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and even though it's pretty hard to imagine Cordy ever being even remotely serious, that was still the impression I'd somehow acquired.

As, once again, I'm sure most people who come to this blog already know, I was wrong. Or I was for as much of the first season as I've seen so far, fifteen episodes. Maybe it gets darker later. Usually I like to wait until I've seen at least a whole season to comment but in this case I have an ulterior motive.

Before I get to it, let me just say Angel, the show, does not match my expectations at all. Like Buffy (The show, not so much the character.) it's as much a comedy as a thriller. It does hit some dark notes but so far it's orders of magnitude away from the relentlessly grim later seasons of Buffy, the grim, dour, depressing period, after Willow drags Buffy back from heaven. The very seasons that would have been running in tandem with Angel at the time. Who'd have thought Angel would have been the light relief?

Maybe it won't last. Maybe things will turn bleak in the coming seasons. I hope not. I'm enjoying the monster-of-the-week plots and all the mugging and slapstick (Wesley.) and snappy come-backs (Cordelia.). As for David Boreanaz and his perpetually confused look, it's a big improvement over his Heathcliff impression back in the Sunnydale era.

And just as Arcane made me want to re-watch Edgerunners, Angel makes me want to re-watch Buffy. I have the box set of that, too, which is just as well because, unlike Angel, which I'm watching on Amazon Prime Video for free, Buffy isn't streaming on any of my platforms just now.

The advantage of seeing Angel on Prime instead of DVD is convenience. The disadvantage is adverts. Prime, as we know, despite charging a subscription, wants you to pay extra to avoid ads. And here we come to my ulterior motive in talking early about Angel.

Those ads! What the heck are Amazon playing at? 

I don't mean by trying to make us watch them. I get that they're making money coming and going by charging companies to place ads and then charging viewers not to see them but for that ploy to work, wouldn't you think there'd need to be some pattern to it?

There is none! I watched one episode of Angel last week that had an advert before the show had even started, then another less than two minutes later, between the credits and the show itself . Then there were more ads every ten or fifteen minutes until the end. It was incredibly disruptive and annoying. Obviously I didn't watch any of the ads - I tabbed out and turned  the sound off - but just the constant interruption to the narrative was infuriating.

Prior to that, which was an exception, some episodes just opened with a trailer for another Prime show, something that barely counts as advertising at all in my eyes, then maybe popped in one more short ad much later in the program. That was very easy to ignore. Other episodes had the same cadence but with much longer ad breaks, which was more annoying but manageable.

The last three episodes I've watched, however, have had no adverts at all. None. Not even the opening trailer. It's spooky.

Am I'm being lulled into a false sense of security? Has one of my ad blockers, none of which should affect Prime at all, upgraded itself and taken control? Has Amazon not managed to sell any advertising space in these particular episodes?

It's disconcerting. I find myself waiting for the ads to start. I'm not saying I want them to but the suspense when they don't is getting to be altogether too much. At least when Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch the Great Pottery Showdown live on Channel 4, the ads (Which are universally terrible, by the way.) come at the same time in every episode. That's bad enough but it's far worse knowing they could pop up at any time. Or not at all.

I'd love to know if there's a commercial imperative behind the apparent randomness or whether something's just broken. Clearly, Amazon has the capacity both to target ads at specific viewers and also to place them in shows those people are likely to watch. Maybe no-one wants their ads turning up in random episodes of twenty-five year-old shows. Maybe Amazon thinks none of the ads would interest me. Who knows?

I don't but I'd love to. Anyone else getting this kind of sporadic, unpredictable advertising? Or have any theories what my be driving it?

Let's Play Grab Bag Catch-Up

I know it's Wednesday but here's a grab-bag anyway. Why should Fridays have all the fun? All these have been around before but there may have been... developments.

A Stone Rolls Up A Hill...  

Let's start with... I want to say a rant but it's more of a whine. Regular readers may (But almost certainly won't.) remember that three weeks ago I dinged 51 in the EverQuest II version of Overseer and immediately posted to complain about how freaking slow it was going. I said then that it had taken me the best part of three months to get there from the mid-40s and that getting to a new season just meant I had to start from scratch all over again.

Well, guess what? Here we are, three weeks later and how far have I got? Not quite halfway through Level 52, that's how far. Impressed? I'm bloody well not!

Getting through 51 was a pain. Since it was a new Season, I was back to just two blue missions, which meant having to log in several times a day to recycle them. Slowly - oh so slowly - I managed to scrape up enough missions to fill out my allotted ten per diem but as I got a few yellow ones, with longer timers and cooldowns, I still had to set them several times a day to maximize my chances of getting more yellow ones.

Eventually - and it seemed like a lot longer than three weeks - I scraped up enough yellow missions that I could justify setting all ten once a day. That doesn't mean I have ten yellows now.  That's the dream. No, I have seven and I'm willing to sacrifice three daily slots to blues just so I can log in after breakfast to set and forget.

Well, not forget, because if I did that, the next morning when I logged in I'd have all the missions completed but they'd go on cooldown for several hours as soon as I collected the rewards. I have to remember to set them in the morning and pick them up in the evening now, so they come off cooldown overnight, ready to go again first thing next day. As for purple and green missions... not seen a single one drop yet.

This is not "playing a game". This is, at best, admin. I don't hate it because stuff like this does at least give some structure to my days, which otherwise might start to feel a little untethered. That's always a danger when you (Semi-)retire. Still, it's hardly what you'd call fun.

As I also think I said last time, I'm unclear on exactly how far I have to go to catch up to where I should be in Overseer. Accurate information is harder to come by than it should be. There is an achievement for hitting 55, though, and another for 61, the latter of which states "Become a Level 61 Overseer to unlock season 7", so I assume I need another nine-and-a-half levels.

Based on how long it took to do the last ten, if I keep this up without missing a day I don't think I can count on being Level 61 by the time the freaking expansion comes out! I always wondered why one of the higher-cost packs included the current Overseer Season as a perk. Not any more!

None of this really causes a problem if you play EQII the way people used to play MMORPGs, by which I mean all the time and obsessively, as though it was a vocation, a job and a religious belief all rolled into one. With that mindset, daily Overseer missions become just one more thing to do on a never-ending list. 

It's comforting, in a way, the repetition, which I guess is why people accept it or even welcome it. Certainly saves you having to think of anything else to do. For a game that you're playing casually, though, it makes no sense whatsoever. So why am I doing it?

I guess at some level I must enjoy it. Probably best not to think about it too hard.

Don't You Know Who I Am?

I was simultaneously excited and annoyed yesterday to read the news over at MMOBomb that Neverness To Everness is about to go into closed beta. Excited because NTE is by some margin my most hotly anticipated new game right now. Annoyed because I signed up for testing at the first opportunity and so far I've never heard a word.

That sounds awfully entitled, doesn't it? Why should he think he's going to get an invite? Millions of people sign up for these things. What makes him think he's so special?

Yeah, not that. What annoys me isn't that I haven't gotten into any round of testing so far, it's that I've never had a single communication from Hotta, the company making the game, at all. And that's odd. 

Usually, as soon as you sign up for testing, the company behind whatever it is starts to deluge you with promos and news and offers and more sign-ups. The whole reason they offer the places in testing in the first place is to harvest contact details so they can do exactly that. Or so I always thought. 

Either I'm wrong or this game's being made by people who think differentl. Or - and this is what really bothers me - my sign-ups never made it through the process at all and I'm not even registered as an potential source of future income.

I said "sign-ups" plural there. You might have spotted it. That's because I already had this worry last time they opened some kind of test. I suspected then that I might already have signed up but I tried again just in case. It didn't entirely seem to work but it wouldn't let me try again so I left it at that. Didn't have much choice, really, other than to sign up under different contact details, something I know from experience would almost certainly come back to bite me in the backside later on.

That's still a possible course of action I might take. Not that there's any real point to any of it, of course. It's a F2P game that I definitely wouldn't put much time into during a testing phase anyway, and it's most likely under NDA so I couldn't even blog about it. So why do I care? 

Because I want to play the damn thing! That's why! Even just for a few hours, to satisfy my curiosity and scratch this irritating itch.  It's nice to have at least one game I'm actually excited about and it's frustrating to feel locked out, even from the publicity cycle.

You know what? I might just go and sign up again after I finish this. It's not like I'm short of email addresses I could use.

There Can Only Be One... More

People, and I'm one of them, often complain about how there are far too many streaming services these days and how it costs a fortune if you subscribe to all the ones that have something you want to see. My solution, again like a lot of people, from what I hear, has been to drop some of the ones I had been subbing and watch less, rather than to spend even more money adding more.

I put Netflix on Pause last month for a start. I've barely been watching anything since I started making AI music, which is what I do late every evening in the time-slot I used to reserve for watching shows. (Also in the morning and in the afternoon but let's not go there just now.). 

I checked with Mrs. Bhagpuss if she was watching anything on Netflix at the moment and she wasn't so it seemed like we were paying to not watch anything on Netflix, which I figured we could probably do for free. A few weeks before that I cancelled Disney+ for the very good reason that we both agreed it was a big disappointment. Everything there I want to watch I've already watched even before it was on the service and the originals and exclusives aren't exciting enough to get me to watch them before I get to a whole load of unwatched shows and movies on services I already have or don't have to pay for.

In place of the two losses there was one addition. Amazon Prime had an excellent offer on Apple+, £3.99 a month for three months. I took that and even with the music pushing everything else aside I have actually used it. I'm watching Murderbot and catching up on Mythic Quest. In fact, those two make up 100% of my viewing right now. 

With all that in mind, what would it take me to subscribe to another streaming service? Obviously I'll unpause Netflix at some point, most likely when either Stranger Things or Wednesday arrive, but a completely new one?

This.   This will do it. I will, without hesitation, subscribe to Hulu if that's what it takes to watch the Buffy reboot when it happens. If Neverness To Everness is my most hotly-anticipated video game, this is its televisual equivalent.  

Want to know the best thing Sarah Michelle Gellar says in that interview? It's not that everyone, dead or alive, will feature in the reboot (If she has her way.). That's fantastic and I'm one hundred per cent behind it but there's something even better than that to look forward to: 

“It will be lighter than the last few seasons of the original”

Thank-you! Thank you so much! I've been wanting to do a full rewatch of Buffy for a long time but for once it hasn't been finding the time that's been the problem. It's that I can't summon up the willpower to put myself through all that trauma again. 

If there's a longer, bleaker run in a supposedly upbeat, humorous, popular fantasy series I don't really care to know about it. (And nobody better mention Bojack Horseman.) When I was watching Buffy the first time, there were days when I didn't want to hit Play. Even when I really, really wanted to hit Play just to find out what happened next..

I'm not saying I'd like to go back to the Monster of the Week slapstick of the first couple of seasons but damn! There has to be some acceptable mid-point. 

Okay, it looks like I've gone on so long about not very much I've taken all my allotted time and space. Which is great! Now I can go have lunch! 

The Taste Test 

Let's end with a song, like the comedians did, back in the really-not-that-good-after-all old days.

A little while back, Blondshell did an exclusive cover for in-car streaming service Sirius XMU and some kind soul put it up on YouTube. I featured that version here but it cut off just before the end. Checking back to the post (Which just so happens to be the same one I already linked above.) it's also now "Blocked in your country on copyright grounds".

Fortunately, Sirius XMU have officially released official version so I have absolutely no hesitation in sharing it again. Let's hope that's not blocked too. I can't actually tell until I post it.

What's more, the cover is now a highlight of Sabrina's live set, as must be obvious from the audience reaction in the next clip. For an artist of her prominence, she sure does still play some small clubs, doesn't she?

She's playing a club like that in the next city over from where I live in a few months and tickets are still available. I'm thinking about it. Haven't been to a club gig in twenty-five years or so. It was already feeling a little odd when I was in my early 40s so it'd be very weird now. 

Of course, it'd be fine if I wanted to see all the same bands I saw back when I was young - everyone who does that is old, onstage and off. Maybe I should do that a few times, just to get back into the rhythm of things before I try seeing anyone I actually want to see. It certainly wouldn't be because I wanted to see any of those old duffers again...

Games, Music, TV, Books... It Must Be The Grab-Bag!

Today, I believe we shall have a grab-bag of various odds and ends. Even though it is Thursday. Because tomorrow I believe we shall have a music post and on the weekend we shall have nothing at all. Because I have to work.

So, let us see what is in the bag. 

Oh, look! Surprise, surprise! Another email from Playable Worlds! It must be a day ending in "y".And what do they have to tell us this time? Something new and unexpected!

Painting The Galaxy Red

It seems Stars Reach has a story. Who knew? Seriously, though. Anyone?

I mean, they have been putting out those really rather quite good short stories on the website while pretty much telling no-one they were doing it but other than that I'm not sure we've heard anything about any lore underpinning the game.

It's an exaggeration to say there's a story. And after all, the game doesn't need one. Raph is very keen to let everyone know Stars Reach is a "true sandbox". Apparently, though, there is some lore behind it all. Well, a paragraph, at least:

"You are one of 8 kinds of humans who have destroyed their homeworlds. Thanks to the TransPlanetary League, a government formed by the eight types of humanity, you have been given a second chance to leave your homeworld behind to head out into the larger galaxy. They’ll hand you a simple blaster, starter tools, and basic training before letting you loose to make a new life among the stars."

There you go. Now you know.  You're basically the scum of the galaxy, one of the surviving members of a bunch of losers who somehow managed to fuck up their own planets so badly they can't live there any more. Now the whole gang of environmental criminals has come together to spread their incompetence and destruction far and wide across the entire galaxy. 

It's not what I'd call an inspiring start. It's dangerously close to "Colonialization: the Space Sim". I was particularly unimpressed to learn that the first and presumably most important item the authorities issue you with is a gun. Get out there, kill anything that gets in your way, take their stuff. Pretty much Colonialism 101, isn't it? 

I'm not sure PW is reading the room here. This sort of stuff isn't going down too well in certain circles just now but it's too popular altogether in others. Which side do you want to be on? 

Less controversially but equally surprisingly, there's a whole lot more in the email about stuff that's not in the pre-alpha. Things like character stats (There are nine of them, apparently.) and quests (There will be some and you'll be able to make your own, too.). There's also a map of the galaxy although it's unclear if it's just an indication of how things will work in general or a specific, accurate map of all the locations that are going to be in the game. 

There's even a flow-chart of what you can do in Stars Reach. Or more accurately will be able to do when it's there. It's mostly not there now, I'm fairly sure...

One thing that did catch my attention was this: 

"A planet is a zone. A part of space is a zone. Zones are connected by wormholes." 

I guess that pretty much puts paid to the idea of spaceships. It's going to be old-school zoning, albeit dressed up as going through "wormholes", I guess. Which is what we're seeing in pre-alpha, minus the wormholes part.

Why Call Her Back From Heaven?

There's going to be a Buffy reboot and Sarah Michelle Gellar is going to be in it!

Really good news. If it ever happens. It's kind of a long way out still but getting closer all the time.

According to Variety, the project is currently "nearing a pilot order" with Hulu, which I think means that someone might be about to green-light a pilot that might get picked up for a series. Sarah Michelle Gellar is also "in final talks" to star in it, so that's not even a certainty, either. 

If it ever happens, it sounds like they have a solid framework, anyway. SMG (Weird acronym...) would appear as a "recurring character" in a mentor role to a new Slayer, which I guess makes her the reboot's Giles. There is the small problem of the way the original series ended, which was with hundreds - maybe thousands - of Slayers appearing across the world but I'm sure that's easily solvable with magic.

The new show, if it comes, will be directed by the Oscar-winning Chloé Zhao. The Zuckerman sisters will write and act as showrunners and Dolly Parton is signed up as Executive Producer, as she was for the original. If they can't get commissioned with a team like that then the money-men really do know nothing.

I'm optimistic but of course, even if it goes ahead, it'll be a looooong wait.

When She's On Her Way To Hell

Sabrina, that is. Sadly, I don't have news of a Chilling Adventures reboot but I am here to recommend Sarah Rees Brennan's trilogy of novelizations of the TV show. I got the set for Christmas, I've just finished the third book and they're all excellent.

Novelizations of TV shows and movies are often so much better than they need to be but these are really outstanding. Not only are they very well-written indeed, they're beautifully designed and packaged as a set. If we had them at work, which of course we don't because we never have the books I want to read, they'd make an excellent display.

The most impressive thing about the trilogy, though, is the way it adds insight into what you see and hear in the show itself. One thing novels handle much better than television or the movies is interior monologue and there's often plenty of that in novelizations but SRB (Much better.) goes well beyond the normal "here's what they were thinking in that scene you remember". 

The three books all employ a different technique and within each there are several more. Only Sabrina ever gives her thoughts in first person but in one of the volumes all the characters' thoughts are represented in idiosyncratic mental registers that sometimes align with but more often diverge from what's shown in the series.

It was so well-done that at first I thought it was being done badly. I felt the author was contradicting both the canonical content of the show and her own, earlier interpretation. As I read on, though, I began to realize she was doing something much more subtle and clever - allowing us to hear not just the private thoughts of the characters but to hear those thoughts from each character's own, unmediated perspective, something often quite different from the way the character wants others to perceive them.

It's a damn good trick if you can pull it off and Brennan very much can. Unfortunately, the trick she apparently couldn't manage was to get the publishers (Scholastic, possibly the last publisher you'd expect to publish a book with a dedication from the author that literally ends with "Hail Satan".) to stump up for more than three books once the series got canned, so the third book ends right in the middle of a tale now most unlikely ever to be told. 

The upshot of all of this is that I really, really want to re-watch the entire series again and also that I'm now extremely likely to read anything else by Sarah Rees Brennan I can get my hands on. She's written some original fantasy but she seems to specialize in novelizations of YA supernatural series. I'm going to have to get hold of her Shadowhunters and WINX adaptations, one of which was published under the name Ava Corrigan for some reason, although she can't have been more uncomfortable being known as the author of a WINX spin-off as I will be if anyone asks me what I'm reading, when I'm reading it in the lunch room at work.

Also, I need to read the comic-book continuation of Chilling Adventures, which was brutally curtailed at the end of Season 4 by the evil Netflix, that ultimate villain no televised hero can ever defeat. The continued adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic-book form after the series ended were absolutely top-notch so, once again, I'm optimistic.

Home Is The Hunter

Blizzard is finally getting around to adding housing to World of Warcraft and Grimtooth of Not All Hunters is feeling ambivalent about it. So would I be, if I could be bothered feeling anything at all.

It's a mark of how far I've drifted from the anchor that held me to the MMORPG scene for so long that I haven't even felt a momentary urge to revisit Guild Wars 2 to see what the housing there is like. Now I find I don't feel much more inclined to revisit WoW to check out the accommodation there, either.

Of course, at the moment there's nothing to see. Not even a prototype. Some artist's impressions, like the architect's models you see in the showrooms of house-builders, and that's all.

We do have some idea now of what Blizzard intends, though, and I have to say it doesn't look at all bad. MassivelyOP reported yesterday on what they're calling "the design pillars for World of Warcraft's accessible neighborhood housing". It's an encouraging document, including as it does "Boundless Self-Expression" as the first and foremost pillar. I think that means decorating. If so, I'm all for it.

The second pillar, "Deeply Social", interests me not at all but the third, "Long-Lasting Journey" is welcome news. At least, it is as far as it goes, which isn't nearly far enough. 

Despite calling it "an evergreen addition to the game", the timescales to which the press release alludes - "multiple patches and into future expansions" - don't feel as reassuring as they should. Once you add housing, it needs to be there for the lifetime of the game. If not, don't bother.

Grimtooth's take on all this is interesting since it focuses not on the housing players are going to see but on the cost to Blizzard of adding it to the game, particularly in terms of server load. I've rarely seen anyone even mention this side of the housing issue before and I've certainly never thought much about it myself. 

Maybe it explains why Yoshi P. always seems so reluctant to give every Final Fantasy XIV player free access to the housing they want. I always thought that was to create artificial scarcity and thereby instill FOMO but maybe it's more like fear of drowning the rest of the game in housing-induced lag.

Just about every other MMORPG manages to provide housing of one sort or another, though, so I'm sure Blizzard can do it. I don't imagine I'll care enough to re-sub but if there's a shack or a hut going for players on the Endless Free Trial then I'll be happy to grab mine. I'm guessing that won't be until next year but who knows? It is in the Roadmap for 2025, I believe.

And that'll do for now. As always, let's finish with a song, even if we're getting a whole post full of them tomorrow.

Woman Driver - The Pill

There are two bands (At least.) called The Pill. This is the one I like. They remind me of Shampoo, a bit, as well as a certain other band from the same place they come from, the Isle of Wight. You know who I mean.

We might have another from them tomorrow.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image but the process was interesting. I wanted to use a composite shot of Buffy and Sabrina. I could have found a couple of pictures and photo-shoppped them together myself but I'd been at this for a while and I was in a hurry so I googled for one someone else had done. I found a good one but then I started to get uncomfortable about just pinching it so I thought I'd mess around with it and make the provenance a bit less obvious.

I ran it through a couple of filters in Paint.net, trimmed it a bit, removed all the text and finally re-rendered it as an ink sketch. It looked good but still altogether too much like the original, so I had the bright idea of laundering it through AI. I uploaded the image to NightCafe and let Flux Schnell have a run at it with the prompt "Movie poster, technicolor, widescreen, 1950s"

At the default settings, that produced something utterly unrecognizable, as if the AI had completely ignored the uploaded image altogether. I pushed the Noise Weight slider all the way back to zero to make the model stick rigidly to the starting image and that gave me the version above. About all it seems to have done is make Buffy's face a little harder and add a night scene with a car in the deep background, which I rather like.

The interesting part about all this to me is what it does or doesn't do to the ownership of the image and the rights that adhere to it. The picture I started with came from YouTube and was almost certainly constructed from other images from elsewhere on the web, presumably culled directly from the shows' PR materials. The image at the top of this post is an AI-generated interpretation of an algorithmically produced "sketch" based on a modified copy of a screen-grab from YouTube, taken using the Screenshot facility provided by YouTube itself. 

I'm not sure that's any cleaner, morally or legally, than just stealing the image would have been in the first place, although as far as I understand it, as an AI image it now can't be legally claimed by anyone. I'll credit the creator anyway. It's a channel called Doing OK.

Buffy By The Book

For Christmas, among many other things, I got half a dozen Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Before the end of January I'd read them all. I enjoyed myself so much, I bought another three and last week I finished those, too. They took just as long to read because they were each twice the length of most of the first batch.

Having now read nine Buffy novels, an uncommitted observer might assume I'd have read most of them. They would be very wrong. According to the Buffyverse wiki, there are well over a hundred, including the short story anthologies and the titles focusing on individual characters like Angel, Willow, Xander, Cordelia and even Spike and Drusilla.

Even though the TV show ended its seven season run with a genuine and satisfying conclusion twenty years ago, novels have continued to appear ever since. The next, The Bewitching Hour, featuring Willow's ill-fated girlfriend Tara, is scheduled for publication in August.

The never-ending stream of Buffy novels may be exceptional but movie and TV novelizations that set out to retell the plots in prose form are a long-established, if little respected commercial phenomenon; one that mostly flies under the radar. It would be an exaggeration to say the sub-genre has a poor reputation in literary circles; I don't believe it has any reputation at all. 

I haven't read all that many but based on the few I have, I'd say that was shortsighted. William Kotzwinkle's adaptation of E.T., for example, is about as demented as any of his other novels. He appears to have taken the money and then written whatever he felt like and no-one cared enough to stop him. Indeed, the publishers liked either his approach or his sales well enough to commission a sequel, E.T. and the Green Planet.

Even when the writing is barely more than functional, it's often fun to replay the storylines in your mind. I read the novelization of Pretty in Pink a couple of years ago and while it certainly didn't qualify as great literature, it not only brought the characters to life but showed them from a sufficiently different angle as to make me re-examine some of my feelings about them.

Spin-off novels from successful TV series that go on to develop original storylines are marginally more respectable than those that just follow someone else's script but even then they sit at the very foot of the genre table, itself generally positioned somewhere close to the literary establishment's back door. The low reputation is scarcely surprising, given the way quality tends to vary wildly as the IP moves from publisher to publisher and writer to writer across the years.

Bearing all of that in mind, and for no better reason than I felt like it, I thought I'd post some very short reviews of the nine Buffy books I've read so far. I'll be reading plenty more, as soon as I get my hands on some, but I don't propose to make a habit of reviewing them here. Then again...

 

Halloween Rain - 1997 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

The second-ever novel based on the TV show. There was a novelization of the original movie published five years earlier and an adaptation of the first season's storyline, entitled The Harvest, came out a couple of months before this original story but no-one gave me either of those.

Halloween Rain was the first of the Buffy novels I received that I read, naturally, since I wanted to read them in chronological order. In this, I was not following my own advice. At work, I sometimes suggest new readers not start with the first book in a long-running series because there's a significant risk the writer won't have gotten to grips with the characters or the setting right at the start. It can be off-putting. Better to begin with one of the good ones and then, if sufficient interest develops, fill in the gaps later.

Halloween Rain isn't bad enough to put you off reading any more Buffy books but I suspect that someone who hadn't already bought in to the Buffyverse wouldn't be converted on this evidence. It definitely feels like a book aimed at young readers - significantly younger than the audience the TV show attracted later in its run but probably around the age the producers expected to get when it began. The main characters don't really sound like the TV versions and the plot, featuring an evil scarecrow, is a bit labored. I got through it but not comfortably.

Coyote Moon - 1998 - John Vornholt

A significant improvement. By no means a good novel but it lopes along nicely enough. The plot revolves around a bunch of were-coyotes (It's a thing, apparently.) and a Ray Bradburyesque carnival. Characterisation is a little better but still feels off, somehow. I enjoyed it considerably more than the last one, though.

Night of the Living Rerun - 1998 - Arthur Byron Cover

The author's name was very familiar to me so I looked him up. He did the novelization of the Flash Gordon movie but I think I remember him from his association with with Harlan Ellison. The two of them even co-wrote an issue of Daredevil, although I don't believe I've read it.

The trend in quality continues upwards. This feels more like an actual novel. The non-core characters feel more solid, better defined; the plot has more nuance; the language is richer. It's still a genre potboiler but it's a decent one. 

The problem for me remains the characterization of the familiar characters from the show itself, none of whom sound quite right still. Buffy (Both the character and the show.) does rely very heavily on wisecracks and quick-fire repartee, not the easiest of styles to replicate in prose. 

Blooded - 1998 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

This is where things really begin to pick up. The authors, who seemed a little adrift in Halloween Rain, appear to have come firmly to grips with both the Scooby Gang and Sunnydale. Everything seems a lot more convincing although the dialog still struggles somewhat with the cut and thrust of teenage banter. 

The plot, which involves an ancient Chinese vampire trapped in a sword, who manages to possess Willow on a school trip to a museum, holds together very well. There's a notable shift into genre horror that will sustain and increase through the rest of the novels on this list. and the sixth Buffy novel is also consideraby longer than the rest, marking a willingness to expect more of the readership and a desire to go deeper.

Child of the Hunt - 1998 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

The first Buffy novel I can say I unequivocally enjoyed throughout. There's a major step-change at this point, although it was heralded in the previous novel. Everything now feels directed at the upper end of the YA range, rather than the lower and the focus is squarely on actual horror, not the fairground ride version. 

This book also marks what seems to be the beginning of a consistent drive by these two writers to stake out (Oh dear...) their own interpretation of the Buffyverse. Characters are introduced who will reappear in later titles and there's the beginning of an integration into the milieu of myths and legends that have little or nothing to do with vampires and demons , something that will escalate in subsequent novels by the same writing team. 

I liked this one a lot. Enough to make me want to read more by Golden and Holder. But first I had to finish the next, penned by another familiar name.

Return to Chaos - 1998 - Craig Shaw Gardner

According to Wikipedia "Craig Shaw Gardner is an American author, best known for producing fantasy parodies similar to those of Terry Pratchett". I wouldn't normally take that as a recommendation and although I've seen his name on many a public library bookshelf, until I read this, I'd never even picked up a book he'd written.

On the basis of this, I definitely wouldn't shy away from his name on a spine in future. Return to Chaos is a fast-paced, funny horror novel that comes closest so far in capturing the spirit of the early Buffy seasons. I particularly appreciated Gardner's take on Cordelia, the popular-girl frenemy just now integrating - not entirely willingly - into the gang. There's a moment late on in the book when Cordelia appears at precisely the right moment, doing precisely the right thing, when I did actually cheer out loud.

The main thing I didn't like about this one was the shoehorned-in romance between Buffy and a new character, which felt both awkward and unconvincing. Then again, the same thing happened a few times in the show, so I can hardly single out Gardner for blame there.

The Gatekeeper Trilogy - 1999 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

Although these three titles were published separately, I'm taking them together for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I bought them as a slipcased set and secondly it's very much a single, thousand-page story chopped up into three volumes.

This is the point at which, for me, all the main characters really begin to sound and act like their TV originals. Except for Cordelia, perhaps, who I thought Craig Shaw Gardner gave a fairer shout, everyone has sharper, funnier things to say and interaction between the gang feels organic and natural. Several members of the extended cast make welcome appearances in cameo or supporting roles and Sunnydale feels better represented than at any time in the preceding half dozen books.

Perhaps the most important thing to say about the trilogy, though, is that all vestiges of any genre other than horror have been jettisoned. This isn't a high school novel in any meaningful sense, even though there's possibly more talk about being in high school than ever before. The action moves from back and forth from California to Boston to Europe to alternate planes of existence, leading the cast to spend much time discussing ways to avoid being expelled for continued absence from school but the upshot is always that the world needs saving so school can just damn well wait. Added to that, at least half the main characters now seem to be adults.

As well as being the most focused and coherent storyline so far, I also found parts of it to be the most challenging. As the geographical and social landscape shifts, so to does the moral ground beneath the Scoobies' philosophical feet. There are some very uncomfortable and morally repugnant scenes involving torture and murder, during which characters make choices I was and am not comfortable with them having made. It's just as well these novels are considered non-canonical. I'm not sure there's anything comparably amoral in the show itself.

The plot of the trilogy is absolutely relentless. There's a lot of action, a lot of fighting, a lot of puzzling and detective work and endless death, dismemberment and destruction. It feels like a war novel in places and gets so dark that Spike and Drusilla's scenes feel like light relief, which is disturbing as hell when you stop to think about who they are and what they're doing.

Even though it's by the same authorial team, The Gatekeeper Triology feels like Helter Skelter compared to Halloween Rain's Yellow Submarine. Where things go after this I can't begin to guess but then the show went places surely no-one could have predicted when it began. I'm keen to find out if the novels follow.

On Repeat

A topic that bubbles up in conversation now and then, when people talk about playing mmorpgs, is the time-consuming nature of the hobby. People occasionally out themselves as addicts or make a point by quoting extraordinary /played statistics running into hundreds or thousannds of hours over a number of years. It's a given that successful, long-running games come with more curated content than most of us are likely to consume even once.

In some ways mmorpgs have more in common with other media than they do with video games, even those that come in series. Single-player games tend to have finite narative arcs that alternate paths and endings merely complement. Almost all non-competetive games have some kind of completion state, whether it's a Game Over screen or a full set of achievements.

It's as well, then, that mmorpgs hang around. When Blizzard's John Hight says of World of Warcraft "Why should it ever end?" he's doing no more than stating the obvious in the form of a rhetorical question. Why indeed? There's no reason. 

In these days of boxed sets and streaming platforms, a long-running mmorpg isn't all that different from a series of movies or a long-running TV show. Time was when you'd need to catch something like that on broadcast or release. Maybe, if you kept your eyes open, you'd get another chance on repeat or rerun or revival. 

 

Nowadays, it's harder to think of things you can't access at will. Even failures and flops live on in a dim half-life, uploaded to YouTube from glitchy VHS cassettes or released back into the culture by creators hoping for another shot at an aesthetic validation they never experienced the first time around. Unsuccessful online games are one of the rare cultural entities that fade and even there, like a superhero's death, you can't count on it lasting.

Jeromai was talking recently about purging games from his hard drives: "I used to just keep the game around… just in case. Well, part of deliberate unfettered gaming is to loose that fetter. UNINSTALLED. Gone from the hard disk. What’s the harm? I can always re-download it again when I get the urge to play it again. The save files are mostly all intelligently maintained or cloud saved these days".

It's true, although I suspect many of us will take a little longer to feel entirely secure in our non-ownership of things we really care not lose. But then, nothing is ever guaranteed. Files corrupt. Disks break. Tapes fade. Even books burn. It's maybe safer in the ether, after all.

The medium isn't the message, anyway. What's stopping all of us going back and doing it over isn't access to the data. It's time.

And playing mmorpgs takes for-frickin'-ever! Even with things on fast-forward, with all the short cuts and the  boosts and the skips. Look at that WoWHead chart I put up yesterday, telling you how long it takes to go from ten to fifty in different expansions. The shortest time is twelve hours. 

Twelve hours!  Twelve hours to get a single character to the old cap, experiencing just a fraction of the basic content of one expansion, from the perspective of one race, one class, one faction. At which point, in the minds of many - possibly most - the game is just about to begin.

Not that most people really are going to get through even that small portion in any twelve hours. It's going to take the average person twice that, I would bet, unless they literally skip the actual content of the content.

Twenty four hours, which is less than it took me to level my shaman, is long enough to watch all three seasons of Stranger Things, something I was doing concurrently with my recent stint in WoW.  It was the disparate experiences that sent me down this track. Also the similarities.

When I finally got around to playing WoW about five years after it arrived I was surprised to find it wasn't at all what I was expecting. I'd heard plenty about it. Plenty. It was a cultural phenomenon and I thought I had a pretty good handle on it despite never having played it.

Yeah, well, I was right and I was wrong. WoW wasn't not what I was expecting but it was much more than I was expecting. It had depth and feeling I hadn't anticipated. It also reminded me very, very strongly of other mmorpgs, some of which I liked better, and yet it didn't disgrace them. In some interesting ways it shed light on them and made me appreciate them even more. And want to play them again. 

Stranger Things is like that. It's not quite the cultural phenomenon WoW was in it's prime but it's the show that made many of us take notice of Netflix as something more than just a distribution service. It had sufficient cultural capital to penetrate the mainstream as a trope, an analogy for a genericized cultural nostalgia, similar to how WoW stood in for nerd culture in general back in that South Park episode and a score more noughties comedies.

I thought I had ST pegged; eighties' nostalgia filtered through a post-nineties' ironic lens. A mash-up of all those Spielberg-influenced, D&D-quoting, kid-friendly movies that themselves referenced a Saturday Morning Pictures culture long forgotten even then. All thrown into a blender with monster-of-the-week hits sequenced all the way from the Outer Limits to the X-Files.

And then I watched it and, like WoW, it turned out to be everything I thought it would be and something entirely different at the same time. Just as WoW, back when I first played it in 2009, was both easy and hard, so Stranger Things is both light and dark. In both cases I went in expecting a frothy, sugar-sweet rush that wouldn't last and came out feeling strangely changed; satisfied yet unsettled; fulfilled yet wanting more.

Good art bounces. Playing World of Warcraft always makes me think of playing EverQuest. It makes me consider what that game did first and did right. It makes me consider what came after and how at least a part of the culture changed because of it and is still changing now.

 

As I was watching Stranger Things I couldn't but help compare it with its preternatural progenitor, Buffy. As in mmorpgs of a certain stripe everything comes back to EQ, so in television shows like this, everything comes back to Buffy but in the case of Stranger Things there are tighter correlations than just that. I could start my dissertation on the touchstones right now. I imagine someone already has. 

What it really makes me want to do, though, is re-watch Buffy from start to end. And I could. I could do that. It would take me six days. If I did nothing else but eat and sleep. Taken at a more realistic pace, five or six episodes a day, I could be through it in a month. 

Which is still a hell of a long time. One day I'll do it but time is growing short. As life passes, things pile up. It's hard enough to keep pace with everything new that's added without revisting and re-evaluating.

Except you have to. You really do. Nothing worth doing is worth doing only once, at least not when it comes to art and culture. It all needs to be looked at again and again, set in context with itself and everything else. The cheese does not stand alone.

One of the more curious effects of this peculiar year for me has been the recovery of my re-reading habit. For many years I re-read as a matter of course. I would often irritate people in pubs with my theory that it's the third time that counts. The first read is all about discovery, the second about comparison. The third is the first clean read. I can elaborate, trust me, but I won't.

 

Working in a bookshop for twenty years broke me of the habit, not intentionally but through the sheer, unceasing torrent of free, new books. I never had time to re-read anything because I had to keep winnowing that pile. This year, for the first time in a long time, at home, surrounded by thousands of books, I started to re-read. And it was good.

Only my rule of three didn't apply so much. I could barely remember having read most of the books in the first place. It was more like reading them for the first time, again. You really need to re-read in real time to keep the doors of perception propped open. Same with movies, TV, music...

And, I guess, mmorpgs? Maybe? I'm not sure. Because we for damn sure aren't likely to start again from scratch and do the whole thing over, are we? I mean, many of us come around a few times. We go back to older games and give them another spin. But it seems to me that's more like playing a few tracks from an old album than reading a whole novel or even sitting through a full movie.

With Shadowlands launching today a whole new layer gets added to the cake. And, trust John Hight, they'll keep adding. Because why in the hell should they ever stop?

But we will. We will stop. Which is why we have to make choices, like Jeromai. What to keep. What to lose. And, for me, what to pick up again, and when, and how many times. How many more times?

I am so going to re-watch Buffy. Maybe I could use the time I'm not using not playing Shadowlands...