Smile And Grin At The Change All Around

There's been a lot of talk these last few days about Elon Musk's grudging acquisition of Twitter. If I'm honest, most of it would probably have passed me by if it hadn't been for the occasional, tangentially-related news item popping up on my music feeds and a couple of posts from Belghast and Wilhelm on my blog roll.

I'm gradually learning more about Elon Musk, someone who, in the rare event I ever thought about him at all, I used only to know as "that guy that Grimes had a thing with, once". As for Twitter, other than when I follow links from articles to something someone's said there, my only real connection to the service ended more than a dozen years ago, when I stopped playing Echo Bazaar, the game that went on to become better known as Fallen London.

Failbetter Games, the developers behind that game and its quasi-sequels Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, went with the original and highly annoying idea of requiring a Twitter handle as login credentials. Twitter at the time was fairly new, having been around for something like three years, and I guess some people still thought it was cute. 

Wildstar, then in development, tried to jump the bandwagon by claiming its nascent quest system would be "directly influenced by Twitter". As Carbine's senior narrative designer Cory Herndon put it, "No one likes writing text that doesn’t get read, and getting our players to read what we write is a challenge we take seriously."

As it turned out, wordy quest text was the least of Wildstar's problems and Twitter itself went on to double its maximum Tweet load from the 140 characters Carbine were copying to a bloated 280, although according to a 2018 press release, few took them up on the expansive offer. Apparently most people can say all they want in fewer than forty characters. Would that I were one of them.

My own Twitter history comprises literally nothing other than automated Tweets put out by the aforementioned Echo Bazaar. That was a very annoying thing some games did back then, sending messages to your mother to let her know you'd just earned the title "Goblin Slayer" for killing your five thousandth goblin. I'm assuming no games do that any more, based on how unpopular a feature it used to be.

Regardless of my own lack of interest in using it myself, changes in how Twitter operates do have the potential to affect me indirectly by dint of the bizarre way everyone from the Leader of the Free World (Archaic term; popular in the last century, now only of historic interest except when used ironically.) to my energy suppliers seem to believe tweeting is the exact equivalent of sending a personalised letter. If Elon, as widely anticipated, unleashes the barbarian hordes, signal to noise ratio will degrade for everyone, whether they participate or not.

The post-acquisition trajectory for Twitter is very far from certain, of course. The damn thing has never made money, has it? Actually, yes it has. Twice. "Twitter has posted a net loss every year, except 2018 and 2019 when it made a profit of just over $1 billion." Most of that money comes from advertizing although some comes from "data licensing and services".

As Kanye West has discovered to his enormous cost recently, if you make your brand sufficiently toxic by things you do or say, people no longer want their names associated with yours. It's a fair bet Elon won't make the same kind of statements that have reduced Ye's net worth from $2b (A figure disputed by Ye, who claimed it was double that.) to a mere $400m and startled some of his fans into seeing him as a potential charity case but if, as some anticipate, his ownership shifts the appearance of Twitter to the public eye into something not much more than the in-house journal of the alt-right, there may be some sensitivity to bleed-over in marketing departments around the globe.

One frequently-voiced response to all of this is to withdraw from the fray, either in a scorched earth, delete all social media accounts and buy a fountain pen kind of extreme reaction or a more nuanced and tentative retreat into the more genteel, guarded, often siloed grounds of lesser-known platforms like Mastodon or Hive Social. (No, me neither, until today.)

Much better-known options like Discord, Reddit and even Tik-Tok also come up as possible bolt-holes but really nothing else is anything like Twitter. I know that and I don't even use it.

What seems far more likely to me than any of the already extant services picking up Twitter's slack is the eventual appearance of some entirely new entity that will do to Twitter what Facebook did to MySpace. It's far too easy for people to see existing cultural monoliths as eternal and irreplaceable, when all the evidence suggests they'll be replaced and forgotten with ease. 

I'll be perfectly happy to see Twitter fade but I'm less sanguine about the futures of other services I value more. Blogger, owned and operated as it is by Google, is always at risk but my inspiration for this post was a change to another Google service that's a lot further up the megacorp's attention scale: YouTube.

As I've made plain many times, I use YouTube a lot. It's my primary source of new music and a strong contributor of factual information and entertainment. I wouldn't have had the nerve to cut Beryl's dog walk light-up necklace to size without first watching a tutorial on YouTube.

I also have a YouTube channel, which I don't use for much, other than some occasional whimsy here on the blog. Until now, that channel has gone by the name of the Google account with which I made it, the tautologous Bhagpuss Bhagpuss. It might sound like a nod to the mighty Duran Duran but it is in fact the highly unimaginitive choice I made a long time ago, when Google briefly decided everyone had to register under their real name and rather than do that I just added a second "Bhagpuss" as my surname, which seemed to suit Google just fine.

Because Google, in common with every tech company, can never leave well enough alone, this morning I received my final notification by email that my new, mandatory "Channel Handle" had been assigned. There is the option to choose one of your own but if, like me, you can't be bothered becauase you don't care, one will be assigned to you. 

I was curious to see what mine was so I clicked through the link to find out. And I was pretty happy with it. That was a surprise.

My handle is now @TheBhagpuss and my YouTube channel is youtube.com/@TheBhagpuss. That, I have to say, is an improvement. I kind of like being The Bhagpuss rather than just plain old Bhagpuss, let alone the somewhat comical "Bhagpuss Bhagpuss".

So, let's take what encouragement we can from this unusual example of an imposed change actually making something better. It can happen! 

Now I just have to remember to use my new handle for... something. That's going to be the hard part.

Fallen London Festival Of Games

Here's a little bauble you may have missed. There's a games festival going on in London right now. It goes by the catchy name of the London Games Festival. Always good to be declarative, I say. (I never say that.)

The LGF (See, if they'd have called it the London Festival of Games they could have acymonized it LFG and how much better would that have been? I used to be in marketing once, you know.) has a tag line: "Making London the games capital of the world." I wonder where it is now, assuming it's not in London?  I'd have guessed Seoul or Beijing.

Anyway, good luck with that, London. I'm sure we're all rooting for you but that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I'm more interested in your "Five amazing game demos. Free to stream now." Why don't you tell us more about those?

"Five game demos are now available to stream from the cloud, entirely for free with no download required, thanks to an exciting partnership between London Games Festival, Microsoft Azure and Gamestream

In a world-first for a global games event, you can sample key games from our festival-wide showcase of new indie games entirely free from home – you don’t have to be in London to be part of London Games Festival

The line-up covers highly anticipated indie games: Silt, Lab Rat, Grimoire Groves, Mask of the Rose and Paper Trail

Demos are available for ten days starting on 1 April to players in the UK, West Europe and USA"

Thanks! That does pretty much cover everything, doesn't it? Although I would have to query the "global games event" claim, given the hefty regional qualifications in the final line. 

I guess we'd better have a link to the website where you can join in.

 PRESS PLAY HERE!

There you go!

I pressed play yesterday afternoon, right after I ran across the NME news report that let me know I could. I get so much of my gaming news from the NME now. Who'd have imagined? They've even been covering bugs in Guild Wars 2, which either tells you something about the depth of the NME's gaming coverage or the sudden uptick of interest in GW2 since End of Dragons dropped.

The demos are each limited to sixty minutes (Or an hour as we call it here.) and your progress, always assuming you make any, will not be saved. They put that in bold on the website and now so have I, so don't say you weren't warned. 

All five of the demos look interesting. They all lean towards puzzles or adventures which is tilting in my direction. I only found that out after I finished sampling the first one, though. Employing my usual analytical skills, I just picked the one with the most interesting picture and clicked on that.

About thirty seconds into Mask of the Rose I realised what I'd done. I was playing Fallen London! Again! Seriously, how many times have I played this game in different iterations now? The first time was so long ago it wasn't even called "Fallen London" yet. It was called Echo Bazaar and I had to make a Twitter account just to play it because it was a Twitter game. Do those still even exist?

Failbetter Games is one of those companies that has a thing they do and they just keep doing it, which is admirable and understandable when the thing they have is as good as this. Fallen London has always been a great setting and I guess by now it's a great I.P. 

Is Mask of the Rose going to be a great Fallen London game? That's the question!

I'm not sure an hour-long demo can give us the answer but after my sixty minutes yesterday I'd have to say the signs are good. It's possible this could be the best Fallen London game yet.

It's cetainly the most visually appealing. The series has always enjoyed excellent design and impressive aesthetics but the nature of the gameplay has sometimes led to iconography that felt more suited to tabletop or even card deck than screen. MotR isn't exactly slam-bang action graphics but at least the pictures are bigger.

Failbetter Game's website describes Mask of the Rose as a "Visual Novel, Dating Sim, Detective Story." The Steam page uses the same tags, plus "Romance". I guess that's what it is, then.

The demo (And by implication the game) opens with character creation, something I'm not sure usually happens in visual novels, where you're mostly going to be guiding a premade character through a series of pre-determined choices There's still a sniff of the RPG about this one. 

Also, I haven't played many Dating Sims (None at all, in fact, unless you count Doki Doki Literature Club, which you would have to borderline crazy to do.) but I'm guessing it's probably not genre-typical to play a character who only wants to be friends, if they're even prepared to go that far.

(I just know someone's going to drop into the comments now and give me chapter and verse on how modern dating sims cover all shades of the spectrum of human sexuality and I really hope that's true but if it is, it must make the games hell on wheels to code. How many conversation trees would you need? You'd need a conversation forest!)

Other than that, to me it felt very much of a piece with all the other Fallen London/FBG titles, just with the pieces swapped around and the pack shuffled. There's the same arch humor, the same existential dread, the same fin de siecle, pre-post-apocalyptic ennui. The writing feels almost identical, which, since the writing is probably the franchise's strongest suit, is a good thing.

The setting and the vibe may be familiar but the mechanics feel significantly different, this being very much a visual novel not a "browser based story adventure". Fallen London's mechanics were "rather pedestrian" according to Alexis Kennedy, writer of the follow-up, Sunless Sea and he should know, since he wrote Fallen London as well. 

According to his Wikipedia page, Kennedy, who founded Failbetter Games in 2010 and remained "chief narrative officer and creative lead", left to go solo in 2016. Well, that's what we'd call it if this was a band we were talking about. From what I saw and read as I played yesterday, whoever took over is still very much working from the framework he established, narratively speaking.

If the ambience and the atmosphere felt much the same, the new mechanics felt fresh. One thing you could never accuse Failbetter Games titles of doing is tripping merrily along. They play slowly and get feel slower the longer you go on. Mask of the Rose bucks that trend.

It may be rash to judge from just an hour (No maybe about it.) but I certainly found the visual novel format much more sprightly, a skip rather than a trudge. Even though the structure still involves a great deal of repetition and the gameplay seems to come down to little more than asking a series of impertinent questions, I found the hour just flew by. 

It was also notable how strongly the narrative seemed to want to interrogate the concept. I've never made my way far enough into any of the games to find out if the storylines ever reveal how London came to fall ("Carried away by bats" isn't much of an explanation.) but it always seemed to me that it wasn't really a question one asked. 

Even more so, no-one ever explained how people were surviving underground, where the food and the light and the heat came from, how everyone wasn't going mad with fear, claustrophobia and hopelessness. (Okay, going mad with fear, claustrophobia and hopelessness is pretty much the USP of Sunless Sea but you get my drift.)

In Mask of the Rose, all these concerns are front and center. In just the small section I played we were treated to conversations about the number of Londoners missing or killed in the fall, the instability of the buildings that survived, the shortage of drugs, medicines and doctors to treat the sick and injured, the inability to grow fresh food and the consequent reliance on handouts from the mysterious and sinister Ministry of Accounting and Recounting. 

Questions were raised concerning the impact of the event on organized religion, there were references to social pressures around transgender identity and ethnicity and I had the opportunity to quiz two people who may or may not have been citizens of Hell about their romantic inclinations. It's a lot for a demo and it augurs well for the full game.

I've wishlisted it on Steam, for what that's worth. Mask of the Rose might be the Fallen London game I've been waiting for. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to go on waiting a while. Release date is "To be announced" and we all know that means "Not this year."

Four more demos to play, then, and eight days left to play them. With the clock ticking at an hour per game, that shouldn't be too hard to manage. I hope they're all as good as the first one. 

If you happen to miss the window of opportunity opened by the LGF, Mask of the Rose, Silt and Grimoire Groves all have downloadable demos on Steam. Lab Rat doesn't and Paper Trail doesn't even seem to be on Steam at all, despite the "Wishlist" button on the game's website that takes you straight to Steam's homepage.

More reviews as and when I play them, if they feel worth the trouble. And maybe I'll review the streaming aspect, too. I didn't even mention that, did I?

In The City : City of Steam

I don't believe we've yet seen a really satisfying Steampunk MMO. Fond as I am (was) of NeoSteam, an eight-foot-tall tiger flattening balloon rabbits with a beer-barrel impaled on the end of a scaffolding pole does not scream 19th Century techno-noir to me. I've not revisited Gatheryn since beta so for all I know it may have changed out of all recognition but I remember it mostly as a Victorian-themed fairground portal for some uninspired mini-games. Echo Bazaar is wonderful, of course, but it's more Surrealist than Steampunk and more card-game than MMO.

Half the supposed high-fantasy MMOs that I've played have Steampunk elements. Airships drift, glide or rumble across the skies in WoW, EQ2 and Warhammer. The Empire in Allods is is almost post-steampunk, pushing into the mid 20th Century with its totalitarian politics and constructivist architecture. The Defiants in Rift look to have taken their entire aesthetic from the James Whale Frankenstein . How well technology of this order sits with high fantasy is debatable, although by now it's apparent that once you let gnomes into your fantasy world there really isn't any point trying to hold the line against clockworks.

Until yesterday I'd never heard of City of Steam. Massively posted a news item about a pre-beta "Sneak Peak" that looked interesting but supposedly you had to have registered on the CoS website before the 28th of February when the event began. Massively right on the case there, then. A bit of digging around turned up a website that still had a few keys left from some cross-pollinating offer and with one bound and several registration forms I was in. (Looks like they might still have a few left, although a lot more have gone since I nabbed mine last night).

The Sneak Peak lasts for two weeks so there's a week left. The question is, is it any good? Well, yes it it is, rather and since there's no NDA here's what I've found so far.

City of Steam is in great shape for pre-beta. I've put several hours in and I haven't run into a  single bug, unless Clockroaches count. There's plenty of content in place, all running smooth as gnomish machine-oil. Not that there are any gnomes. Or dwarves. No, wait, hang on there are dwarves but they're clockwork. I think. I spoke to one and he chided me for forgetting about his marvelous clockwork city, tragically now overrun by undead. Nice twist.

The writing is very good.  Mechanist Games, the studio behind the game, may be Chinese but the opening credits name one David Lindsay as both Creator and Producer and the English throughout is impeccable. The text and dialog isn't just grammatically correct either. It's idiomatically comfortable, literate and witty and there's a wealth of interesting detail which I found endearingly old-school. Every item has a mouseover tooltip that reads like an entry from a tabletop rpg rulebook from the 1990s.

The UI is first rate. Elegant, clear and responsive. Can't fault it. I found it intuitive, familiar without being generic and a pleasure to use. The game runs in a browser but looks like it's running from a client. Masses of detail, very gritty feel. There doesn't seem to be a first-person view option but the camera is well-behaved. Movement is click-to-move, which is fine by me. Maybe they'll add WASD at a later stage.

"None" includes Your Reporter

Visually City of Steam is gorgeous. I couldn't get it to run full-screen, which is a shame because I would love to be able to get an even better look at the dirty buildings, moss-covered cobbled streets and juddering steam-powered vehicles. Airships and even flying steam-locomotives cross the skies above the sprawling city in which you begin. It really is a city, too. Seen from above in the opening cinematic it reveals itself as port city that has spread back into the surrounding hills like a stain. Reminded me a bit of Bilbao.

Thus far I've spent most of my time taking screenshots and exploring. At the end of various streets or bridges an option sometimes popped up inviting me into some suburb where the City Guard's writ no longer runs, or down into the inevitable substrate of sewer and crypt. Instanced dungeons, in a word. Two words. For a pre-beta there seemed to be quite a few  already,  stretching at least into the high 20s.

Click here...

... Go there.

One feature I really liked was the signposts. You can click on the destination and your character will make his own way there. I've played plenty of MMOs that have this autoroute feature activated from the quest journal or the map but for some reason having it on a large sign in the gameworld itself seems much more immersive.


Ah, there's that word. Immersion. Some MMOs attain it effortlessly, some couldn't find it in the dictionary. I suspect City of Steam has it and if it does it's down to something I can't show in a screenshot. Sound. The sound direction is about the best I've heard in an MMO. The music is sweeping, elegaic, bittersweet but it's not the music that builds the pervasive atmosphere, it's the ambient sound. Train whistles hoot mournfully, sinister functionaries make mysterious announcements over a distorted tannoy system, dogs bark somewhere in the maze of streets that stretches into the distance all around. It's like being somewhere.

And with that I think it's time to take a break. More on City of Steam to come. Probably. So many MMOs, so little time. I think this one deserves attention.