Breaking News - Hello Kitty Is A Cat

 

Yesterday, I was stunned to read - in The Independent, no less - that “Hello Kitty is not a cat.” According to the article, which quotes as its source Sanrio director of retail business development Jill Koch, in an interview she gave on the Today Show, "She’s actually a little girl born and raised in the suburbs in London."

It seemed so unlikely I wasn't prepared to accept it just like that, even on the say-so of a respectable, old media source like a national print newspaper, where traditional, pre-internet journalistic standards might be presumed still to exist, so I engaged in a modicum of fact-checking. Something you might have thought whoever subbed the piece for the Indie might have thought to do before running it.

It's not as though it took me much time or effort, either. It took maybe thirty seconds to confirm that

a) It's not true.

and

b) It's not news.

The claim originally surfaced a decade ago in a 2014 Los Angeles Times article, ahead of the style icon's 40th Anniversary, when Christine R Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii and the author of  Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek across the Pacific, was interviewed in relation to a Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum. 

Among other surprising facts, Yano revealed that Hello Kitty "is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature." She also explained that Sanrio, who presumably ought to know, had made all of this very clear to her in a response to the script she sent them for approval while preparing the show.

It seems the revelation didn't gain quite as much traction in the U.K. back then as it has now, on the occasion of Hello Kitty's fiftieth anniversary, when it suddenly resurfaced and became a news story across the British media. If you google it, you'll find numerous reports on all kinds of responsible outlets, from The Guardian to Sky News.

Once again, none of them seemed to think it worth checking with Sanrio for confirmation, possibly because this time the claims were, after all, being made by a senior representative of the company.Apparently no-one even bothered googling it.

Had they done so, they'd soon have discovered, as Kotaku did back in 2014, that the whole thing was nothing more than a combination of translation issues and cultural differences. The Kotaku piece goes into considerable detail about the nuances of language that apparently led to the confusion, all of which are very interesting but which I won't repeat here. 

The key facts were summarised neatly by The Week, where Catherine Garcia explains 

"Hello Kitty is just one in a long line of personified animal characters, including Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and others. Although he may be able to drive cars, steer boats, and serve as a sorcerer's apprentice, Mickey's still a mouse, just like Hello Kitty — who bakes, goes to school, and is on the side of a 777 — is still a cat."

Why it ever needed anyone to spell this blindingly obvious fact out in simple terms is as much a mystery as how the story came to be resurrected (Hint: It's the fiftieth anniversary and hey, look! There's Hello Kitty in the news!) I'm actually more concerned by the apparent failure of almost all of the mainstream news sources to realise the "news" they were breaking was a decade out of date than I am to find they didn't bother to do due diligence on a silly-season story about a cartoon cat.

Anyway, in honor of the Great Event I'm pleased to present for you a choice selection from the many, many songs that have been written in Kitty White's honor over the last half century. That's Hello Kitty's real name, by the way. Did you not know?

Some of these may have appeared here before but they may also be the best ones so no apologies for bringing them back. And with that, let's have

Hello Kitty - Avril Lavigne

Avril's having something of a renaissance right now. She played Glastonbury for the first time and in what the NME described as "one of the weekend’s most highly-anticipated performances" she played a dozen of her best-known hits. This wasn't one of them.

Hello Kitty - Jazmin Bean

I'm pretty sure Kitty and her twin sister Mimmy would't be allowed to watch this. It'd either give them  nightmares or make them big-headed. Bigger-headed....

Hello Kitty - PiNKII 

Or this one, either, probably. For other reasons. Then again, PiNKII is PG compared to most of the rappers who've riffed off  HK. I had to stop clicking on those after about the fifth one I tried. Seriously, what is with rap and Hello Kitty?

HELLO KiTTY - OH!DULCEARi x LESTON

Spanish-language hyperpop is a sub-genre I am coming to adore. The glitching in this is superb. Two million views on YouTube says I'm not crazy, too.

🪲Hëłłœ Kįttÿ🐜 Alice Longyu Gao

Pretty much just Avril Lavigne for little Kitty White then, I guess. I mean, this one probably could do with a content warning. I guess they all could, although it's a bit late now...

Maybe we'd better finish with something wholesome.

Hello Kitty: Super Style! - Carly Rae Jepsen

Pity it's so short but then - SO IS HELLO KITTY!

Boom! Boom!

Okay, now that makes me wonder... is Basil Brush really a fox...? 

Hello Kitty would get that reference. She is British, after all. 

Maybe Some Day

I gave myself the day off blogging yesterday to play Nightingale. I think I'm circling in on the primary reason why I'm finding it so compelling but I'll let that percolate a while longer. In the meantime, I thought I'd make good on a promises I made in a previous post.

I started writing about games Palworld and Nightingale had stopped me from playing but then ended up writing about just one of them, Allods, which I actually had played, a little, somewhat defeating my own argument. I said then I'd do post something about the rest later and here we are. It's later already!

Games I'm Not Playing

Obviously, that could be an extremely long list. If you want to be literal about it, it would be all games ever made except Nightingale. That would be kind of a lengthy post even for me, though, so I'll stick to the handful I quite possibly would have been playing, if it hadn't been for (Insert ironically struck-through reference to meme from ancient Hanna-Barbera cartoon old people still somehow expect anyone who didn't grow up watching Saturday Morning Cartoons to get and then shake their heads wearily when they don't here.) two survival games on Steam.

I'm not even going to bother listing the obvious ones, the ones I was already playing before I got de-railed or, more accurately, ran my own train off the tracks, like both EverQuest titles or the many single-player games I'm in the middle of on Steam. This is just a short list of games I have bookmarked, meaning to try, added over the last few weeks either because they looked interesting or because I thought I might get a post out of them. More likely both.

Eterspire

Syp did a short piece on this one for MassivelyOP back in January and I thought it looked interesting enough to bookmark for possible further investigation. It's a mobile title, available for Android and iOS, which self-describes as "the best mobile MMORPG in the history of the universe!!" Look, they even bolded "best" so it must be true!

Really, when you see a claim like that, you have to check it out, don't you? And there's more...

"With engaging combat, tons of rare items to collect, and no overly complicated systems to slow you down, Eterspire cuts through the fluff and takes you straight to the action."

Good, 'cos I really hate being slowed down by those darn overly complicated systems. That's why I've played fifty-five hours of Nightingale these last two weeks. 

Looking at the screenshots and taking the temperature of the extensive patch notes, I get the feeling this is something along the lines of AdventureQuest 3D. I like AQ3D a lot but I still hardly ever play it, so why I'd think I needed another like it beats me. I'd have to play it through BlueStacks or Nox, too, which is another hurdle it will probably never pass but even so it's on the "Maybe One Day" list now. 

Hello Kitty Around The World

I can't now recall where or why I was reading about this. I didn't bookmark my original source, only the Bluestacks entry for the game, which was as far as I got in my attempt to play it. I do remember seeing something that suggested this was an important title for some reason. If I knew what was important about it, I'd tell you. 

Oh, wait, maybe Google knows...

Aha! Now I remember! Or at least, I remember what started it all. It was something I read at NME, because of course a music site was going to be my go-to for important news about Hello Kitty games.

From the NME, I learned that 2024 is Hello Kitty's fiftieth birthday. She really doesn't look her age, does she? That was how I started looking at at Hello Kitty stuff again, but how I ended up with Around The World specifically, I have no clue. 

It's what I bookmarked, anyway, so I'll have to assume I wanted to check it out for something. Maybe if I ever actually play it I'll find out what it was.

My personal history with Japan's most famous feline (And that's a highly competitive title, let me tell you.) doesn't go back quite as far as half a century but it does stretch all the way to the late 1990s, which is when I bought a Hello Kitty pencil case in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona. A few weeks later, I gave that pencil case to a work colleague as a leaving present, when she decided to go to back to America. 

We were the only two people in the office who knew both who Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and that the show was fit viewing for adults, so a Hello Kitty pencil case seemed to be the obvious choice to give her to remember me by. Plus it was all I happened to have with me at her leaving do in the pub after work. God, remember when we used to do things like that? Another world...

A little bit later, I briefly played the Hello Kitty MMORPG,Hello Kitty Online, mostly out of spite. I wanted to be able to hit back at anyone who used it as a lazy diss to put down any other MMORPG they happened not to like, which was very much a trope of the early 'aughts. 

It's always a more effective put-down if you can open with "Have you actually played HKO? Because I have." 

I don't think I ever did that, by the way, but I always thought I might. I guess it could still happen, but I doubt it. After all, I'm not a hot-tempered kid of forty any more.

Of course, the Hello Kitty game I really want to play is Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which is basically Hello Kitty meets Animal Crosssing as far as I can see. Unfortunately, that one is only available via Apple Arcade, which not only requires an iOS device capable of running the game but also charges a subscription. Never gonna happen.

Embers Adrift

Finally, a game you can play on the PC! Embers Adrift is one of those uphill in the snow both ways, retro "golden age" MMORPGs that were all the rage a few years ago, only it's one that both actually launched and hung around. I'm pretty sure it used to be called something else and there was probably some drama involved at some point but I neither remember the details nor care enough to go look them up.

The important part is that from the start of this month it's getting one of those endless free trials I like. The way I play, those might as well be free games. It's not like I often get much further than the starting zones in most MMORPGs, and anyway those are usually the best bits.

The devs also recently made some changes to the early stages that apparently mean you don't have to get a group before you can even take on a kill ten rats quest any more. Oh, it's still laser-focused on "Group-based Gameplay" with all the usual promises and reasons, but like just about every similar game ever, it has finally occured to someone that players occasionally either want or need to do stuff on their own, if only for the sake of their sanity. 

As the patch notes from a preparatory update for the free trial last month put it "A new solo loop has been added to the Meadowlands' Noxious Bog Ember Vein." Now, doesn't that sound inviting?

MOP reported back in January that the recent changes were just the beginning of a new approach to solo play in the game:

"“One of our primary goals in 2024 is to deliver more structured gameplay for those who begin their adventures alone,” the studio says. “We hope that by providing more tangible goals with meaningful rewards to solo adventurers they will stick around longer increasing the likelihood of forming a group to tackle a dungeon or complete a quest. To start the year off we are launching three new EV solo loops and our new Bulletin Board System!"

Amazing how every new developer has to re-invent the wheel, isn't it?

I don't know how well Embers Adrift is doing but generally these kinds of changes only come in response to either player demand or demographic decline. It seems the old school B2P + Sub payment model was the first thing to give. That would be a really hard sell in 2024. 

It's still $39.99 for the full game but the subscription is now one of those optional deals that give you perks of various kinds. A change like that wouldn't have moved the dial on my interest but the combination of not having to pay $40 plus the prospect of at least some content I might actually be able to see without having to make a whole bunch of new friends I'd never meet again did at least motivate me to bookmark the game to have a look at later. 

Op success for the Marketing Dept. I guess..

Tower of Fantasy

Aka the game I didn't play when everyone else was playing it because I was too busy playing Noah's Heart. So, if I didn't bother then, why would I consider it now?

This is why. The prospect of meeting Asuka, Shinji, Rai and the rest in a game is enticing - although I notice the promo only mentions Asuka by name. I guess she is everyone's favorite...

The crossover event begins on in exactly a week on 12 March but I'm unclear as to whether it will then become permanent content or if there's a date set after which it goes away. 

If it's the latter, I'll probably never get to try it but if it's staying for good then maybe I'll eventually find a window to take a look at a game I probably should have played already, anyway.

And that's all of them for now.  Not counting the games on my Steam wishlist I almost bought or the Prime games I almost downloaded. 

If I ever get around to trying any of them, I imagine you'll read about it here. Meanwhile, it's back to Nightingale.

When Rights Go Wrong or Why Household Names Don't Always Sell Games

In the course of a post about Embracer Group and how its current financial difficulties might affect both Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online and Amazon Games' in-development title based on the works of JRR Tolkein, Wilhelm noted "there isn’t a track record of huge success for games based on the IP".

That tied into something I've been thinking about since I observed, in the thread on my own recent post about the move of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Broadsword Games, that "there's almost no synergy between huge, mainstream IPs and the mmorpg genre".

Has there ever been an mmorpg, based on a pre-existing IP not itself originating in gaming, which performed commercially to the same standard as other iterations on that same IP in other media? Or, if you'd like that in English, has any mmorpg based on a book or a movie ever been a runaway success?

I can't think of one. What's more, neither could Bard or ChatGPT. They were both bloody useless, frankly. Neither of them seemed capable of understanding what a "Non-gaming IP" might be, even when I gave them examples. 

For once, I won't derail  my own post by going on about AIs and their funny little ways. I didn't want to rely on my own dodgy memory, though, so without AI assistance I was thrown back on my own research skills, namely skimming through all sixty-six pages of the MMORPG.com list of games.

It wasn't much more help than the nonsense the AIs tried to fob me off with. The MMORPG.com list is stuffed with games that couldn't reasonably be described as MMORPGs even by the loosest of definitions. There were live games, dead games and games still in development that don't yet exist at all. I really need those AIs to get their act together so I don't have to keep trawling through this stuff. I have better things to do with my time. 

Oh, wait...

I did spot a handful of examples of games based on external IPs that I either didn't know about or had forgotten, so it wasn't a total bust. There were a couple of manga/anime inspired titles - Naruto Online ("an MMORPG turn-based browser-game that is set entirely in the NARUTO universe") and One Piece Online, which doesn't actually seem to be an MMORPG at all - but I don't feel qualified to comment on either so I'll pretend I didn't see them after all. 

I also probably ought to leave out the two Chinese titles I found on Wikipedia - Dragon Oath ("Based on the novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong) and Fantasy Westward Journey ("Inspired by Journey to the West" - not least because to include the latter would scupper my entire thesis, given its probably one of the most successful - and profitable - MMORPGs in the world, at least if those old SuperData reports were to be believed. 

Sticking - mostly - with games released in the western hemisphere and/or based on "western" IPs then, here's the list I ended up with:

• Age of Conan
• Conan Exiles 
• DC Universe Online
  
• Hello Kitty Online 
• Lord of the Rings Online 
• Marvel Heroes 
• Otherland 
• Star Trek Online 
• Star Wars Galaxies 
• Star Wars: The Old Republic 
• The Matrix Online

It's surprisingly short, isn't it? Anyone think of any more? No? Actually, I can. That Lego MMO, for a start. Maybe Toontown? And wasn't there a Transformers MMO, briefly? 

Tough. Didn't think of them at the time and now it's too late. Anyway, all of those just shore up my argument so I don't need to shoehorn them in after the edit.

Let's go through the ones I did remember, one by one. 

Age of Conan - Main IP: Books and Movies.

Still running but in maintenance mode. Sold a lot of boxes but famously couldn't hold an audience much beyond the bait&switch tutorial. Honestly, I feel Conan is barely a well-enough known property to support an MMORPG to begin with, so it's incomprehensible to me that we also have...

Conan Exiles -  See above.

Okay, it's not really an mmorpg. Is it even an MMO? When I got ChatGPT to put the list into alphabetical order for me (Nice to find something it's good for, at last.) it prissily warned me "Please note that "Conan Exiles" and "Dune Awakening" are not MMORPGs but are included in the list you provided." I took Dune Awakening out to discuss separately, later (Which, as you'll see, I signally forgot to do.) but since the Steam page says "Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer. (My emphasis.) I left it in. 

CE is doing okay. About 10k concurrent according to the Steam Charts, a population it's maintained remarkably consistently for several years now, putting it just barely in the Top 100. By no means a failure but also clearly no kind of mainstream breakout hit.

DCUO - Main IP: Comics and Movies.

According to the information that came out of the EG7 acquisition of Daybreak Games, quite a consistent performer. It makes money. People play it. For an IP that includes household names like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, all of whom can and have been able to stand up multiple TV and movie series for decades, however, it can't be considered more than a modest success, if that.

Hello Kitty Online - Main IP: Merchandising and cultural icon

This one deserves a post of its own. It appears to have been either abandoned or possibly even forgotten by its owners, Sanria. The game was last known to be playable over a decade ago but the website, which hasn't been updated since 2012, is still up. A sad and mystifying fate for such a global icon.

Lord of the Rings Online - Main IP: Books and Movies.

I think we all know about this one. Doing just about okay for an aging mmorpg but certainly no more than that. Signally failed to capitalize on the massive global interest in Tolkein following the Peter Jackson movies and the recent Amazon Prime series barely moved the dial, despite the hype. I suspect that, much though the fans still worship the man and all his myriad works, the general audience has had about as much Tolkein as it stand for now, which may not bode well for either Embracer Group or Amazon Games.

Marvel Heroes - Main IP - Comics and Movies

Seemed to be doing reasonably well, perhaps on a par with "rival" DCUO until it suddenly and unexpectedly closed down. Even at its peak, though, it could scarcely have been said to have done justice to what was, at the time, one of the best-known and most commercially successful IPs in the entire world. If you can't bring the punters in by the millions with Spider-Man and The Avengers, really, what do you think you're doing?

Otherland - Main IP: Books

This one's just weird. It was a left-field choice for an IP to begin with, being a fairly obscure SciFi trilogy by an author better-known for his fantasy novels. No-one's bothered to make a movie or a TV show out of anything Tad Williams ever wrote, so why anyone thought a game would sell is a mystery. The game never really got finished, never attracted an audience, changed hands a couple of times and finally closed down without anyone noticing. It wasn't a bad game, as far as it went, but the IP did it no favors at all.

Star Trek Online - Main IP: TV and Movies

I called this "The game time (And the world.) forgot" in a comment on the post I linked earlier. It's a Cryptic production, which means it's solid enough but a bit dull, making it, some might say, an ideal fit for the IP. I always feel that Star Trek somehow manages to be well-known by the mainstream yet still entirely niche. This is one game on the list that may even have done about as well as the IP deserved. At least it's still running and people play it. Or I guess they do...

Star Wars Galaxies - Main IP - Movies

This, on the other hand, is a truly world-class IP. One of the very biggest. As Raph Koster is always keen to point out, the game he made using the Star Wars setting and characters was a success - just not a big enough one to satisfy the IP's owners. It's worth reading that piece for Raph's observations on the core topic of this post, the value of a non-gaming IP to an MMORPG - or to any other video game genre, for that matter. 

Raph puts it like this: "if you look at the power of licensed IP game genres outside of sports, it’s really not very clear that a license can or will imply a massive increase in game trials or purchases."  That's really the crux of the problem except that, in the case of an IP like Star Wars, the expectations are also hyped to the skies. It's a recipe for failure because even success on the scale of SWG (Raph claims it was weight-for-weight more successful than EverQuest, the market leader at the time.) doesn't count as success in the eyes of either the fans or the investors.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - See above.

And that, of course, is why SWG is only available on emulator and private servers these days. Along came the second MMORPG based on the IP and even though they weren't making Highlander Online, there could only be one. Sony Online Entertainment bowed to the inevitable and cancelled SWG so SW:TOR could have a clear run... and BioWare fumbled the pass.

Once again, the game itself was fine and sales were good enough for the genre. Just not good enogh for the IP. With the endless publicity pumped out by Disney since then, along with the ongoing global success of many, if not all, of the movies and now TV shows, a middle-ranking MMORPG just doesn't cut it. If it was an original IP, it would be deemed a major success - it's not like we have a lot of SciFi PvE MMORPGs to choose from - but it's Star Wars so it was widely seen as a failure even before the move to the Broadsword Home for Elderly MMOs.

The Matrix Online - Main IP: Movies

Oh, boy! I guess at the time The Matrix was reckoned a pretty big thing? It also has something to do with virtual worlds, I think, so I suppose there was some synergy there? I don't know. I'm vague on the details because I've never seen the movies. 

I've also never played the game which, given that it was published by SOE and included in the All Access sub I was paying at the time, ought to tell you everything you need to know about the appeal of the IP outside its dedicated fanbase. I mean, back then I was at least trying out just about every MMORPG on the market and I still didn't make the time to take a look at TMO. 

I can't even say if it was reckoned a good game or a good version of the IP. I don't even recall reading much about it. I'd guess most Matrix fans  probably didn't even know it existed and most MMORPG players didn't care.

TMO is like the poster child for why hanging an MMORPG off an external IP is a bad idea. It sums up the innate and seemingly insurmountable problem that comes from draping your MMORPG over the scaffolding of an IP that's been successful in another medium: chances are really, really high that most of that pre-existing audience doesn't even know what an MMORPG is, far less want to play one, while at the same time you're limiting your MMORPG audience to a subset that finds the particular IP appealing.

And it gets worse. There may be a very large and well-established market for video games that reference already-familiar properties but those games generally don't require the kind of time commitment and long-term dedication of an MMORPG. It's one thing to buy a Batman game, play it, finish it and put it away; entirely another to commit to raiding Arkham Asylum from 9pm to 1am every Thursday, Friday and Saturday for perpetuity.

And still worse yet. Even if you successfully tap into the loyalty and affection of your chosen IP's dedicated fanbase, the people eager and willing to consume, own and live inside every possible aspect of their beloved obsession, you're going to be opening yourself to disappointment, disgruntlement and maybe even DDOSing and death threats from those same superfans, many of whom will inevitably see your interpretation of their dreams as an embarrassment, a disaster or a betrayal.

Finally and perhaps worst of all, as the IP's licensee, you'll have to pay for the privilege of piggybacking on someone else's success, likely handsomely, on the basis that the rights owner is doing you a favor by letting you hitch a ride on the back of their money-wagon. You'll just have to pray that, when they've taken their cut for doing nothing at all and you've paid all the development and running costs, there's enough left to make the whole thing feel like it hasn't been a complete waste of your time.

Almost all the big, successful western MMORPGs are based on IPs created and owned by the companies that developed and operate them. With barely a couple of exceptions, even the ones we call successful aren't much more than a few big fish in a fairly small pond. World of Warcraft had its cultural moment but, unlike Star Wars or Marvel Comics, it couldn't hold on to it. The Warcraft movie is evidence enough. 

MMORPGs are a niche genre. Expensive mainstream IPs are a terrible fit. If picking a strong IP and slapping an MMORPG back end on it was a guaranteed - or even a likely - way to make a fortune, we'd have massively multiple versions of every TV show, movie franchise and best-selling book series of the last fifty years. Just like we do with the TV shows, movies and books themselves. But we don't because MMORPGs are a niche market and even the successful ones don't make a ripple in the mainstream.

I wish it was otherwise. I could list, right off the top of my head, a couple of dozen IPs I'd love to see turned into MMORPGs - and I might, in another post. It's never going to happen because IP-led MMORPGs don't work unless, like WoW or Pokemon Go or Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, the IP itself comes from another game.

So, if you're waiting, like me, for Scooby Doo Online, where we all get to ride around in the Mystery Machine, solving mysteries and catching bad guys in a lighter, funnier version of The Secret World, then you're going to have a very long wait indeed.

Don't Go, Kitty, Kitty

The PC Gamer post-WoW roll-call of births and deaths I was discussing yesterday includes eleven MMORPGs I could reasonably claim to have played plus one that no-one ever did. They break down into three categories: games I took seriously, games I dabbled with and games I merely glanced at.

Of the twelve, there are two that shouldn't even be on the list in the first place: EQNext and City of Heroes. I'll get to EQN later. First, let's think about City of Heroes.

Did no-one fact-check the copy? The title of the piece is "25 MMOS that lived and died since World of Warcraft launched" but the North American launch of CoH pre-dates WoW's by a full six months. It says so right there in the article! I believe I may have played it in beta as early as late 2003.

CoH looked, on paper, like something I'd really enjoy. I've been a superhero fan since before I learned to read. My mother, in her late eighties, still occasionally complains about how she had to read those speech bubbles out loud to me when I was four years old. At the time the game was announced I was deep into EverQuest and the MMORPG genre - it looked as though it could have been made for me.

It wasn't. Not even close. What always appealed to me most about superhero comics, even as a child, was the soap opera. The fighting? Not so much. CoH, in beta at least, seemed to be nothing but an endless conveyor belt of  meaningless battles, most of them in featureless offices and warehouses or bland city lots.

I played the beta in a desultory fashion for a few weeks, on and off. It was deeply disappointing. When the game launched I didn't buy it and during its eight year run I never once considered giving it a go. For my money there has never been a good superhero MMO. DCUO is the best I've played but that's more for the glorious movement controls, the well-realised cityscapes and the housing than anything to do with the combat or the story.

When City of Heroes miraculously re-appeared earlier this year (in true superhero "I was never really dead" style, I might add) I gave it a try and enjoyed it a lot more than I had back in 2003/4. Just not enough to keep logging in after the initial rush.

Moving on from the game that shouldn't be on the list at all, we come to the ones I tried just to say I had. Chief among those is Hello Kitty Online. I played HKO maybe two or three times. I downloaded it because people insisted on using it as a pejorative in general chat in MMORPGs I did play and that irritated me.

What's not to love?

My feeling was that none of the people using the fashion-challenged feline as a stick to beat their supposed inferiors with would actually have played the game. If I wanted to be able to call them out on that I had to have some basic experience myself.

Also, I do like Hello Kitty, with whom I have a little history. I remember the first time I happened upon a display of HK merchandize in real life, in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona sometime in the early '90s. I was so amazed I bought a couple of items, one of which I later gave to someone I worked with as a leaving present, when they went back to the U.S.

I can remember all of that but almost nothing about Hello Kitty Online, except that it was a lot less casual than I'd imagined. I know I used that as a deflating counter-argument in chat battles a few times, although finding Hello Kitty Online more challenging than I expected was perhaps not exactly the argument-clincher I was looking for.

Speaking of memory and its failings, this is where I offer a practical dmonstration. I thought I'd played Mythos, which is why it's in this section instead of in yesterday's post, where it should have been. Turns out, on fuirther investigation, I never played it at all.

There was a brief period when a clutch of online games using Greek and Roman mythology as a backdrop appeared at around the same time. I played at least two of them and I thought Mythos was one of those but, looking at some reviews and screenshots, it clearly wasn't.

The game I was thinking of, which I remember playing quite a few times, was Mytheon not Mythos. It's still running. You can get it on Steam. Looking at the screenshots, Mythos looks like a more interesting title. I kind of wish I'd played that instead.

Moving swiftly on, we come to games I played a fair bit, on and off, but which never made it into the majors. Minions of Mirth is almost the poster child for my personal minor leagues. (Way to go there, Bhagpuss! A mixed metaphor combining two cultural touchstones, neither of which form any part of your own immediate culture. Some kind of a record, I think. Plus now you're talking about yourself in the second person...)

Someone exploring much further into Minions of Mirth than I ever managed.

MoM was unusual in that it could be played either as a full MMORPG or as a single-player game. That seemed like a great idea back in 2005 and it still seems like one now. Wouldn't it solve all kinds of problems? And if an obscure indie like Prairie Games could do it, what's stopping the big guns?

Minions of Mirth was an EQ-inspired game with graphics that looked more dated than EQ's even in 2005. I must have played through the starting area four or five times over the years but I never really got much farther than the equivalent of Qeynos Hills. The MMORPG closed its gates a couple of years back but the single-player version is still available. I even have it installed although I doubt I'll ever play it again.

Marvel Heroes is an odd one. I played it quite a few times and read about it a lot more because several bloggers I followed seemed to be very into it indeed. For me, the game doubled down on two things I really don't like at all: the Diablo-style lootfest and the aforementioned superhero action mode.

I grew up with the Marvel characters, although I was (and remain) a DC fan at heart. Marvel Heroes seemed to me to strip away virtually everything that had made Marvel the most successful comics publisher of the late twentieth century and which went on to make it one of the most profitable and worshipped global brands of the early twenty-first.

It seemed to me like a game designed by people whose only knowledge of the characters came from a short conversation with a six-year old child. Costumes? Check! Powers? Check! Personality, motivation, backstory, depth? I dunno what those things are, mister. It was the MMORPG equivalent of smashing action figures together and shouting "Bam!", something I didn't even do when I was six years old.

The most interesting thing about Marvel Heroes for me was the bizarre way it ended. Made no sense at all. Just like the game.

Stolen from my own blog.

But then, what happened to Marvel Heroes at the end happened to Firefall time and time again, while it was still running. Was there ever a game that changed direction so many times? Or suffered so many public disputes among its developers?

I played it in a couple of its variants. It wasn't the sort of game that seemed likely to appeal to me - I'm not mad keen on shooters and I don't have a lot of time or affection for mech-suits - but a couple of bloggers kept writing interesting stories about it so I thought I'd give it a try.

I enjoyed it much more than I expected, even though I was absolutely terrible at playing it. I liked the environments and the jetpack movement. It also looked great in screenshots, which always helps, particularly since, by this time, I had a blog to put them in.

The thing about opinions on Firefall is this: they depends entirely which version the opinion-holder played. Each major revision was so radical Red5 might as well have re-marketed them as new games. I liked the version with the public quests based around thumping. That one would have made for a solid MMORPG experience, I think. When they took that out I liked it a lot less. It felt more like a single-player game the last time I logged in.

That's the last of the also-rans. looks like this is shaping up to be to be a trilogy. Part three will get to the games I played for long enough to have something of substance to say about them. Or so we may hope.

Except there's one anomaly to dispose of first. The game I mentioned at the top of the post. The one that really has no reason being on PC Gamer's list at all. Not because someone can't read a calendar but because someone apparently can't read reality.

Much though some would like to believe otherwise, EQNext never existed. There was no game, ever. All there was were some videos, a lot of concept art and a few minutes of faked gameplay put together for a convention.

Blurry and out of focus. How appropriate.

It's quite hard to dig that little fact out of the welter of "Oh noes! My beloved EQNext is no more!" eulogies that clog the filters of a google search but as Feldon explains in an incendiary demolition of the entire EQNext debacle at EQ2Wire, "The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

It wasn't just the demo; the entire EQNext project was smoke and mirrors. There was no game. There never had been a game. There never would be a game. It has no place on a list of MMORPGs that lived and died because it never did either of those things. I'd say good riddance to it but even that gives its existence more credence than it deserves.

Landmark definitely did exist, though, and I'll get to it next time, along with Vanguard, Warhammer, Free Realms and Wildstar. I'll even bring my own screenshots!