One Last Time Around The Lake

Somewhere down in that insanely long tail of tags (Sorry, "Labels".) that follows every post, there's one for a game called Lake. I've used it four times. This is the fifth and almost certainly the last.

The first time I mentioned it was in June 2021, when I reviewed some demos I'd been playing for Next Fest. I ended by saying "Lake is on my wishlist now and I highly recommend the demo. It's almost a game in itself."

As you can almost certainly guess, I didn't buy the game when it came out. That turned out to be just as well because the next time I posted about it, in April 2023, it was to say it had cropped up as one of the freebies in that month's Amazon Prime offer. I admitted to having been "too mean" to pay money for it, thereby proving that both procrastination and parsimony really do pay.

The next time it came up in dispatches was only a couple of months later, in June 2023, when I was rambling on about Steam constantly reminding me about things on my wishlist going on sale. It wasn't entirely clear whether I was complaining about it or thanking them but on balance I imagine it must have been the latter. 

Apparently I'd been about to buy Crowns and Pawns off the back of such a prompt, when I saw Lake was also on the list. That jogged my memory enough for me to remember I already owned it on Prime, meaning I didn't have to spend any money to get something off the list. Always good to hear.

Two things to say about that. First, I really have some serious issues with short-term memory. Second, I did go on to buy Crowns and Pawns at some point, presumably on the assumption lightning wouldn't strike twice. So far it hasn't but it is exactly the kind of game that does turn up on Prime so it could still happen.

The last time I posted anything about Lake, or at least anything I felt was significant enough to justify using a Label, was in April of last year. That was a whole post about games I'd stopped playing for no good reason and how I ought to go back to them. 

Six games were on that list. Lake was one. The good news is that I have now finished three out of the six - Crowns and Pawns and Tales Noir: Preludes, both of which I have posted about very recently and  Lake, which I'm about to give my final verdict on now. (Hold on - it's coming!)

Of the other three, one is Valheim, which even the developers seem incapable of finishing, so I'm giving myself a permanent pass on that one. Then there's My Time At Sandrock, which I have been thinking of trying again, although it would be a much bigger task than any of the unfinished games I've successfully tidied up so far. I put almost seventy hours into the first "My Time At..." game (Portia.) and still never got to the end. There's a third on the way but I'll probably skip that.

The unfinished game I intend to tackle next is Imposter Factory. I'm quite a way into that, I think. It ought to be doable. 

I am finding it quite satisfying, tying up some of these dangling threads. After they're done, I might even buy a couple of new games. I really ought to play Old Skies for a start...

But for now, let's wrap up on Lake. In case anyone (Meaning everyone.) has forgotten what it's about, here's the Steam Store description:

"It's 1986 - Meredith Weiss takes a break from her career in the big city to deliver mail in her hometown. How will she experience two weeks in beautiful Providence Oaks, with its iconic lake and quirky community? And what will she do next? It's up to you."

And that's about it. You play Meredith, an independent, single woman working at a software company in New York in the mid-80s. She's agreed to take two weeks of vacation time to come back and fill in for her dad, the mail-carrier in the small, lakeside town where she grew up. He's just retired and he and Meredith's mother have gone away on a vacation of their own. The job is vacant for now. Maybe Meredith might even want to take it on full  time?

That seems like a weird set-up to me. I'd love to know if that's a thing that really happens in the U.S., people being asked - and allowed - to sub for others in responsible jobs purely because they're related  in some way.

It for sure would never happen here, not even in the 1980s. Not even in small towns in the country. Unless it's in some wholly private business you own and run, like a family business specifically, you can't just get your adult children in to do your job for you while you go on holiday, much less when you retire. And even leaving the ethics of it all aside, how is Meredith even remotely qualified? She has no experience of delivering mail and as far as I can tell she's never even driven a mail truck before.

I had a bit of a problem with all of that but I applied suspension of disbelief and it was fine. It wasn't the only time I needed it, though. There's the issue of Meredith's age, for another. 

In the first draft of the previous paragraph I wrote that I guessed she was in her late twenties or early thirties. Then I saw on the developer's notes on the Store page that she's actually "forty-something". I literally just finished the game last night and I thought she was much younger than that. Her burgeoning mid-life crisis makes a lot more sense now!

What the game is all about is making choices. Meredith is at a crossroads in her life. It's down to you to pick which way she goes.

Discovering Meredith's story is the visual novel element cutting in but Lake is more than just a visual novel for two reasons, the big one being that you have to drive a mail truck and deliver mail. For real. As in actually drive. Like it's a driving game. Which it is, albeit probably the world's slowest and safest. 

You can roll the truck, run it into fences, crash into other cars... There's no penalty for bad driving but you do have to drive. 

I enjoyed the driving but there is a lot of it. The game has an average run-time of around seven hours and I wouldn't be at all surprised if half of that is spent delivering mail. I vaguely remember seeing there was some way to automate the actual driving  but I think all that does is drive the truck for you so you don't crash. It still takes just as long to go around the route.

The driving, like the walking, which comes when when you get out of the van to put the mail in the mailboxes, is very relaxing. Kind of meditative, really. It doesn't have the same buzz as driving around the deserted highways in Once Human and the Lake radio station, which plays as you drive, doesn't feature as many good tunes but altogether it's a chill experience.

As you go around your route, you have to deliver some parcels along with the letters and parcels have to be handed to someone or else dropped on the porch if no-one's there. That leads to numerous conversations, many of which are very engaging. The dialog is good, the voice acting is strong and the stories are engaging. Those conversations in the course of her work, plus the others shes has in the evenings, make up the core of the gameplay.

The other way it diverges from basic visual novel territory is that it's very much one of those "choices matter" games. There are multiple branching narratives. Most of them seem to revolve around Meredith's career, her love life and her plans for the future. She meets old friends she hasn't seen for decades, flirts and gets flirted with, does people favors, sorts out problems and generally becomes enmeshed in the kind of small-town life I have to assume she left home to get away from.

I had the impression she appreciated the time away from her stressful job in New York but that the pace of small town life was never going to compensate for the buzz of the big city. That was my take and that's how I played her. 

By the end, though, I got the distinct impression the writers were strongly hoping I'd realize that Meredith had had enough of the competitive world of software  development and was yearning for the quieter, simpler life of a rural mail-carrier. She might even want to settle down with some bearded guy straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel so she'd be back home, close to her childhood best friend and her aging mom and dad.

Or perhaps the devs were hoping I'd take the hints they were giving and encourage Meredith to explore her sexuality by entering into a relationship with the video-store owner (A woman, it has to be said, with no business sense whatsoever, so I guess there'd be more opportunities there than just romance., assuming Meredith wanted to invest in a dying niche.) Or maybe Meredith could discover her long-buried anarchist leanings and drive off into the sunset in a decaying RV gifted her by those hippies she met that one time...

None of which appealed to me in the slightest, let alone seemed like realistic choices Meredith would make. This is a woman in her forties, working in software development in the 1980s, for a company with a new product that she believes has huge potential. She's clearly in the right place at the right time. Why would she walk away from any of it?

It's true that she's obviously over-worked and it seems for a while that she might also be under-valued. During her two week working vacation she takes numerous calls from her boss back in New York, who seems to think she's still on the job while she's on vacation. 

But then he gets the funding, thanks in great part to her efforts and he calls her, tells her the money is there and offers her a huge rise in pay and a partnership in the company to stay on and do the job she's already doing. She's going to throw all that in to drive her dad's mail truck around a big lake for the rest of her life? I don't think so!

Nor is she going to settle down with the lumberjack  (He literally is a lumberjack. It's not a metaphor. The first tiem she meets him, he's up a tree!). Leave aside their obvious incompatibility, he has a failed marriage behind him that he's obviously not over yet and professes his love for her after a single date, chasing her down in his car as she's leaving town and forcing her over to the side of the road so he can make his pitch. I only let her believe she was going to stay in touch so she could get to the damn airport alive.

Other possibilities include shacking up with the irritable and incompetent owner of the video store or hitting the road in a beat-up hippiemobile with a teenage runaway for a sidekick.... 

Okay, I may have slightly misrepresented that last option. Not by much, though.

What I ended up doing was being nice to everyone, leaving them all feeling happy they'd been able to reconnect with an old friend and confident it wouldn't be so long before she came back to visit them again. And then I got the hell out of Providence Oaks.

Maybe if you do work in software development in a big city, as perhaps the people who wrote and designed this game do, the idea of giving it all up for the idyllic life of small-town service operative might seem like some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. Not to me it doesn't. Postman Pat isn't a documentary. Delivering the mail is low-paid, low skill labor, even if the scenery is pretty. And it's not even that pretty when it rains, which it does all the time.

Makes for a great game, though. I highly recommend it. Also, I'm sure it has excellent replayability for those who like that sort of thing. There are so many decision points there must be many possible outcomes. I'll settle for my ending being the good one. It certainly felt good to me.

And finally, there's the Easter Egg. It's the biggest I've ever seen in a game. Huge.

I've left it to the end so as to avoid spoiling the surprise and I suggest anyone that's going to play the game stops reading now. Or maybe not because there's every chance most people playing won't even realize they're seeing anything unusual when they get to it.

I apologize in advance if I've already posted about this. I could have sworn I had but I can't find anything even using search on all the obvious keywords, so I'm going to have to assume it was a post I meant to write but never did.

There's a British TV show called The Detectorists. It's written by and stars McKenzie Crook, best known for being in the original version of The Office, Pirates of the Caribbean and for playing Worzel Gummidge in the revival of that show. As you might guess from the title, it's a show about people whose hobby is finding buried treasure with metal detectors. Or at least, that's  the dream. Mostly they find old cans and buttons.

You need that background to appreciate the Easter Egg. Here's how I found it.

Meredith was driving her mail van along one of the outer roads around the lake one day when I happened to notice there was someone standing right in the middle of the huge field of wheat on the right-hand side. I thought it was a scarecrow at first but I was curious because I was pretty sure it hadn't been there the last time I drove by, so I pulled over to the side of the road and Meredith got out.

She walked all the way out to the figure which, as she got closer, revealed itself not to be a scarecrow but a lanky fellow with a metal detector. As I saw his face I felt like I recognized him but obviously it couldn't be...

And then he spoke and it was. In the middle of a field, apparently with no relevance to either the gameplay or the location whatsoever, stood a character with no business being in the game at all. The character's name is Andy. Andy Stone, is who McKenzie Crook plays in the show.

Just in case there was any doubt, Meredith chatted to Andy for a good while and the whole conversation refers to things that happen in The Detectorists. Later in the game, on her final day, he turned up again, just wandering across the parking lot of the motel where she's pulled in to deliver a package. I believe he can just wander into a few other locations. too.

And none of this has any connection whatsoever to the story. It's just there. One of the oddest, most unlikely and also most memorable things I've happened across in any game, ever. How or why it came about is a mystery but I'm very happy it did.

Jumpstyle Is Not A Crime

Since I ran up against the buffers in Nightingale I've been game-hopping like crazy. Typically, when I was spending all my time in one game, I complained about feeling trapped. Now I'm back to jumping between half a dozen games it's giving me the jitters. There's no pleasing some people.

The games I'm "playing" just now (Although that's a very fancy word for what I'm actually doing when I log into some of them.) are:

• New World
• AdventureQuest 3D
• Once Human Closed Beta 3
• EverQuest II
• Nightingale
• The Dungeon of Nahalbeuk: Amulet of Chaos

I don't have one of those fancy apps that tallies exactly how much time I spend in each of them but I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it isn't a lot. I doubt it's more than a couple of hours altogether most days.

As well as those six, I have a mental list of about twice as many games I feel I ought to be playing - or could be playing - or was in the middle of playing before I stopped for no good reason. Those include:

• Valheim
• Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
• Tales Noir Preludes
• Imposter Factory
• Lake
• My Time At Sandrock

There are more - potentially a lot more - but that's a round dozen so I'll call it there, just so I have time to give a little gloss on each of them, starting with the ones I'm at least managing to log into once in a while:

New World - I came back for the Spring event and kind of hung around. I've been logging in most days to do the rounds of the settlements and festival camps so I can pick up my freebies, especially the tokens. I've bought some of the furniture I wanted and I have a couple more days to get the rest. I need to remember to spend everything I've earned because the event currency vanishes along with the event itself a tthe end of April.

Other than that, I've done a few quests and I feel like I might carry on and do a few more, just for the fun of it. Questing in New World is generally entertaining and I see new quest markers everywhere I go. Unfortunately, I'd need to buy the expansion to level any further and I think it's a bit steep at £25.  I'm somewhat discouraged to do too much questing while the xp goes nowhere so I'll probably shelve this one soon in anticipation of whatever the Big Announcement in June might be. Maybe that will make it feel like it's worth buying the DLC.

AdventureQuest 3D - I log in every day just to collect my three daily chests. There are two reasons I keep doing it: 1) The first chest always gives some cash shop currency and I want some for housing items and 2) AQ3D has by far the fastest login process I've ever seen. 

Seriously, it's like lightning. I wish every MMORPG was even half as fast. I just timed it and it took 28 seconds from Pressing "Play" in Steam to looking at my character in game. I can log in, get my chests and be back in Steam in under a minute although I don't usually go quite that fast. Of course, I'm not actually playing the game but there's certainly nothing being put in my way if I wanted to, which is more than I can say about a lot of games - *cough* Lord of the Rings *cough*

Once Human CB3 - I logged into this one for the first time in a couple of weeks last night and my house was gone! That was a shock. It turned out to be more of a feature than a glitch, though. It seems that if you don't log in for a while (I don't know what the time-limit is.) your house automatically gets copied and stored using the system designed for moving home. 

All you have to do to restore it is find a new spot and put down the blueprint and it magically reappears, just as it was, with all the furniture in the right place. It seems like a very ingenious solution to the endless problem all games with open-world housing have, namely absentee homeowners. This way, no-one has to look at hundreds of abandoned homes and all the best building spots can be taken by people who are going to use them.

Once Human has a lot of clever design features like that. Yesterday I ran across the game's ingenious solution to that other annoying trope of so many F2P MMORPGs, player-owned strip malls. You must have seen them; dozens, scores, hundreds of stalls put up by players to sell their goods, all crammed together in a particularly ugly form of urban blight.

In OH, players sell from pick-up trucks on which they place vending machines. These fit so well into the post-apocalyptic environment, already littered as it is with broken-down vehicles and machinery, it took me a good while to realize what they were. They also have the benefit of all being different. I haven't found out how you get one yet but it looks as though once you have one, you can furnish and decorate it like a room in your house. I wonder if you can also drive about in it? There are vehicles in the game, so I don't see why not.

I want to do at least one more full post about Once Human soonish, so I'll leave it at that for now. I don't plan on playing much more of CB3 but that's only because I want to save my enthusiasm for when the game goes live. I did do some exploring yesterday, though, which is where all the pictures in this post came from. It's fun just driving around on my motorcycle, looking at the scenery. I might do some more of that before the beta ends.

EverQuest II - I'm in and out of this one as usual. This morning I finished the Signature Questline from the current expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, which would normally be a big moment. Instead it turned out to be something of an anti-climax. 

For one thing, it's the first expansion for a long time where finishing the Sig hasn't also put me at the level cap. My Berserker is still only half way through Level 128. For another, there isn't a big, explosive ending to the storyline - just a regular fight with a named mob I wouldn't even call a Boss, followed by a hand-in, at which point you get a pop-up telling you the Sig line is finished.

It transpires there's a reason for that. The Signature Quest might have stopped but the quest faucet is still jammed full on. Other NPCs nearby immediately sprout feathers over their heads and everything carries on as before. I looked ahead on the wiki and there are tons more quests of all sorts in the expansion, many in direct line of sequence from the Sig. 

I'm not sure why they've done it this way although no doubt there are reasons. It's fine with me, anyway. Now I can just carry on chipping away until I eventually hit 130. I'd like to get it done before the Anashti Sul server arrives in June. That shouldn't be too hard...

Nightingale - As I said the other day, the changes they've made aren't significant enough to get me back playing regularly again. I would like to re-visit all the vendors so I can buy stuff directly from the UI in future, though. That would be a project in itself.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos - The wild card on this list, being both the only game that's both solo and offline. It's also the one I've been playing the most. I've had a session most evenings, usually lasting a couple of hours, which is sometimes as long as it takes to finish a single battle.

I really like the gameplay. It's one of those XCom-style, turn-based, tactical group combat games, only with a high-fantasy skin. Lots of setting people on fire, knocking them down and hiding behind things until someone blows them up. All of that.

It's also - loosely - a parody and I was wary of what that might mean in the way of "humor" but it's largely okay. The voice acting is just the right side of amateurish and the jokes rise just above embarrassingly cliched. I wouldn't call it witty or original but it raises the odd smile and the characters... have character.

The game also seems to go on forever. I feel like I've been playing it for months. I know I'm doing all the side quests but I feel if I wasn't my party wouldn't be tough enough to handle the main quest so it doesn't feel like that's much of an option. Anyway, I'm enjoying it and I hope one day I might even finish it.

And now the ones I'm thinking - but not doing much - about...

Valheim  - Wilhelm writing about this one again reminds  me I ought to go back and at least take a look at the Mistlands. I had a terrible start with that biome, although from what Wilhelm says that was likely the developers' intention. 

I'm not even going to bother trying to play the game properly any more but luckily I don't need to because I've switched all the mobs to Passive, meaning I can go explore without fear of being jumpd on by a spider the size of an elephant, moving as fast as a cheetah. I mean, does that sound like fun to anyone?

I was tempted to go back and have a wander around yesterday but then I thought about the final biome, Ashlands, which is in testing now and should be going live in a matter of weeks. It probably makes more sense to wait for that and then explore both biomes together. If I do, I won't be switching mob aggro on for that either, I'll tell you that for nothing!

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit - I bought this in January. Haven't even logged in yet. Every time I see it in my Steam Library I feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll start on it as soon as I finish Naheulbeuk.

Tales Noir Preludes  - I bought this around the same time and played it right away. I was really enjoying it but then I stopped, for no reason I can recall. I keep meaning to carry on from where I left off but somehow I never do. Must try harder.

Imposter Factory - Much the same story for this one, although I got further before I stopped.

Lake - And this one! I have no idea why this keeps happening. I have a post in mind to write about Lake, too. Something very odd happens in it. Twice, in fact. 

I thought I might already have posted about that but search suggests I haven't. I guess I could tell you what the Odd Thing is now but there's still the outside possibility it might happen more than twice, so I really ought to finish the game first, just in case.

My Time At Sandrock - Will I ever play this damn game? I very much doubt it. 

I almost wish I hadn't bought it, now. I feel like its whole schtick has been done by so many other games, I can't really see the point. Then again, the My Time At... games probably do it better than most of them, so why play any of those, when I already have this one installed? 

And there we have it. Not so much a post, more of a to-do list. Maybe putting it all down on paper will even inspire me to get some of it done.

I kinda doubt it but you have to try something, don't you?

Garfield And Morrissey Don't Know What They're Talking About

I quite like Mondays. Not a popular opinion, I know. 

It's mainly because Monday hasn't been a regular working day for me for well over a decade, not since I went to see my manager and said I wanted to drop my hours from full time to four days a week and she got out the calendar for the rest of the year and put a line through every Monday. From then on, whatever my working pattern has been - and it's changed more times than I can remember - I've never worked Mondays.

Monday isn't my favorite day, though. I don't have one any more. It used to be Sunday (Suck on it, Morrissey!), a preference dating all the way back to adolescence, when I had classes six days a week (and chapel on Sunday mornings), making Sunday the only day of the week I didn't have school all day. 

Now Sunday is my main work day, so in a weird way Sunday is my Monday, although when you don't have to go to work the day after, it hardly has the same dread impact. Sunday's also my Friday, I guess, seeing it's both the first and last day of my working week. Or it is on the weeks I don't also work Saturday...

Anyone know why I started this? If you do, please let me know in the comments because I certainly don't.

Oh, wait a moment, yes I do. It's coming back to me now. I was going to say here we go with another Friday Grab-Bag on Monday. That was it.

 

Mark This Comment As NOT SPAM. 

Since we've mentioned the comments (We? Are we the Queen now? Or, I guess, the King. Still getting used to that...) this might be a moment to mention that I'm very, very bad at checking Awaiting Moderation. And when I say bad I mean I pretty much never do it at all.

This morning, I just happend to look in there (For reasons.) in what must be the first time for at least a year. I was very suprised to find about half a dozen genuine comments among the endless stream of sexual harrassment and unwarranted praise that prefaces links to websites of extremely dubious provenance. I authorised all of those valid comments, most of which were of fairly recent origin, so if anyone's commented lately and not seen their comment appear, now might be the time to check.

I haven't replied to any of them, for which I apologise. I wasn't smart enough to do it as I was signing them off and now I can't remember which posts they were for. I may go back and try to find them but I probably won't, so feel free to drop another comment and remind me if anything needed an answer.

 

Address Unknown

Whenever Wilhelm does one of those posts about all the peculiar offers and invitations he gets via email thanks to having a blog, I wonder why no-one ever gets in touch with me to promote their product or give them free content for their their platform. I mean, I'm glad they don't but no-one wants to feel like they're invisible. 

Okay, everyone wants to be invisible, at least sometimes but that's an entirely different fantasy.

It so happens that this morning, in the course of fact-checking for the item above, I discovered that contrary to my belief, this blog has never in all the dozen years of its existence had an email address. Well, not one that both worked and that anyone could find. Believe it or not  - and if you're a regular reader I'm sure you will have no difficulty believing it whatsoever - I did not know this until  about a quarter of an hour ago.

When I set up the blog I was, like many people, somewhat anxious about the potential for self-exposure. I anticipated many bad things happening, as new bloggers often do, not realizing that by far the more likely outcome wouldn't be torrents of abuse but complete and utter silence. 

In the interest of anonymity, I put the least-possible information in my public profile but I did include an email address. That email address was invfull@gmail.com. It's been the contact address for the blog ever since but even though my Blogger profile has been accessed over eleven thousand times no-one has ever used it. 

There are two good reasons for that. Firstly, it appears I neglected to tick the box that makes the email address visible when you look at my profile and secondly I don't appear ever to have gotten around to creating an email account of that name at Gmail. I imagine I made it up back in 2010 with the intention of registering it at some future time, if and when I felt comfortable about it, but then I forgot all about it, just like I forget most everything else.

In my head, though, I've been thinking all along that there was an email address on the blog, somewhere. I've occasionally wondered why I never get any mail from it but I figured it must be one I never look at. I have plenty of those. I never bothered to check until now.

Sorry about that.

I can now confirm that this blog does have a valid email address attached to it and it's visible from my profile. Confusingly, it's my Twitter email because I'm signed in to the maximum permitted number of Gmail accounts and I'd have to sign out of all of them to add another (Why? I don't know! Ask Google. It's annoying.) 

The email address for the blog also redirects to one I look at every day so I will see whatever anyone sends there. For a while, anyway. If it turns out to be a nuisance, I reserve the right to sever that link, after which it'll be down to how often I remember to check. Either way, it will now at least be technically possible to get in touch with me without resorting to hijacking the comment thread on the latest post (Which I'm also totally fine with, by the way).

 

From The Comments

Wow! It's almost as though there's a theme developing here. It wasn't planned but I guess I'll go with it.

Angry Onions was kind enough to drop by with a link to a very informative video explaining exactly how ChatGPT works. It's a shade under half an hour long. Less if you skip the commercials. I watched it right after breakfast this morning and I'm embedding it here because it's well worth the time it takes to watch.

In general terms, there wasn't much in the video I didn't already know. The specific mathematics involved, even dumbed down to the nth degree as they are, still go way over my head. For instance, I remember matrices from school and not being able to understand them then. I don't understand them any better now, so referencing a matrix as a way to simplify a much more complex process really doesn't do much for me.

That in itself highlights one of the most significant aspects of the whole AI phenomenon, namely that, for the end user, an understanding of how LLMs and Generative Pre-Trained Transformers work isn't really necessary or possibly even advisable. As has been observed countless times, no-one needs a degree in electronics to switch on a TV set. 

What's important is what shows up on the screen, not how it got there. The underlying technology is interesting, of course, if you have an enquring mind, but what's essential for the end-user to understand are the controls, not the mechanics. 

The current suite of applications we're choosing, highly inaccurately, to call "Artificial Intelligences" are either tools or toys, depending how we use them. When we use them as toys, it doesn't much matter how we play with them, so long as it amuses us but if we're going to use them as tools, we do need to know what they're good for, what their limitations are and how to handle them safely. It's not clear everyone's reading the manual.

There were two statistics in the video I found surprising, even shocking, and neither of them had anything to do with how ChatGPT functions. The first was the sheer number of people currently using the app. Kyle states that as of 2023 "ChatGPT has one hundred million monthly users". I knew the whole AI phenomenon was getting a lot of media attention. I did not know so many people were actually using it.

The second, which relates directly to the first, is that running ChatGPT to service the demands of those hundred million users "might cost $500m a day." Seriously? For an application that's free to use? How the hell are they funding that? And how long is it going to be before the pay walls come up and the AI gravy train runs off the rails?

I asked Bard because I thought it would be rude to ask ChatGPT itself.

 

I have two things to say about that. 

First, I haven't fact-checked any of it against original sources and as we all know - or should - all these AIs are very happy to make something up if they don't know the answer. (Also, AIs don't "know" anything. I know that. No need to remind me. It's a figure of speech.) I'm just quoting what Bard said as a starting point for further investigation, should anyone care to look into it further. 

That's what I find Bard useful for. I'd no more accept anything it told me at face value than I'd take a child at their word if they told me they'd been playing with fairies at the bottom of the garden. No-one would, would they?

Second, saying the same thing twice does not provide "additional details". I suspect there may have been a lot of high school essays in that original data corpus.

Caveats aside, I think it's not unreasonable to assume that billionaires and megacorps are going to be driving the AI revolution forward but that we, the general public, will end up paying for it in the longer run, one way or another. I can absolutely see why that might be a concern. There's not much of a history of forces like that working in anything other than their own financial interest, after all.

In the video Kyle alludes to the frequently expressed concern that unrestricted public use of these models risks creating a feedback effect that will eventually render all data on the internet at best suspect and at worst corrupt. He also (And not, in my reading, entirely facetiously.) nods towards the longstanding paranoid scenario in which machines attain sentience and decide to dispense with humanity.

I'd put the danger of the latter somewhere just above a zombie apocalypse. The former, though, does seem to have some traction. ChatGPT itself is currently insulated from any such corruption due to its siloing within a data set that cuts off sometime around September 2021 but that protective restriction also means the engine becomes less useful for practical purposes day by day. If the AIs are going to have a future they're going to have to live in the present, not the past.

If a hundred million people are pumping AI output into the data-sea every single day now, how many are going to be doing it next year and the year after? It's a fair bet most of those users won't be fact-checking and cross-referencing before they dump their results into the pool. Gigo still applies only now it's going gigagigo.

Which sounds like a suitably gibberish moment to end this segment. Of course we'll be coming back to it soon enough. Probably for the rest of our natural lives.

 

I Nearly Bought A Game But In The End I Didn't.

Story of my life, really. I keep getting emails from Steam telling me something on my Wishlist's up for sale. The list itself has ballooned to more than two dozen titles so something's almost always on some kind of offer. I always check the deal but it's rarely tempting enough to get me to bite.

Not everything on my wishlist is there because I really want to play it, of course. Some things are just bookmarked in case I want to write about them some day. There are a few Point & Click Adventures on there that I would like to get, most of which I played in demo form at one time or another. 

One of them is Crowns and Pawns, about which I was very lukewarm back in February of last year but towards which I have since warmed a little. I did eventually add it to my wishlist and when it came up recently at 45% off I almost pressed "Buy". I'm really in the mood for a good point & click about now.

Luckily, before I spent the money it occurred to me I must have quite a few games in my Amazon Prime Gaming library by now. I checked. I have one hundred and thirty four. I've finished fewer than a dozen. There are more than a hundred I've never even looked at. 

Among them are at least fifteen Point & Click adventures, although most of them are versions of bloody Monkey Island. Still, I ought to be able to find something. Then I remembered one of the games I got free from Amazon, Lake is also on my Steam Wishlist. If I take that one off my list, I thought, and start playing it through Amazon, it'll be just like I bought it!

So I did and it is! That ought to keep me busy for a while.

And finally...

Close With A Song!

Anyone like Suicide?

  Moon Duo obviously do!

Oh, Come On! There Must Be Something You Like...

After last month, when I added Prime Gaming to the blog roll, I thought I'd written my last Amazon Prime roundup. Then I saw the line-up for May and found I had a few things to say about it, so here we are again. I'm not going to go through the whole list, just the highlights, but if you want the full skinny it's on the official blog or you can see a rundown in brief in the video below.

I found the comment thread following that video on YouTube revealing, although obviously it's in no way representative. Still, you can always read the temperature of the room from these things. I scrolled to the end of the thread and apart from a couple of brief nods towards a couple of the titles, all I saw were complaints about the quality of the games on offer:

"Prime give us some good old AA games"

"What I don't like about Prime Gaming is not that much about "how big the game is". I mean, it's ok for me if I don't get any AAA game. But almost every game included in Prime is really bad, like games that no one would buy them."

"what games are these Prime oh my god too weak games where are those breathtaking games because if it continues like this it will no longer be an advantage to renew the annual plan I expected more I see it's bad"

"Awful , just awful. What happened to you prime gaming ? Last year You're gibing away AAA games and this year its either old games or indie games. Atleast give some old AAA games that ppl enjoy. Another bad month with not a single good game."

Nice to see the level of literacy on YT as high as usual but we get the general idea.

There were also a couple of direct comparisons with Epic Games:

"...nothing worth it. Meanwhile Epic Games on a roll giving better and better games every week"

"Epic games gives better games than these and that too for free"

And there were the usual threats to quit:

"Time to leave Prime"

"Will not renew this month. Hope next month."

" ...will end my Prime subscription right now"

Some of this is misguided or plain ignorant. The trailer for Lake on YouTube, for example, has 2.6m views, suggesting a certain pre-existing popularity. Much of the discontent, however, is founded in reality - of a sort. 

There is an argument to be made that the games we've been getting from Prime this year are less prestigious and of lower authority than in previous years. I highly doubt, however, that it's because Amazon is "having a hard time" as one commenter, almost certainly ironically, suggests. 

I suspect it probably has more to do with a change of emphasis somewhere in the vast, labyrinthine structure of the megacorp although benign neglect is always a possibility. If Amazon has any genuine interest in gaming, it's probably directed at their own games and publishing deals.  

It's long been difficult to align "Amazon Games" with "Prime Gaming". They seem to have little or nothing to do with each other. Maybe the company's current gaming focus is simply elsewhere.

And why wouldn't it be? To compare Prime Gaming with Epic is misleading at best. Epic is mostly a games company. Amazon is mostly not. Moreover, even within Amazon's remit, Prime Gaming is at best an Add-On to an Add-On.

The comments made me wonder about the insularity and tunnel-vision of the commenters and by implication of the wider gaming community. Are there really people who pay their Prime subscription solely - or even mostly - for the free games? It's hard to believe but I guess it's possible.

I took out my Prime subscription years ago for the specific reason I imagine most people did at that time: free, fast shipping. I looked at how much it was costing me to have things sent to my house and how long it was taking for them to get there and  calculated that I'd save money and get stuff faster by paying the sub. I didn't at the time even realize there were other benefits attached and back then I'm not sure there were many.

Over the years since I began subbing Amazon Prime, the service has grown to include a raft of features, some of which, like Prime Video, I use literally every day, while others, like Amazon Music or Reading, I use only very occasionally.  

Gaming falls somewhere in the middle. Every month I claim a few games and some months I even play one of them. The main reason I even know about Prime Gaming it is because I used to claim the free games from Twitch before Amazon bought them and rebadged the service. That pretty much sums up how important Prime Gaming has to be to the overall Amazon Prime offer - it's a thing that came bundled with a thing they bought for other reasons and this is where they put it so they wouldn't keep falling over it in the hallway.

Or that's how it's always felt. Amazon doesn't care about Prime Gaming per se; it's just a bullet point on a list. Look how far you have to scroll down that list of reasons to subscribe. It comes almost at the end, just before Amazon Photos (A thing I didn't know even existed.)

As a Prime subscriber who also games, I appreciate Prime Gaming. It adds value to the offer for me. But if Amazon announced tomorrow they were closing it down it wouldn't for a moment make me consider cancelling my subscription. If I wanted to pay a sub specifically for access to new games every month, Prime is not where I'd be spending my money.

So, even if I was disappointed with the current tranche of free games that come with my Prime sub, I wouldn't start mouthing off about it on social media. And anyway I'm not disappointed. There's something every month that gets me a least a little excited and May's no exception. 

The games in this month's offer that I'll be claiming are

• Lake
• Planescape:Torment (Enhanced Edition)
• Agatha Knife.

I might also take The Also Gone, although it looks a bit... depressing.

Lake is a game I reviewed in demo form a couple of years ago. It's been on my wishlist ever since but even with discounts I've been too mean to buy it. Well, now I don't have to! That's about a month's sub right there.

Planescape:Torment is a game I already own, at least technically. I have it on DVD - or possibly CD, it was that long ago - in a box on a shelf somewhere. I'm sure I don't need to describe it. It has a ferociously high reputation as an all-time classic but I could never get into it at all. I tried but not only did I dislike the premise, I found it... boring. Really dull. Too much text and none of it engaging.  Still, I've always felt I ought to at least give it another chance. Now, maybe, I will.

Agatha Knife is new to me but it looks right up my dingy, dark, alley. The Steam page describes it as "a whimsically twisted adventure" in which the eponymous Agatha is "torn between her love for eating meat and her friendships with animals". Well, aren't we all? Okay, not me. I haven't eaten meat since the 1980s and I didn't much like it then but the same applies to plants. You know they scream when you cut them, right?

Well, that ended on a cheerful note. Oh, well. Time I was mowing the lawn anyway.

Speed Dating : Steam Next Fest

Thanks to the hard cutoff at the end of the Swords of Legends Online demo, I found time last night to do what I'd meant to do all along: download some single-player demos to try. I didn't have either the time or the energy to comb through the plethora of short sales pitches in Steam's Next Fest, particularly given the delight the platform seems to to take in stuffing most the entries into all of the categories, but I gave it a few minutes and pulled out a handful of choice-looking plums. Then I played through all of them.

Well, kind of. Let's say I pressed Play on all of them. That's true enough. Of the six demos I downloaded, so far I've only finished one but I've seen enough for a bullet point or two. That's about all you can expect from a demo anyway. Here they are in order of time played.

• The Secret of Retropolis - Minutes Played: Zero (0). Uninstalled.
  

This looked right up my street: "A blend of classic point-and-click adventure with immersive cinematography. Embody the witty protagonist of a film noir plot. Meet unforgettable characters. Solve puzzles. Lose yourself in the retro-futuristic atmosphere". The screenshots looked stylish. I was itching to get started.

It wouldn't play. At all. Clicked the buttons, nothing happened. I tried restarting a few times but no joy. Turns out in my excitement to play I'd missed one key factor: "The Secret of Retropolis is a VR narrative game."Ah! That explains it. My bad. Next! 

• Catie in Meowmeowland - Minutes Played: Four (4). Uninstalled.

 

Okay, this was a gamble. "Catie in MeowmeowLand is a classical humorous point-and-click adventure game. Help little Catie get back home from the bizarre cat world of MeowmeowLand!" Could go either way. The screenshots looked inviting and unusual, like stills from a child's picture-book. I had high hopes although the word "humorous" in the description of any video game always rings alarm bells.

Within seconds of logging in I was fairly sure it wasn't for me. The same art that looks good in screenshots looks awkward and uncomfortable in game. Nothing wrong with it, just not my thing. The visuals would have been manageable if the gameplay had been to my taste but "point-and-click adventure" clearly means something very different to whoever wrote the blurb than it does to me.

• The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout Act III - Minutes Played: Twenty-Four (24). Uninstalled.

Much more of a known quantity, this one. "A whimsical puzzle-adventure game set in the world of the bestselling Redwall books. In this third and final episode, seeking escape from Cheesfthief you find yourself beholden to a family of mysterious Stoats who may or may not be carnivores..." Based on a much-loved series of children's' books and the third installment of an established spin-off series of video games. Should be fine, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. The Redwall series looks like the kind of thing I like but in fact I have never been fond of it. I don't much like Brian Jacques' prose style and when I did try and read one of the books I didn't much like some of the concepts and philosophy either. Still, it's talking animals having adventures and solving puzzles. How bad could it be?

Not very bad. Just rough around the edges and uncomfortable to play. It opens with a lengthy cut scene in which the characters watch a stage play and catch each other up on the plot. I counted four typos in the captions. There may have been more but some of the text was on and off the screen far too fast for me to read it. 

 

After that it was into the game proper. Movement was floaty. I changed the settings several times but it never felt right. The developers have gone for full immersion with almost no instructions and no visible UI at all. Most of the twenty-four minutes I spent with the demo went on trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing and which keys I needed to press to do it. By the time I'd worked that out I'd also decided I didn't care. 

About the only thing I liked were the character portraits and associated text. Those were nicely done. The "Scent" system, whereby the mice identify and find things by smell is original in concept but in execution doesn't seem all that much different to any other "Press key to see things light up" mechanic. To be fair, I didn't play long enough to be able to tell if there was more to it than that. And I'm not going to. Pass.

• The Season of the Warlock - Minutes Played: Fifty-five (55). Completed.
  

Okay, this is more like it. "The Season of the Warlock is a weird adventure game inspired by the gothic tale tradition, with two storylines to choose from. The soul of a warlock of yore, trapped in a portrait, will present Lord Alistair Ainsworth with an offer he will not be able to resist. Or will he? It’s your call..." Looks good, sounds solid. "Weird" is a tad worrying but let's give it a go...

I liked this one. It's a straightforward point-and-click adventure in the way I understand the term. You walk around inspecting things, pocketing things, talking to people and solving puzzles. The descriptions you get when you inspect things are amusing, the things you pick up are logical, the people you talk to are characterful and the puzzles you have to solve are manageable. 

 

And it's funny. Not laugh out loud funny but wry smile funny. The jokes land, most of the time, and there aren't too many of them. Nothing feels desperate or forced which is more than I can say of "funny fantasy" games in general. I was a bit doubtful of some of the historical research (Did they have toy poodles with pompom cuts in the 1840s?) but it seems a bit pointless to quibble over historical accuracy when the basic premise involves a five-hundred year old warlock who can only communicate by way of an oil painting.

The visuals were very impressive throughout, rich and detailed with a tactile depth to them. The UI and the controls, always crucial to the success of a point-and-click adventure, felt well-designed and natural. I'd have gone on playing this one for a lot longer if I hadn't come to an actual "Game Over" screen. I haven't wishlisted it yet but I might. 

• Lake - Minutes Played: Seventy-Eight (78) so far. Incomplete. Still playing.
  

I didn't know what this was going to be but it looked intriguing. "It's 1986 - Meredith Weiss takes a break from her career in the big city to deliver mail in her hometown. How will she experience two weeks in beautiful Providence Oaks, with its iconic lake and quirky community? And what will she do next? It's up to you." After nearly an hour and half I still don't know what this game is and I'm still intrigued.

It's a walking sim, I know that much. I mean it literally, too. Most of the gameplay consists of driving around the small, lakeside town of Providence Oaks, the town where you grew up and which you left over twenty years ago. You're in your dad's postal delivery van. You have letters and parcels for houses and businesses marked on your map. You get out the van, walk up to the mailbox, drop in the letter, get back in the van and drive on. If there's a parcel you walk around to the rear of the van, open the doors, take out the parcel, walk to the door of the house and ring the bell. 

 

When you've delivered everything you take the van back to the post office and go back to your parental home for the evening. Your folks are vacationing in Florida and you've agreed to cover your dad's mail route while he's away. At least I think that's the deal. He could be retired. He's definitely not dead. The phone might ring. It could be your mom. It could be your boss. You talk on the phone then watch TV or read a book. In the morning you wake up, go to the post office, get back in the van and do it all again.

All of this you're doing in your vacation time. You have a real job. You're a coder. You just finished a product. Some business program. It hasn't shipped yet. Your boss doesn't seem to understand vacation time so he's calling you at home and sending you promotional copy to work on. There's some sense of tension there. It is a program, not an app, too. This is all happening in 1986.

 

I didn't read anything on the Steam page before I played this. I was completely at sea for the first half hour. I kept waiting for a plot to develop. It never did. The visuals were so beautiful and the gameplay so relaxing, so immersive, after a while I stopped caring what it was "supposed" to be and just fell into what it was. 

Driving the van is easy and fun. The radio plays, intermittently, and the songs are perfectly suited to the setting. As you deliver mail you meet people from your past and chat with them. Sometimes they ask you to do something for them. I took a lady's cat to a guy on the shore who runs a bait store because she thought the cat was sick and the guy is the nearest thing in the town to a vet. I had a conversation in the video store that felt like it might have been flirting but might just as well not. I had an awkward conversation with my best friend from school, who I'd not seen for twenty years.

 

I really like Lake. It's one of those games that indie devs seem so keen on making that feel to me like living inside a graphic novel from the eighties or nineties, something by Harvey Pekar or Daniel Clowes. Only with even less plot. The more games like this I play, the more I want to play. 

I'll finish the demo for sure. I'm curious to see how long it is, for one thing. I've already done three days' delivery and I'm only supposed to be there for two weeks. Seems like I've seen a substantial chunk of the game already. Lake is on my wishlist now and I highly recommend the demo. It's almost a game in itself.

•  Sable - Minutes Played: Eighty (80). Incomplete. Restart needed.
  

This had the most striking screenshots of all the demos and a description to match. "Embark on a unique and unforgettable journey and guide Sable through her Gliding; a rite of passage that will take her across vast deserts and mesmerizing landscapes, capped by the remains of spaceships and ancient wonders." Sounds great but what about the gameplay? I was nervous.

I needn't have been. This was probably my favorite although it's a close call between Sable and Lake. The graphics are exceptional and they work even better in game than they do in stills. The color palette drives the heat in the day and brings a chill at night. The style has a luxuriant minimalism that evokes sixties and seventies bandes dessinées. I could sense the aesthetic of movies like Barbarella and Dune somewhere in the background.

 

Great graphics in a video game mean nothing if I can't control my character. I was a little worried this was going to be some kind of platformer or jumping game. I don't get on with those as a rule. Sable begins with your character in a desert ruin. With only the most minimal of instruction you're left to figure out what to do next and yes, it does involve climbing, jumping, crawling and all those things.

Joyously, Sable also has some of the most natural movement controls I've run across since I first played Genshin Impact. Jumping, gliding, climbing, riding your sand-bike... everything just feels easy and intuitive. The only real problem I had was a slight tendency towards motion sickness as I careened around the landscape, hurling myself off  high places, spinning the camera with abandon. My fault, not the game's.

 

The demo consists of the opening sequence of what looks like it's going to turn into a young girl's rite  of passage: a walkabout in the desert to come to know herself except the desert is on another planet and the walking is actually riding a hoverbike. Unfortunately, the guy who was supposed to source and build the bike had other things on his mind and forgot so you're going to have to build it yourself. But before you can do that you need to go scavenge the parts from some crashed spaceships...

I mean, come on! Aren't you sold already? I am! It's a melding of very traditional rpg gameplay with parkour-lite movement in service of a classic bildungsroman narrative. The writing is good, too, and there's just the right amount of dialog. It's so nice to play a game that says just as much as it needs to say and no more.

 

I had just one problem with the Sable demo and it's a very unusual one: I couldn't find any way to save my progress. I was so immersed I played my eighty minutes without even thinking about saving and then Mrs. Bhagpuss called lunch. I searched for a save function and couldn't find one so I took the only logout option I could find, assuming the game would autosave and it didn't. There's no save function of any kind as far as I can tell. Start a new game is the only choice.

I think I was probably very close to the end. I'm guessing the demo finishes when you build your bike and I had two of the three parts. I just needed to figure out how to get some beetles to bribe the horrible child who'd hidden the last part and I'm guessing that would have been that. Even so, it was annoying not to be able to come back after lunch and finish what I'd started. 

I certainly don't mind going through the whole thing again but I'll have to be sure of not being interrupted for a couple of hours when I do. Not as easy you'd think. I've wishlisted Sable so I might just leave it until it comes out to start over.

Both Sable and Lake are due to arrive in finished form in September. With Bless Unleashed and New World due in August and quite possibly End of Dragons around the same time it's more than likely my wishlist won't be seeing much use for a while but both of these games are going to get bought and played... eventually.

I guess that's a win for the Steam Demo Fest. Now if they'd just make it easier to sort the demos meaningfully...