Once More, With Filling

A genuine Friday Grab-Bag this week, I think. Not some music or TV post trying to pass. The plan is to keep them all short but I reserve the right to extend and also repeat, as in come back another time with a full post. I might be glad of a few of these topics if next week's slow for news.

Renewal of Interest

First up, a return to EverQuest II. Yes, well, I never actually left, of course. I just haven't been playing all that much for a few weeks. Yesterday's EQ-oriented post reminded me of a couple of things. Firstly, that I still really enjoy both the EverQuest games and secondly that I'm still paying for them. 

Not only do I have an annual All Access subscription, the only one I've kept for any publisher, but I also bought the latest EQII expansion, Renewal of Ro, back in December. By this point, I'd normally have completed both the Adventure and Tradeskill storylines on several characters and be pretty much done until the next big update. Not so this year. I need to get back to it if I'm going to get my money's-worth.

As of yesterday, I was only about halfway through the Adventure timeline on my first character and I hadn't even started the Tradeskill signature on any of my half-dozen max-level crafters. The Tradeskill questline is usually much faster to complete as well as more relaxing and less demanding so on my return I decided to begin there instead of picking up where I left off with my Berserker. He was just about to go into a solo dungeon last time I played him. That was also why I stopped. 

Crafting my way to success feels a lot more like fun just now. I finished the Tradeskill line this morning. I guess it took me a couple of hours. Technically, I haven't quite finished it yet because I need to do fifteen of the repeatable public research missions to unlock flying on my Sage, the character I chose to go first, but as far as storyline goes, I'm done. And it was great.

As a player of multiple characters in EQII, I'd happily swap the long Adventure questline, which will probably take me fifteen hours or so at least, for the much shorter Tradeskill version.  I could take all my characters through the craft quest it in around about the same time as one adventurer and it would be more fun, too. 

Back to Collage

Remember Disco Elysium? It was pretty good to begin with and it gets better all the time because Za/Um can't seem to leave it alone. They keep tinkering with it, adding new bits and pieces, to the point where a second run is starting to tempt even me, someone who generally can't be bothered to play through games twice to see what would happen if I made different choices.

That said, the latest update doesn't ask that I play the game at all. It's a typically left-field idea from the developers called Collage Mode, which "grants you full access to characters, environments and props from the game, along with filters and frames". 

What it does is allow you to select character models, backgrounds and filters from a menu, then slap them all together however you like. You can also give the characters dialog of your own and frame the whole lot to look like a set-piece suitable for illustrating a blog post or a magazine article. I imagine you could make comic strips or even a graphic novel if you had the patience.

I spotted it last night, just before I logged out of Steam and couldn't resist fiddling around with it for half an hour. The new mode is free to to anyone who owns the game, which itself is on sale for a massive 75% off right now. If you don't have it in your Steam library, you should probably go do something about that. 

Is it Spring already?

Ah, well now. That's the question, isn't it? As the Met Office explains "How you define the first day of spring depends on whether you are referring to the astronomical or meteorological spring". Astronomical Spring begins on March 20th but Metereological Spring started over two weeks ago, back on March 1st.

Valve clearly can't make its mind up because Steam's first ever Spring Sale opened yesterday, which is neither one thing nor the other. As the video, which acknowledges the confusion, explains, the sale runs until March 23rd, which is indisputably Spring, however you count it.

I had a quick skim through the offers this morning. There seem to be a lot of bargains. I might even buy something. Spring is possibly the worst time to start selling games, though, wouldn't you think? Just when the weather's clearing up and the nights are getting lighter. That's probably why Steam has never done a Spring Sale before. 

Game Over!

Speaking of buying games on Steam, I actually finished one of the ones I bought last month. Nine Noir Lives took me just over seventeen hours by Steam's count, although you can knock a couple off for the times I left the game idling while I had tea or took the dog out. It also crashed on me twice, something I can hardly remember any point and click adventure ever doing, and since it only seems to autosave when you quit to the menu, I had to redo a substantial amount of dialog both times, adding to the running time.

I'll probably do a whole post about this one and all the other noirish adventure games featuring anthropomorphic animals I've played. It's getting to be a lot and I'm starting to wonder why it's such a popular sub-genre, at least with indie developers. 

 

For now, I'll just say that I enjoyed the game, for the most part. The humor can be hit or miss but I found it generally more amusing than not. The voice acting can be overly arch on occasion but that's hardly inappropriate given the setting. Mostly the lines are well-written and land solidly.

Visually it's pleasing in the main but the cut scenes have a weirdly unfinished feel to them, almost as though they're placeholders waiting for the real artist to come along and finish things up.

Mechanically, I found the puzzles fair enough. There were a few occasions where I knew what to do but couldn't figure out how to do it, which I much prefer to having no clue at all. I used a walkthrough on several occasions but not for much more than a nudge in the right direction.  

The real strength of the game is the characters, all of whom are strongly individuated. If most of them are one trick ponies, which they are, then at least it's generally a good trick. I particularly liked the existential Russian bouncer and the effete Henchtigers but every character had something going for them.

All in all, I'd firmly recommend Nine Lives Noir to afficionados of the furry detective point&click and mildly to anyone else.

Finish With A Song

It's just as well I wasn't relying on a roundup of what I've been listening to this week to fill my Friday posting quota. I've earmarked precisely two songs for consideration since the last time I posted. It's not that I haven't been listening to a bunch of new tunes; it's just that none of them have been anything special.

This is, though. It's the third single from Lana del Rey's upcoming album, Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. Added to the first two, the title track and the sublime A&W, it makes the strongest imaginable case for Lana's ninth album being yet another classic, her fourth such in a sequence beginning with the monumental Norman Fucking Rockwell. She's already my favorite songwriter and performer of the 21st century and if she carries on like this she's going to end up being my favorite of all time. 

The new song's called The Grants and it's about family, Elizabeth Grant being Lana's birth name. I'm guessing that's her dad, Rob Grant, on piano, although the surprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry that's already up for the track doesn't mention it. It'd be a shame if it wasn't, though, wouldn't it?

That's Friday. I'm out of here.

Playing By The Rules

I took a day off posting yesterday for the very good reason that I couldn't immediately think of anything I wanted to post about. I could certainly have come up with something if I'd tried but I didn't feel like trying all that hard so I didn't bother. Everyone always said that Bart Simpson was a bad influence. 

Today I'd normally be working, so I wouldn't be posting anyway, but I'm on holiday, so since I didn't post yesterday I guess I should today. Is that how it works? I don't know. I lost my blogging rulebook a while ago.

The only problem is, I don't really have much more of an idea what to post about now than I did twenty-four hours ago. Maybe I'll just do one of those Friday Grab Bag posts but on a Sunday. Actually, Sunday seems like a better day for it, wouldn't you say?

The First Rule Of Fight Club

Let's start with something with some socio-cultural heft to it, why don't we? Although the hysteria over Non-Disclosure Agreements seems to have subsided somewhat of late. I remember a while back when it was a hot topic in mainstream news. I guess it might still be. I stopped paying attention the news about, oh, I guess it must be eighteen months ago now. 

I get a ton of cultural updates on everything from gaming to movies to the arts from a number of sources but I opted out of all politics and general news channels, both online and off, towards the end of the second pandemic year. What with Brexit and covid it had all become so deeply inflected and recursive there seemed little point listening any more. If anything important I genuinely need to know about happens, it either seeps into my attention via cultural osmosis or Mrs Bhagpuss will tell me. Otherwise, I don't need to hear about it.

Back when I was less hermetic, I remember there being a lot of talk about how NDAs were very bad things that were threatening the future of free speech as we know it. That mostly seemed to apply to the kind of documents handed out by one celebrity's lawyers to another's or from some megacorp's legal department to someone's literary agent. No-one was really talking about the NDAs I get asked to sign from time; the ones you have to accept before they let you test a video game these days.

My problem with NDAs for unreleased games is that these days I pretty much only want to "test" them so I can blog about what they're like. Once upon a time, in the ancient past, I wanted to get in because it was so gosh-darned thrilling just to be accepted. Like joining some kind of elite club. If I got in, I took the whole thing as seriously as if it was an actual job. Later, when beta tests ran for months, even years, I wanted to get in so I could play the game as though it was already live.

Familiarity killed the thrill and the commitment. Early Access killed the need. Nowadays, I'm happy to wait until the gates open to the public, which is generally around the same stage of development I'd have gotten into an old school closed beta anyway.

No-one puts an NDA on Early Access or open beta so it makes sense to wait. As I said, my main motivation is usually the opportunity to get a few blog posts out of the experience. Games like Noah's Heart that I go on playing day after day, month after month, are extreme outliers. A swift flick through the blog's back pages will show my average stay in a new mmorpg or fellow traveler rarely sees out the month.

Still doesn't stop me applying for testing programs, though. For one reason it's rarely clear up front whether there's going to be an NDA or not. Some developers follow the old "All publicity..." homily, even now. And then, not all NDAs are the same. Sometimes they're tight enough to choke on but other times there's plenty of give. I'm more than happy to sign up to a "No Livestreaming" clause if I'm allowed to  wax cynical in prose.

In the past year or two, I've made my decision at the point of signing. If I get an invite, I read the NDA. All of it. Carefully. Mostly, that's the end of it. I decline to sign and move on. On that basis, I've skipped a couple of in-development games I really wanted to see, which I'll almost certainly buy and play when they release. In at least one case, I'm still not convinced declining was the best decision, either. 

Then, a couple of days ago, for some reason and none, I signed one. And that's the last I'm going to say about that. I have another couple of applications pending for games I'm arguably more interested in. If either of those comes through I'll probably sign up there, too. Or maybe I won't. Whether I do or not, no-one's going to know about it. These things are so strict you can't even tell anyone you've been accepted. 

Fight Club has a lot to answer for. 

I've never seen Fight Club, by the way. Or maybe I have. If I had, I wouldn't tell you, now would I?

The First Rule of Tufty Club

My god, that ages me. Or does it? Tufty Club feels like it was even before my time. I only heard about it. I never was in it. 

Oh, wait, does everyone know what Tufty Club was? Because I'm awkward and because it amuses me, I'm going to give you this link to explain it. Apparently Tufty was doing his thing right into the seventies but I swear I only ever knew him as something that happened before I was born.

Anyway, the point of Tufty Club was to tell everyone about road safety, which has absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm going to say here. I only mentioned it at all because I was trying to think of the antithesis of Fight Club and it was the first club that popped into my mind. Which, I guess, tells you plenty about what's in there. 

The extremely labored and unconvincing segue I was going for would have had something to do with secrecy and openness but I think we can all agree it's not going to come together. Also, the first rule of Tufty Club would have probably been "Look both ways before you cross the road", which is just confusing the issue even more. All it was supposed to do was introduce a little "What I've Been Playing" section, anyway. Geez! What a totally overblown and unecessary introduction for such a mundane topic. 

Anyway, we got there eventually. So, what have I been playing? Noah's Heart, obvs. I'm level 99 now, closing in on the big three figures. It doesn't stop there, either. I saw someone who was level 105 the other day. I could give you about a dozen more kinds of levels I'm chasing there as well but I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say I'm playing every day and enjoying it a lot, still.

Other than that, one of the big games of my week has been the really excellent Artifact Krewe, which is not only one of the most aesthetically pleasing, visually gorgeous games I've ever played but also a lot more nuanced and layered than I expected. Skrool, the develper, really ought to think about remaking it without the proprietary Guild Wars 2 content and releasing it commercially. It's more than good enough.

The other is Nine Noir Lives, which has also turned out to be deeper than I expected. Okay, not deeper. It's still a jokey, "wouldn't it be funny if everyone was a cat?", Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe pastiche. Nothing's changed there. The depth I'm talking about is the sheer quantity of dialog chains and the exceptionally diligent way the developers seem to have anticipated every possible interaction and crafted an appropriate response for it. 

There are some generic "That doesn't need peanuts" results when you try to add peanuts to someone's shoe (Just as a frinstance.) but most everything gets an individual outcome, which just makes me want to ram all the things together to see what happens. That'll be why I'm still in Act One but loving it.

Some of the puzzles are a bit too puzzling for me but I have a solid walkthrough to help with that. I've only needed to glance at it a handful times and only for long enough to get a hint. The solutions are all very fair, once you get a nudge in the right direction.

I did start Blacksad and liked the graphics, characters and writing quite a bit but it's waaaaay more actiony than I expected. The quicktime games are relentless. I'd have to be in the mood and I mostly haven't been. 

As for Baldur's Gate, I claimed it, downloaded it, installed it, made a character and logged out. It looks very slick on the screen. A good job of bringing it up to date, I'd say. I spent a while investigating voice packs to see if I could track down the old Daria set I used to have but since the top Google search for "Daria soundpack Baldur's Gate"goes to a post on this blog, I think I can forget about it. I'm never reliving that experience, sad to say.

The First Rule of Celebrity Club

Okay, I know "Celebrity Club"'s not a thing but it is really, isn't it? We all know it. Just like we all know the first rule there has to be "Have famous parents". 

There's been a lot of kerfuffle in my media feeds of late concerning "Nepo Babies", which is a band name if ever I heard one. It seems like the most ridiculous twaddle to me. So, knowing people in the line of work you hope to follow opens doors and having the same name gets you noticed. Big fricken deal. You still have to be able to Do The Work. 

Is it any different from a plumber or an elecrtrician or a garage mechanic? If it says Jenkins and Son over the door, does that mean Jenkins Jr. gets a pass on their HNDs or NVQs or whatever the hell set of initials you need these days? You still have to know which end to hold the spanner.

Why was I thinking about this? Because when you see something standing on its head it draws your attention. Last week NME informed me out of the blue that someone called Rob Grant had an album coming out. About the only person I could think of by that name was the guy who co-wrote the overrated SciFi sitcom, Red Dwarf. I very much would not want to listen to an album by him.

Setting Sail On A Distant Horizon - Rob Grant

The Rob Grant in question, though, is someone I find one whole helluva lot more interesting. He's Lana del Rey's father. 

Lana, as you will remember, started out as Elizabeth "Lizzie" Grant, before she changed her name to May Trainor, then Lana del Ray, before finally settling on the version we know today. Her dad, it transpires, is a bit of a piano player himself. He has a co-writer credit and also plays piano on one song, Sweet Carolina, on Lana's last album, Blue Banisters. 

Ahead of the June 9th release of ‘Lost At Sea’, Grant pere's debut album, two tracks have been pushed to YouTube for our perusal and they make for pretty pleasant listening. It's a stone certainty I'd never have given them a moment's attention were it not for his daughter's name but that would have been my loss. It seems beyond ridiculous to complain about fairness just because someone's playing the cards they've been dealt.

Off the back of this unusual twist, I was going to put a whole music post together featuring tracks by children of celebrities and I may well yet get around to that but for now I'll just drop this one in from my "What I've Been Listening To" slush pile.

Moonbath - Sateen Besson

I came across this organically, somehow. As I watched the video, which even now only has just over thirteen hundred views after four months on YouTube, I found myself wondering how she got that bed into the forest. It seemed like a little much for a home-made video for an unknown's first song.

It did, in fact, seem me like the sort of thing you might expect from a famous movie director known for startling, dreamlike imagery. Someone like Luc Besson, for example. So I googled her and of course "Sateen Besson is a French rising Instagram model, social media influencer, and actress who boasts a significant fan base on Instagram. Additionally, she is renowned for being the daughter of the famous French director and screenwriter Luc Besson".

It's a good tune and I'm glad to have heard it. I'm even gladder to have heard this one, which sadly doesn't have a dreamlike video to go with it. If Sateen's family connections add anything, it's interest above and beyond the work itself. You have to womder if she asked her dad for tips on how to get that bed out there. Not to mention how to get it back. 

In the end, everyone has a past, everyone has a family and as the saying goes, you can't choose your relations. If only, eh?

I have more but that's probably enough for a Sunday. Or any day, come to that.

It's A Mystery (Fest)

One thing Steam does really badly, in my opinion, is promote its own events. Even though I log in almost every day, all I ever seem to see is the pop-up window with the spot offers of the moment. Any wider promotions might as well not exist. If I hadn't read it about it on someone else's blog last month, I'd never have known there was another Next Fest running.

Equally, if I hadn't happened to have three particular titles on my wishlist, I might never have found out there's another event of considerable interest to me going on right now. It's called Mystery Fest, it runs until next Monday, and it "celebrates the spirit of investigation and solving mysteries—both big and small—with discounts and demos on current and upcoming mystery and detective games of all kinds."

I had to google to get that description because nothing on Steam itself actually explains what the event is about. All there is is a banner and you have to scroll down past the first page of the Store even to see that. The thumbnail definition above comes from Steamworks, "a set of tools and services that help game developers and publishers build their games and get the most out of distributing on Steam." 

Steamworks, as I'm sure everyone reading this already knows, is a very useful resource for anyone who might actually want to know what's going on with the platform. The Mystery Fest page there provides a wealth of detail on the event, including which genres of games are eligible:

• Mystery
  
• Detective
  
• Social Deduction

and which probably won't be:

• Combat-forward games, incl. superhero themes
  
• Spy games
  
• Straight puzzle games, incl. hidden object games, with no detective work / investigation
  
• Escape room games with escape rooms as the only mechanic
  
• Horror games that may include a mystery element but that do not focus on investigation
  
• Walking simulators without a primary focus on solving mysteries

As a potential customer, this is the sort of information I'd like to see prominently displayed on the Store page itself, not buried on an affiliate site aimed at developers. I wouldn't expect anything so straightforward from Steam, though. It's a  service that seems determined to make everything as cluttered and obscure as possible. 

I'm sufficiently inured to its quirks and foibles now that I no longer notice just how badly designed it is until something like this comes along to remind me. I feel we all probably have Stockholm Syndrome where Steam's concerned or it wouldn't still enjoy the dominant market position it does.

Anyway, through whatever circuitous route, I got there eventually and now here I am, doing unpaid marketing work for Valve, yet again, by passing the information on. The event includes some massive discounts on well-known titles but more importanrtly than that, it's a very useful opportunity for anyone interested in these kinds of games to see them all gathered in one place, with Steam's submission system, for once, doing the grunt work of sorting the wheat from the chaff, something the customer-facing search algorithm signally fails to do, at least when I use it.

I plan on going through the full card this week, using it to populate my wish list with games I might enjoy. It'll save time later. If anything's on heavy discount I might even buy it now. (Edit - I did. I bought two games and a bundle - Blacksad, Backbone and all five Broken Sword titles. I'm not embarassed to admit that 75% of everything I bought features anthropomorphic cats.)

And in fact I have already made a purchase. Two of the three games from my wishlist (Brok the Investigator and Scarlet Hollow) were just repeating the same 25% price cut that didn't inspire me to get my wallet out the last few times they tried it but the third hit 50% off, a trigger point I find harder to ignore. 

The game I bought was Nine Noir Lives, which I wrote about a couple of years ago, when I played the demo in the February 2021 Next Fest. At the time I called the demo "a solid, entertaining introduction to what looks like it should be a very enjoyable game". I've nearly bought it a few times since but the discounts were never quite steep enough to bypass my inner miser. At under a tenner, though, I couldn't resist any longer.

Nine Noir Lives has a Positive rating on Steam. Reading through the reviews, it's clear that the sticking point comes in the humor, described by some as as "comedy gold" but by others as "really lame/childish" and the voice acting, which is either "BEST I have EVER heard in any point and click game!" or "terrible, overzealous" and "trying too hard."

My own take, two years ago, was somewhat more equivocal, describing the main character as "nicely voiced, comfortable to listen to for long periods of time" but his assistant as "a little harder to take". As for the humor, it seems I didn't bother to mention it. I did, however, describe the writing in general as "professional and entertaining".

We'll see what I think of it once I've played through the whole thing. I'm sure there'll be some kind of review.

Meanwhile, to reiterate, there's a celebration of and sale on all things mysterious happening over at Steam and it lasts all week. Don't bother to tell Valve I sent you. I don't want them to get into the habit of thinking I'm going to do their job for them.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Baby!

 

With the Steam Game Festival due to end in a couple of days I thought I'd better get on and check out the remaining demos I downloaded back at the start. That meant finishing up Nine Noir Lives and playing through Ring of Fire: Search for a Killer and Kathy Rain: Director's Cut. 

I also said I'd re-download the Frozen Flame demo and give it another try. It surely couldn't be that short on purpose, could it? I must have been bugged, right?

This afternoon I did all of that and it took me... well, it's hard to say, exactly. I can say for sure it wasn't long. Probably about an hour, all told.

In theory I ought to be able to come up with an exact figure. Steam keeps tabs on how long you spend playing, after all. According to the records on my account I spent ten minutes playing Ring of Fire, twenty on Kathy Rain and eleven minutes taking a second run at Frozen Flame. 

That all seems clear enough. The problem comes when I look at the time Steam has down for my full playthrough of Nine Noir Lives. 

When I first posted about the game I mentioned my opening session had lasted seventy minutes. I can clearly remember seeing that number on Steam when I logged out. What's more, it's about how long I would have guessed I'd been playing. I know roughly what time it was when I started and when I stopped.

Coming back to it today, there turned out not to be so much distance left in the demo as I'd thought. It ends when you manage to talk your way into the first real crime scene, the Knitty Kitty Club. 

Before you can do that, though, there's quite a lot of banter between your character, Cuddles Nutterbutter P.I. and Officer Krakowski, the by-the-book cop guarding the door. Before he'll let you in you have to show him your Private Investigator badge and a form from police headquarters authorizing you to work on the case. 

Since Nutterbutter would clearly forget his tail if it wasn't glued on, this means a trip back to the office to find the missing credentials. This in turn leads to yet more banter, this time with Tabby, Nutterbutter's long-suffering assistant and so the dance goes on.

A little light gameplay comes next , in the shape of a search for the badge (Spoiler: it's under the cushion on the sofa. Took me a little while to find it) and finally a phone call to the gravel-voiced form-faxer down at the cop shop. All of this takes quite a while. I'd guess it took me at least twenty minutes.

In fact, I think I can prove it. You can follow most of the action in the second half of this twenty-eight minute playthrough on YouTube. The player who posted it, Cryptic Hybrid, must already have made the phone call because he just gets a copy from Tabby. It took me an extra four or five minutes to learn how to use the phone (cats don't use numbers) and to sweet talk the gorgon on the other end of the line.

And yet somehow Steam now shows my total time spent in the Nine Noir Lives demo as... sixty-five minutes. I somehow lost five minutes getting from where I left off to the end!

Okay, alright, never mind about that. The point is, however long it took me, the Nine Noir Lives demo is a solid, entertaining introduction to what looks like it should be a very enjoyable game. I was quite disappointed when it ended abruptly, just as I saw the first dead body on the floor. I would definitely have gone on playing if I could. I've added it to my wishlist. 

Nine Noir Lives: Recommended!

The demo for Kathy Rain: Director's Cut almost had the opposite effect. Not because it doesn't show the game off to good effect. It starts at the scene at the graveside during Kathy's grandfather's burial, where Kathy meets her grandmother for the first time since she was a child, and carries on from there just as it does in the full game.

And that was my problem with it. It's a while since I played but as far as I could tell what I was seeing and hearing was identical to what I saw and heard on my original playthrough. The graphics looked the same, the voiceover was as I remembered it, the mechanics, puzzles and dialogs appeared to be unchanged in any way. 

Since I already own Kathy Rain and this is a demo for the Director's Cut edition, I was hoping to see what was different about it, not just to be reminded of what I already knew. I kept on for twenty minutes but eventually I felt as though there were better things I could be doing with my time so I stopped.

I still have the Director's Cut on my wishlist but the main effect of partially playing through the demo has been to convince me I need to see some evidence of the extent and value of the new content before I pay again for what might end up being pretty much the same game I already have. Not quite the result I imagine they were hoping for.

Kathy Rain: Director's Cut: Recommended for anyone who doesn't already have Kathy Rain. Otherwise, maybe wait for the reviews when it comes out to see if it's really worth paying twice.

Next I took a look at the demo for Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer. Did not take me long. I hated it.

About the only thing I didn't actively dislike was the visual aesthetic. It sets a striking, minimalist tone that seems to nod towards pop art and abstract expressionism. I am something of a soft target for stuff like that as some of my previous choices probably suggest. 

It was mostly the look of the the game that made me pick it out of the pack in the first place but I do also like a good police procedural, particularly one that takes place in a near-future Dickian dystopia. Probably haven't been hiding that any too well, either.

What I don't like are supposedly adult characters who cuss and banter like fourteen-year old boys. Neither do I see any point in crowing about game mechanics designed to make the player copy down text from the screen in longhand, just so they can type it back into the game five seconds later. 

If I wanted to make notes with pen and paper I'd get in my time machine and go back twenty years. Or possibly thirty. Either let the game keep track or at least give me an in-game notebook I can record information in, ffs!

What I actually did, of course, was screenshot each piece of text as it appeared and tab back and forth. Arguably more awkward and annoying than writing it down with a pen and paper, I can't deny it. Also probably what made the demo glitch to the point where I couldn't read the dialog any more and had to close it and start over. That's on me. 

Including the restart I lasted ten minutes. If I hadn't known I was going to have to write something about it it would have been five. If even that.

Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer : Not Recommended. 

Last and definitely least in terms of what there is to see and do in the demo, Frozen Flame. I was replaying this because I was convinced I'd done something wrong the first time. As I mentioned, a commenter on Massively:OP had explained there was more to it than the ten minutes I'd spent running across a bridge and watching a gate open. 

And I'm sure there is... in the game. I'm guessing that person had tried the early access version, not the demo. The demo is just the bridge and the gate and that's it. I googled to see if anyone else was confused and found this Reddit thread. 

Well, if you can call it a thread. It's a couple of comments but they both describe the exact same experience I had. And no-one comes on to contradict them, so I'm taking it that's all there is to the demo after all.

The tiny sliver I saw did look interesting. I will certainly give it another look if ever goes into some kind of open beta or free trial. I don't think it's enough of my kind of thing to pay money for but honestly on the little I saw it's hard to be entirely sure.

Frozen Flame: Insufficient Data.

And there we have it. One thing I will say, demos are fun. Too many can leave me feeling a little queasy, like I've filled up on snacks, but somehow there always seems to be room for just one more.

Two days left. Maybe I'll take my plate and go round one more time.

Try It, You Might Like It

There's a promotional event going on right now over on Steam. It's called the Steam Game Festival. Makes it sound substantial. It's a bunch of demos and some devs livestreaming. 

If it was a bigger deal it wouldn't be third banner down on the home page, I guess. Those pinks, purples, oranges put me in mind of the kind of flyer you get handed in the center of some down-at-heel market town on a Wednesday evening. Student Night in a basement club under a second-rate hotel. First drink half price. Maybe it's meant to be retro. Or ironic. Is irony in again?

Garish as it is, there's a better-than-even chance I still wouldn't have noticed if a couple of blogs on my watchlist hadn't weighed in with commentary and suggestions. Several of the titles on both lists looked interesting so I thought I'd take a few minutes to pick through the possibilities.

It was hard work. I find Steam a pain to navigate at the best of times. It's cluttered and chaotic and not in a good way. In common with almost every virtual storefront the designers seem to live in terror of someone discovering a way to see only those things that already interest them so no matter how carefully you set the options it makes next to no difference. Everything eventually shows up everywhere.

Wow! Dymotape lettering! Not seen that in a while.

I flipped and clicked and scrolled through the jumble, trying to avoid anything my mouse touched popping out a video to tempt me. It felt like walking through a seaside town after dark, two blocks back from the promenade, signs on every corner, waiters calling out from every bar and restaurant, all trying to get you to come inside. 

If I hadn't already clicked through some of the links on Nerdy Bookahs, visited those games' individual pages, I would never have guessed they existed. Couldn't find their stalls in the festival even when I knew what I was looking for. 

It didn't help that Steam seems to categorize games very diferently from the way I'd do it. Titles I was looking for under "Adventure" turned up most prominently in "Puzzles" or "Visual Novels although, as I suggested earlier, scroll deep enough and everything turns up eventually. Just not where you expect.

In the end I had to type the names of the specific games I wanted to look at into the search field. I gave up completely on browsing for anything Paeroka or Magiwastaken hadn't mentioned. I went back to  Paeroka's links, checked them all to see if any of them caught my fancy, then cross-refered back to Steam.

I wonder how much of the city we get to see?

 

I did find a couple of things that weren't on either of the blog lists. The five demos I ended up downloading were:

Ring of Fire

The Longest Road on Earth

Frozen Flame

Nine Noir Lives

Kathy Rain : Director's Cut

I also took a look at Cats and Other Lives and Detective from the Crypt. I might download those later, depending how far I get with the ones I've already chosen.

Of all of them, the one I was by far the most intertested to try was Kathy Rain. I've already played and written about the original edition, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The prospect of an expanded version featuring "extended storyline with a prolonged ending, hundreds of lines of additional dialogue, and multiple new areas to explore" and "several new major puzzle chains." is enticing. I hadn't realized that Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye was involved. He directed the English-language voice acting, apparently. No wonder it's so good.

This is a pun that makes no sense. The customer is here to server the bartender? I still laughed, though.

The only problem I have with playing the demo is that I've already added the full game to my wishlist. I'm not sure I want to spoil my eventual fun with a teaser.

A teaser was all I got from Frozen Flame. Steam has it as it tagged as an "mmorpg", for what that's worth. Steam tags, hmmmph. Massively OP has also covered it, as a "multiplayer survival rpg". It's a fellow-traveller at least, then. I'd have a better idea if the demo had lasted more than ten minutes.

Officially, I played for twelve minutes according to Steam, but that included at least two minutes staring at the EULA with the screen frozen. I got in eventually. I was a big guy with a two-handed sword. The game told me to go to a bridge. I couldn't see it but there were things to kill so I killed them.

That part ended. The big guy vanished. I found myself at character creation so I made a character. She arrived in a very pretty snow scene. There was an NPC. He wouldn't speak. Then he woke up and some very pretty lights appeared. I made my way towards some NPCs who were waiting for me next to a huge gate. When I got there I just had time to watch it open. I had a brief vision of an open world beyond and then the demo closed down.

There's being smart and there's being a smartass. And then there's this tutorial.

 

Figuring that was it, I was annoyed enough to uninstall. A short while later I spotted a news item about the demo on Massively:OP. I commented there about my experience and a reader by the name of Solaris was kind enough to let me know there was meant to be more: "After the cinematic with the dragon you should get dropped into the game world. The game is beautiful. It’s a little tough to get started but once you do, lots to explore and discover".

I'll re-install it and try again. It did look very pretty. I'd prove it with screenshots only I was in and out so fast I didn't have time to take any.

I had a much better experience with the next demo: Nine Noir Lives. This, as the overworked and awkward title tries to sign, is a detective game with cats. Yes, another one. 

I am the target market for these, it seems. I keep playing them, anyway. I played this one for over an hour. Seventy minutes, Steam says. It was an enjoyable and entertaining hour. Seventy minutes. Whatever. Almost all of it was spent sitting back, hands off, listening to voiceover. Not so much a visual novel as a radio play with pictures.

You should try listening to yourself sometime. It's very much the same thing.

If your "game" consists almost entirely of voice acting, your actors and director need to be solid and so does your script. Nine Noir Lives isn't Kathy Rain, let alone Neo Cab, but it's professional and entertaining enough. The main character, the unfortunately-named Cuddles Nutterbutter, is nicely voiced, comfortable to listen to for long periods of time. His assistant is a little harder to take but she grew on me after a while.

The visuals are unsettling. Noir detectives usually have down-at-heel offices with shabby carpets and dinged desks. If they have a view it's of the trash cans in a back alley or the flashing neon sign on the bar across the street. Nutterbutter seems to operate out of a corner penthouse suite with floor to ceiling windows and enough polished parquet flooring for a dance hall. His lighting bill alone must come to more than most private dicks earn in a calendar year. 

As for the plot, after an hour I've only just arrived at what I assume is the opening act. I logged out when I reached the third location, the Knitty Kitty Club, just as it looked like the action might finally be about to start. 

My eyes! My eyes!

I won't say any more just yet. There's probably enough in this demo for a proper First Impressions post. It would be a shame to pre-empt it.

The event runs until February 9th. I'm unclear whether that means the demos will become unavailable to download after that or whether any demos Steam punters have already installed will stop working. I suspect it just means the promotions and the livestreams will end. You'd imagine, having taken the trouble to make a demo, most developers would want to keep it in play at the very least until the game comes out and probably a lot longer than that.

We'll find out next week, I guess. By which time I hope to have at least taken a look at my five picks and maybe posted about them as well.