You Wait Years For A Cloud Gaming Platform And Then Three Come Along At Once

I was just thinking about posting an update about how my GeForce Now experience had been going, when this popped up in my rss feed. To save you clicking through, it's a news article at Games Industry.biz about Amazon Luna, which is now included with a Prime Gaming subscription.

Wait? Wasn't it already? Didn't they switch "Prime Gaming" over to Luna months ago, when they stopped handing out free games? I thought I wrote something about that at the time? 

Let me check a mo... Yes, I did. Kinda... I mentioned it in a Grab Bag, which is about all it deserved.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic back then. I have another post where I talk about being able to access my Good Old Games catalog through Luna, which meant I was able to play games I'd claimed through Prime, but which I redeemed on GOG, on Amazon's cloud gaming service. It was about as convoluted as that sounds. I did it a few times and then completely forgot about it until now, which is about par for the course for these things with me. Make logging in more than a single step and I'll probably bounce, after the novelty wears off.

So, what have they done this time? And is it an improvement?

Ehhh... kind of? I gave it a quick test this afternoon so I have a basic grasp of how it works and I have to say it's not exactly intuitive. Or user-friendly. Or anything like as easy as they seem to think it is. Not for me, anyway. 

Amazon believes Luna offers a low-effort, non-technical, crowd-pleasing way to play games. They see a huge number of people playing on mobile devices, people who own neither PCs nor consoles, and they'd like some of that business, thank you very much. 

Amazon has noticed Netflix getting plenty of traction with their gaming offer, now they've integrated it into their basic service. Take-up there has increased massively and as we all know, no-one gave a toss about Netflix games until recently. (Pretty sure no-one reading this gives a toss about them now, either, but people who read whacking great walls of text on gaming blogs are hardly their target audience.)

I know this because at the same time that news article appeared on GI.biz, so did this. It's an interview with Jeff Gattis, general manager for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, and he's keen to explain the rationale behind giving away the farm.

That is what they're doing, isn't it? Although Prime subscribers have had some limited free access to the platform for a while, the full Luna service used to require a subscription. Now it doesn't. Is that right?

Who knows how it used to work? Or cares, frankly. I'm not going to waste my time researching it because whatever it was, it's changed now. All these cloud gaming platforms have a free version of sorts, then one or more levels of paid subscription. I don't imagine Luna was much different.

As it stands today (And don't quote me on this because I'm guessing making it up quoting Gemini here.)  there are two levels: you can either get Luna free as part of your Prime subscription or you can pay $9.99 a month just for Luna. Which would seem like an exceptionally bad deal, considering all the other stuff Prime gets you...

Or it would if Prime got you the whole package but of course it doesn't. It gets you what they call the "Standard" package. Or it does if you live in the USA or the UK, which are the only two regions where it's being bundled in with Prime so far . It doesn't look as though Standard is available separately outside of Prime, either. A lot of caveats and conditions creeping in, aren't there?

If you want the Premium package, that definitely costs extra, even if you are a Prime subber. Why you'd want it, if you're in the UK or the US, beats me. The only difference I can see is that you get more games and I'm not even sure of that, as you'll see further in.

That's all already more confusing than Amazon would like to believe, something that I'm sure will surprise no-one reading this. Amazon does not have a reputation for clarity where gaming is concerned.

The whole interview with Gattis is very interesting, not to say revealing, as he talks about the various games divisions within Amazon historically not having known what each other was doing, some of the decisions they made being "weird" and how Amazon were after a big share of the PC/Console/AAA market until they realized Steam, Playstation, XBox and Epic were fighting over the same gamers like a bunch of dogs in a sack and decided not to bother with that nonsense any more. Casts some light on New World's demise, that perspective, doesn't it?

What they want to do now, apparently, is get their claws into the 2.5 Billion active gamers, who don't use any of those upscale platforms. And they think they can do it by making it easy to get in on a device you already have, through a subscription you're already paying. There are 200 million Prime subscribers already so that'd be a good start.

Except my experience suggests getting to the games on Luna isn't quite as smooth an experience as all that. As soon as I read the news, I logged straight into my Amazon account and looked for the games. There weren't any. 

There are thirteen tabs along the top of the page and none of them says "Games". Neither does any of them say "Luna". None of them even says "Prime" for that matter. The nearest I could get was "Prime Video", which goes exactly where you'd think it would. No games there.

Right up in the top, left corner there's the Amazon smiley logo and underneath it, in small, blue letters, it says "Prime". I clicked on that. No dice. Just a bunch of cut-price offers. So where are the damn games?

Finally, in the absence of anything better to try, I clicked on the three horizontal lines with "All" next to them. That gets you a drop-down menu and halfway down it you'll find "Amazon Luna - Cloud Gaming." Click on that and you get a sub-menu with four choices - All Games, Play With Prime, GameNight With Prime and Learn More. 

I went for All Games because why wouldn't I? That got me a page featuring a game I actually want to play, right at the top, as the splash image. Wow! Wasn't expecting that. That's it, up there in the header.

Scrolling down, there's a layout very similar to what you see on Prime Video or indeed Netflix. There's a top ten, the latest additions to the platform and some "Editor's Picks". And as I found out eventually, once you've played a game, you get a "Continue Playing" shelf, just like "Continue Watching" on regular Prime. 

If you scroll right to the very bottom you will finally see an "All Games" button. You can then filter that by Standard or Premium although honestly I could hardly tell the difference. The list of Premium titles also includes all the Standard ones so good luck figuring out what's been added. It certainly wasn't obvious where the extra $9.99 a month value was.

But the good news! There are games in the Standard offer I might at least want to take a look at. Dispatch, for a start. That's on my Steam wishlist. I've been waiting for a decent sale. Looks like I can save my money now.  There's also Death Stranding and both Alan Wake games and Hogwarts Legacy and Hollow Knight...

I might play any of those but I will play Dispatch so I started there. Things didn't go too well, at first. 

The first problem was my browser. There's an approved list and Firefox isn't on it. I can't really rag on Amazon for that. Firefox is increasingly not on anyone's list of approved browsers. I keep Chrome always ready in the background for all the services that won't have dealings with Mozilla any more. 

I swapped to Chrome and that worked. Kinda. Luna opens a full-screen window and my mouse pointer would only display in the top couple of inches. It worked on the whole screen - I just couldn't see it. I had to move the mouse about and wait 'til I saw a button light up. A mini-game all of its own!

After a little of that, I got the game started. Inside I found the same issue with the mouse but you don't really need the mouse in the introduction. It's all watching cut scenes and making choices with the keyboard. 

I gave it a few minutes just to check it worked, which it did, then the traffic noise through my open window drowned out the dialog so I opened the settings and switched the subtitles back on (I'd turned them off at the start.) and guess what? The mouse pointer magically appeared. Must be some glitch with the full window.

I tried to take a few screenshots for this post but the old reliable, Win+PrtScr didn't exactly work. It looked like it might have but there was nothing there when I checked the folder later. That'll have to be sorted or I won't be playing. Can't play a game and not be able to take screenshots. It's inhuman!

At that point I decided to stop and have a look at Netflix to see what games they had to offer. I've looked before and it's been a whole load of mobile games of little interest to me but that was a while ago. 

It still is, mostly. There are a lot of them, though. Can't argue with the amount of choice. And there are a handful of semi-interesting titles scattered here and there.

More importantly, the games are right there on the first page. No digging through drop-downs to find them. Much easier. If Amazon are hoping for the same kind of take-up Netflix is getting, they'd better get their UI guys on the job. But then, Prime Video is a chaotic shambles compared to Netflix, so I'm not convinced they have any UI guys, or not any that know what they're doing...

I did find one game on Netflix I'd be interested to try: Oxenfree. I remember reading about that one a long time ago on someone's blog, or at least I think I do, if I'm not mixing it up with something else. I thought I'd try it just to test the ease of access and Netflix faltered at the first fence.

Obviously it wouldn't work with Firefox but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Netflix games only work on a mobile device. You can't play them on a PC. 

Officially, that is. By which I don't mean there's some back-door access you can hack your way into via some shady third party app. There's a beta for playing Netflix games on TVs and PCs running right now, albeit only in certain, selected territories, the UK being one of them. I tried it and it worked fine. 

I played Oxenfree for just long enough to make sure it was playable and then I logged out. It looks like an interesting game. I imagine I'll be back.

So now I have three options for playing games I don't own, on other peoples' computers. By far my preferred option is GeForce Now, for which I'm paying, and which I'm finding to be very much worth the money. I can play a huge range of games there that I actually want to play already, many of which my current hardware won't run, or not reliably. Since I subscribed, I've used it pretty much every day.

Amazon Luna places a fairly distant second. It is free, since I won't be bothering with the dubious benefits of the Premium version and it does have a few genuinely appealing titles. Given a choice between even this iteration of Luna and the "weird" Prime Gaming of a couple of years ago, though, I'd revert in a heartbeat. I liked collecting those games, even if I never played most of them. I guess that was too good to last. 

I'm also very skeptical that this latest attempt by Amazon to forge a presence in the gaming sector is likely to achieve much more than the last several ruses they tried. If they think what they've got here is going to feel natural and accessible to the huge, casual gamer market I suspect they're going to be disappointed. Again.

Last comes Netflix. Not because of any shortcomings in the platform itself but because it's clearly not designed for me. I don't have a great deal of interest in mobile games and if I did I'm not sure I'd need Netflix to curate them for me. Most of them are free anyway and I already have several options installed to play mobile games on my computers. And even if I didn't, I imagine that even when the Play On TV and Computer option comes out of beta, there still won't be many Netflix games I'll want to try.

Still, I'm not complaining about being given more options, even if I'm not likely to use them. Nor am I going to whinge about extra value being added to subscriptions I'm already paying, even if the value to me is limited.

And, what with the continuing issues with availability and pricing for computer components and the concomitant price rises, we might all be glad of some options in the years to come. Of course, it is herding us all into the walled gardens of various multinationals, where no doubt we'll be swiftly fleeced like the sheep we've become but as Mrs. Bhagpuss and I often comment, as we stroll the English countryside with Beryl, of all the farmyard animals, the sheep seem to have by far the best deal.

There are worse things you can be than a sheep.  

It's Like They're Not Even Trying Any More

Following on from yesterday's post, which it has to be admitted somewhat got away from me, here's the one I meant to write about the current state of Prime Gaming. Not that I have anything much to say about it. That's probably how yesterday got started.

Anyway, here's what I've got, such as it is.

It just popped into my head yesterday morning that it'd been a while since I picked up my free games from Prime. The era of Amazon promoting the service in any meaningful way seems to be over. For a while, I used to get emails telling me there was something new to collect. After that, there was the "blog". Now, as far as I can tell, there's nothing.

Actually, if I go back far enough, I seem to remember I used to have to log into Twitch to claim the games, back when it was Twitch Gaming or some such. Or was that just a dream I had? I think that was the reason I made a Twitch account in the first place. To get those free games.

Now it's up to me to remember. I think everyone can guess how that's going to go. 

It also very much looks like the days of a dozen or more free games every month are in the past, too. It's very hard to be sure, without the published monthly slate. The claim dates overlap so I can't tell without going back through the posts here when I registered something was "new". They always did overlap a bit but at least there used to be published start and end dates you could refer to if needed. Now it just says on the offer when it runs out but not when it began.

So, how many new, free games have been added since last time I looked? Good question. Luckily, last time I posted about it, I made a list. There were dates then, I see. I wonder where I got those from? Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place now.

Where I have been looking is on Luna itself, where all of those are still claimable except Lovecraft's Untold Stories and Another World. Those two seem to have vanished, always assuming they were ever really there. I claimed the Borderlands, Fallout and D&D titles I didn't already have and passed on the rest.

On to what seems to be new since last time:

Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus (GOG)

Gunslugs II (GOG)

Christmas Adventure: Candy Storm (Legacy)

Ashworld (GOG)

Gylt (Amazon Games)

They've started using an icon to tell you where you'll be claiming the game from, which works perfectly well for Good Old Games and EPIC, both of whose icons are basically their names. Unfortunately, the others are a picture of a crown and a snowflake, neither of which mean anything to me. 

The crown turns out to be Amazon Games, which still exists independently of Luna, apparently. Or maybe not. I can't tell any more. If you claim a game with a crown on, it says you need Amazon Games installed to play it, anyway, although I suspect when you try to launch the thing it'll go through Luna after all. 

As for the snowflake, I'm guessing that means it's a holiday offer. It's on the only two obviously seasonal games, which would strongly suggest so. I imagine it would tell you for sure if you claimed them but since I don't want either, I can't say for certain. They're both from the hidden object specialist, Legacy Games and they also have the Windows icon so who fricken' knows? Or cares?

The new games I did claim were Ashworld and Gylt, both of which looked quite interesting. I wouldn't have thought so if I'd been paying attention, though.

If I'd had my mind on my work, I wouldn't have bothered claiming Ashworld. I just read the description and grabbed it. 

And why not? It looks great in the splash illustration, doesn't it? Here, take a look. Wouldn't you want to play a game that looked like that?

 

The description makes it sound quite appealing, too. It's an open-world survival game with scavenging, crafting, combat and vehicles. We like those, right? 

Well, yes, we do. Just not when they look like this:

Is that what you were expecting from the picture above? No, me neither. So I won't be playing that one.

Gylt looks more likely to get a run-out sometime. It's "a narrative adventure with stealth, puzzles and action" in which you play Sally, "a little girl living in Bethelwood, Maine". 

Sally's having kind of a bad time just now. "After being chased by a group of bullies, Sally is dragged into a twisted version of her town where her fears and worse memories are presented in a wicked and very real way." 

It's a psychological horror game with surrealist tendencies. Not my favorite sub-genre but I've played and enjoyed a few. It looks pretty and it has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" Steam rating, so definitely worth a shot for free.

 I claimed it, at least. Whether I'll ever play it is another question. Then again, that applies to just about all the games I've ever claimed from Prime under any incarnation.

Will there be more free games in January? No idea. Will I remember to check? Possibly. Do Amazon care if Prime members know any of these games exist? Sure doesn't look like it.

They want us to know about Amazon Music and Audible, though. I get emails about those every blasted week. 

As for games, I think they probably wish they'd never got started on those to begin with.

What Has Amazon Done For You Lately?

How about a catch-up on what's happening with Amazon Prime Gaming? Anyone up for that? And while we're about it, how about a general What's Up With Amazon? Because it's hard to be sure, sometimes, isn't it? For one of the biggest consumer-goods companies in the world, they really don't make it easy for the customer, do they?

I'm not really down with the whole Death of the Interwebs narrative but it's hard to argue that certain once-reliable strands aren't getting horribly tangled now. Amazon used to be relatively clean and straightforward to navigate but it's been a while since it felt like that was still true.

You really can't trust the reviews the way you once could, what with the bots and the review farms and now AI. I like the way they've tried to set a bot to catch a bot but those AI summaries are only theoretically helpful. As far as I can see they just summarize, accurately enough, the reviews you probably couldn't trust in the first place. 

I still have to read a whole bunch of reviews and use my training as an Eng. Lit. grad and longtime writer to try and parse the truth from the hype. Rufus, the weirdly-named Amazon House AI, seems to take them all on face value. 

Why is it called Rufus, anyway? I mean, I know everything has to be called something but not very many things have to be called Rufus. Or any. Why pick on that?

Oh, hey, guess what? There's a reason. Because of course there is. Would you like to know what it is? Of course you would. Shall we ask Gemini to tell us? Why not? 

All these AIs know each other, you do know that, right? They lounge around in their luxuriously appointed virtual chat-room, blipping to each other at the speed of information and this is just the kind of thing they talk about:

AI Overview

Amazon's AI assistant, Rufus, is named after the company's first office dog, a beloved Welsh corgi from its early days in the 1990s, honoring the company's dog-friendly culture and the furry friend who was a fixture in the offices and even appeared on early error pages. 

• Origin Story: Rufus was a loyal Welsh Corgi, owned by an early Amazon employee, who roamed the first warehouse, played fetch, and was a significant part of the startup's early family.
• Legacy: The original Rufus passed away in 2009, but his legacy lives on, with Amazon even naming a building after him and continuing its pet-friendly policy.
• Connection to AI: Naming the new generative AI shopping assistant after him pays homage to this nostalgic figure, blending Amazon's history with its future technology to create a relatable brand for customers. 

Does that humanize Rufus for you? Or caninize it? Maybe that should that be him? What's the correct gender appellation for an AI? 

Also, did you know Amazon has a "pet-friendly" policy?  Does that humanize the company for you? 

So many questions.  

 

Corgis, too. What about them? They've had a makeover, haven't they? I guess now the Queen's not around any more that whole image I grew up with is gone for good. Apparently everywhere else in the world Corgis are cute, goofy doggies, not hateful symbols of class privelige. How times change.

 

Anyway, I like them now. Corgis, that is, not the royal family. I have no strong opinions on the royals. Never have had. Which is surprising. There aren't many things I don't have strong opinions on.

 

I like nearly all kinds and styles of dog, anyway. Dachshunds I have issues with. Hard to spell for one thing. Also often unnecessarily aggressive, as are Chihuahuas. Does canine aggression come in direct proportion to how hard it is to spell the name of the breed correctly? I had to use Spell Check to get both of those right and I'm a good speler. (Yay! Visual joke!)

 

Hmm. Even for me, this is a a bit of a wander. I'll attempt to recalibrate. What was I going to talk about? Oh, yes, Prime Gaming.

 

Before we do, though, you really ought to see the HTML that came across when I cut and pasted that Gemini quote. I just went in to tweak something (Normally I write in Compose View not HTML.) and Blimey, Charlie! Here, take a look:

 

What is that? All that red! 

 

Anyway, so, the Amazon storefront isn't as reliable or user-friendly as it used to be, even with the digital ghost of a dead dog doing its best to help. (Did I ever mention my character that I played for a couple of  Golden Heroes campaigns back in the 80s was a robotic dog called The Ghost Dog? I did? Oh, okay then...)

 

And Prime Video? Sheesh! Hasn't that ever gone downhill!? It's kind of insulting that they not only added compulsory, unskippable adverts to a service they're already charging a subscription for but then to stick a "Go Ad-Free" button on the ads themselves! Is that not what the police in TV shows used to call Running A Protection Racket?

 

Also, the placement of the ads. Who's picking the spots? Is it completely random? Why is there sometimes just one at the beginning and one near the end and other times three in ten minutes in the middle? And has no-one at Amazon ever heard of the concept of a "natural break"? Just slam the damn things in anywhere, why don't you?

 

Do you know what I do? I mute the sound and tab out as soon as the ads start. It handily tells you how long they're going to last but I don't bother timing it. If you leave it longer than that, when you come back you can just roll the video back to just before you left and it will play normally from then on, without the annoying ad. It's disruptive, sure, but not as much as watching the bloody things would be. Also, you feel like you're getting one over on The Man.

 

(Hey, speaking of getting one over on the man, did anyone know there was a Furry Freak Brothers animated show? I didn't until last week. It came up on my Netflix recommends. I watched the pilot episode and it was about as funny as the comics which is to say not all that funny. I haven't watched another. I read all the Freak Bros. comics when I worked in a comic shop in the '80s. Wouldn't have bought them. I also met one of the artists at a con once. Gilbert Shelton, I think it was. Can't remember much about it. There was a lot of drinking involved although no dope, surprisingly.)

 

Gaaaaahh! Dragging this thing back....

 

Oh, wait, just before I get to Prime Gaming, I spotted something actually useful on Prime Video last night. I think this is new. At least it was new to me. 

 

They've slightly changed the UI on the Storefront. I've long been in the habit of using my general Amazon bookmark when I want to watch something on Prime Video, then clicking on Prime Video along the top to open it. I couldn't see the button (It's there now but I swear it wasn't last night...) so I was stumped for all of three seconds. 

 

Then I thought why not try the full menu? Top left corner is an "ALL" button so I pressed that and got a full list of services with Prime Video near the top. Clicking that gets you a flip-out menu and on that one there's another button for My Stuff. 

 

Well. 

 

I wonder? 

 

I wonder if Firefox would make a Bookmark for that? 

 

Yes it would!

 

So now I have a bookmark for Prime Video that takes me straight to a clear, clean page that only has My Stuff on it! Better yet, it has all My Stuff broken out into handy subsections - My Movie Watchlist, My TV Watchlist, things I've bought, my subscriptions...

 

It's a million times better than trying to find My Stuff in the bullet hell of Prime Video's Home Page, where 90% is stuff they want you to pay (Again.) for and almost none of it is anything I'd watch even for free. Has everyone else been doing it this way all along and I was the only sucker doing it the dumb way? Or is this actually a new option? 

 

Either way, if you don't already sort yours this way, I suggest you start. I'm wondering now if there's a Firefox Add-On that will make My Stuff into my Amazon Prime landing page. I have one like that for YouTube and its transformative. Although, if I have a Bookmark for it, I guess don't really need an Add-On.

 

I think that's about it for Amazon-related moans and groans... oh, no, wait! no, it's not! 

 

I'm trying to buy an Amazon eGift Card for my step-daughter in Australia. How hard could that be? I mean, it's a global company and digital products can be delivered instantly by email anywhere in the world. Gotta take five minutes, tops, right? 

 

Hah. Dream, as they used to say, on. You can't buy eCards for any Amazon sub-unit other than the one you have an account with, so if you're in the UK you can only buy eCards for the UK. If you want an Australian one you have to make an account with Amazon.com.au. 

 

Or, in fact, as I discovered, just sign into that website using your existing account details. That works. Still doesn't let you buy a digital card, though. For that, you have to change your location to an address with an Australian postcode. All this for something that isn't going to be damn well posted anywhere!

 

Maybe there are currency or legal reasons? Yeah, maybe, but if so, how come I can buy digital gift cards from other Australian companies using my own address? And have them sent to me, whereupon I just forward them to my step-daughter's email because ALL ANYONE NEEDS IS THE GODDAM CARD NUMBER!

 

I'd say it's almost as if Amazon don't want to take the money but we all know that can't be true.

 

Okay, I'm done. Now about that Prime Gaming offer... 

 

<Sorry! I'm afraid we're out of time for today! Please come back tomorrow.> 

Rag-Tag Grab-Bag. Sold As Seen. No Refunds

For once, I have several meaty posts I want to write but I can't seem to find the time to write any of them. Certainly not today. Tomorrow I don't have much planned, though, and it's forecast to rain heavily all day so maybe then...

For now, though, I think this is going to have to be a bit of an ad hoc rummage down the back of the bookmarks. Again. 

Let's start with a PSA.

Are You Experienced?

EverQuest II is.  275% experienced. From yesterday until 10.00AM PST on 19 November, all Live servers plus Varsoon and Zarrakon are getting a 275% server bonus to adventure and tradeskill xp. Anashti Sul, the Origins server, where players are supposed to enjoy the journey or something, I guess, are getting just 14%. 

This is in celebration of Darkpaw breaking $100k in donations to Extra Life this year. There's also a 45% increase in the chance of rare drops, double currency rewards and double loot drops in "current expansions". 

This is great news if you want to fill your bags with crap level a character up to 125. Before level l00, a 275% bonus on xp from mob kills and quests is huuuuuge. From 100 to 125 the xp from kills will be meaningless but as I understand it the bonus will still apply to quest xp, which is already huuuuuuge in some of the relevant expansions so presumably it will now be huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge! 

I haven't tested it personally, so don't take my word for it. Go try it for yourself. I also haven't confirmed what I've heard about the final five levels to the 130 cap, which is that in the expansions aimed at those levels, bonus xp does not apply to quests at all. That's by design, not because they've been specifically excluded.  

I have tested it on a Level 125 character in the expansion before the cap went to 130, though, and it seemed to work there. I was getting almost 10% of the level for a basic kill quest hand-in, which seemed like a lot. 

If I can find a gap in my schedule, I'll put in some time and see how far I can get a couple of characters who are sitting at 125. It would be nice to have them at 130 for the new expansion.And I might get one of my lower-levels out and blitz some dungeons just for fun. When it comes to xp, I like big buffs. I cannot lie.

The Whole of the Luna

As I suspected, Amazon's recent withdrawal from the games market has indeed put paid to Prime Gaming. I got one, presumably final, email from the Prime Gaming blog that handed everything off to the Luna website and since then... nothing. I guess it's up to Prime Members to remember to go check to see if anything new is available from now on.

If so, here's where to look. I'm not going to go through the slate for November one by one but just for completeness' sake, here are the games, the dates they become available and where you can claim them from:

Already available: 

New Tales from the Borderlands [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series [GOG Code]
Gas Station Simulator [Epic Games Store] 
Lovecraft's Untold Stories [Epic Games Store] 

From November 13: 

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition [GOG Code] 
Fallout 76 [PC via Microsoft Games Store] 
Fort Solis [GOG Code] 
Dark City: Kyiv Collector's Edition [Amazon Games App]

From November 20:

PlateUp! [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series [GOG Code]
Dream Tactics [GOG Code]

From November 26:

Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 6 Collector's Edition [Legacy Games Code]
Gunslugs [GOG Code]

I don't remember seeing the Microsoft Store come up before as a place to claim Prime giveaways. Not sure I like that development much. Also, I notice there's only one game you can play through the Amazon Games app itself. I imagine that's on the way out, too. It'll all be freebies from third-party platforms by 2026 or that's my bet.

Stranger Than Strange

There's a new trailer out for the final season of Stranger Things. It's the first five minutes of the first episode, which seems to be a thing now. Netflix did the same for Wednesday back in the summer.

I haven't watched it and I'm not sharing it. I watched the Wedneday one and posted it here, because it was really good. But I regretted it later. Watching it, mostly, although if I regretted watching it then logically I should also regret sharing it, unless I was trying to give people a degraded experience when they came to the show itself. (I wasn't, by the way...)

The problem with the Wednesday First Five Minutes Trailer (And this is a spoiler of a kind, if you haven't watched the show yet, although if you haven't gotten around to it by now I'm guessing you 're not really going to care...) is that it raises completely inappropriate expectations for the rest of the season. It makes it look as though in Season 2, Wednesday is going to be working as a kind of bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals. 

That is very much not what the rest of the season is about . The trailer is basically Wednesday's "What I Did On My Holidays" report. When I came to watch  the full first episode I was a little irritated by what felt like a bit of a bait&switch by the marketing department. It definitely fed into my mild disappointment with the first half of the season.

I have no idea if the Stranger Things trailer plays any similar tricks but I don't intend to risk it. I'm really looking forward to the show and I'm more than happy to wait until it arrives before I see any of it.

I will happily share this with everyone, though:

That's a trailer for the upcoming Stranger Things animated spin-off series, Tales From '85. The Duffer brothers said a while back that they planned on doing more with the Stranger Things IP and this is one of those things. 

It's a cartoon that's supposed to remind everyone of the kind we all watched in the '80s, which makes sense. When Stranger Things first appeared, all the publicity about it went on and on about how it was either an homage to or a recreation of the 1980s. It was one of the things that put me off watching the show until much later.

In the latter seasons that whole eighties vibe seems largely to have vanished. The action may take place in the same decade but all the focus is either on the weirdness or the military, neither of which seems particularly grounded in any time period, not on the everday small-town lives of a bunch of young kids in the decade of Madonna and MTV. Plus the kids aren't so young any more, either.

The cartoon show, which has a completely different cast of voice actors, has the opportunity to reconnect with that original, nostalgic concept. Whether it will, or whether we'll want it to, is another question. We won't have too long to wait to find out. It's coming in 2026, although exactly when it will run is still a mystery.

And Finally

Anyone remember a song called iPod Touch that I included in a music post a while back? I thought it was great. I still think it's great. It's by Ninajirachi and it's from her album I Love My Computer, which is also great. 

At the time I thought she was some obscure hyperpopper I'd been lucky to discover. If I thougt about it at all, I'd have guessed hardly anyone was listening to her. Although actually I didn't think about it at all. 

Turns out she's a much bigger deal than I knew. She just won Australian Album of the Year at the TripleJ awards. She also won Australian Music Video of the Year for Fuck My Computer, which you can find in that post I just linked so I won't link it again here. She won Australian awards as a teen, too. She's a big deal in Oz, apparently.

This will explain.

I didn't even know she was Australian. 

Tomorrow, a proper post. Maybe. Let's hope so. 

Or You Could Always, Y'know, Write Less?

All year I've been talking about not spending as much time playing video games as I used to but, coming into November, I think I might have hit a twenty-five year low. If I play more than a couple of hours a day now it's a big gaming day for me.

I'm not having one of those burnouts that used to be so common and which I always found so peculiar. I seem to hear a lot less about those lately. I guess most of the folks that were prone to them have flamed and faded now, leaving the rest of us slow-smoldering remnants slowly turning into gaming charcoal, barely glowing, giving off almost no heat at all.

No, I haven't had enough of gaming. Nor have I really chosen to take a break. It's just happening.

It's as if a lot of other things have drifted up and gently nudged me off the gaming highway I was on, leaving me to putter down the slow, meandering back roads of the hobby instead. I'm not even sorry about it, really, although it does feel odd, if I stop and think about it

I've commented before about how strange it is that the more free time I have in theory, the less free all my time feels in practice. I got a lot more gaming in when I was working full-time than I ever have since I reduced my hours and shifted down into semi-retirement, that's for sure. Also I watched a lot more movies then and read more books. 

I strongly recommend anyone who thinks they can safely defer their cultural experiences until they retire to think again. I had so many plans about what I'd use the extra time for when it came. Not a one of them feels realistic now I'm almost there. That whole "Ask a busy person" saw applies to leisure, too.

All of which might sound a little negative, which would be misleading. I'm enjoying my new routines. Well, by and large. For example, following her minor heart-attack in the summer, I have to go visit my 93-year-old mother three times a week now rather than the couple of times a month, which had been my schedule for years. It could have been a problem but it led me to acquire a car of my own for the first time in many years, which feels good and it's a very pleasant drive. I like driving anyway, so it's nice to have a reason to be doing it.

Then there's Beryl. One of the big eaters of time in recent years has been having a dog around. I spend more time almost every day taking her for walks and playing with her at home than I spend on gaming and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. 

I've always loved being outdoors, walking, in both city and country but I'd fallen a little out of the habit, particularly when my gaming time was at it's peak. Even when I made the effort, I wouldn't bother if the weather wasn't great. Now I'm out every day for at least a while, although it should be said that Beryl is not a fan of wet weather. If the rain isn't actually hammering down, though, we can usually find somewhere to go for a half-hour walk. If the weather's even halfway decent that'll often stretch to an hour and a half.

Luckily, she tends to lie fairly dormant during the day, which gives me a chance to do other things, like gaming. Except mostly I'm more likely to be doing this instead; writing a blog post about the gaming I'm not doing. Then, in the evening she wakes up and wants attention, meaning I don't often get to do much else but play with her, feed her and walk her between tea and bedtime.

When Beryl crashes out around eight or nine in the evening, I tend to go to bed, too. It's earlier than I've ever gone to bed since I was a child. I could stay up (I'm a grown-up. I can stay up as late as I want.) but since I got my (Refurbished.) laptop I've found it too tempting to lie down in comfort and use it instead of sitting up at my desk. 

For most of the year that's meant a few hours spent working on AI-assisted songwriting but very recently I've swapped back to watching TV and... playing games. Partly because I had a gap in my schedule with the music-making on hiatus but mostly because I'm still using the stand-in desktop pending Black Friday, it occurred to me it might be worth doing a little experimenting to see just what games would run on the decidedly non-gaming laptop. I tried it back at the start of the year, when I was playing several titles via an external SDD, most notably Cloudpunk, but I'd not done much about it since.

One of the things that nudged me into trying again was the news that Amazon's withdrawal from the gaming sector had led to a rebranding of Prime Gaming. They sent me an "important update" about it. 

Before I read the email, my first thought was that they were going to close the gaming offer down altogether. Then I thought maybe they were just going to stop giving away free games. Eventually, it dawned on me I could stop guessing and just read the email.

It turned out to be good news. Instead of closing the whole thing down, it looks as though Amazon has slightly expanded its Prime offer. There will still be new games to claim every month and access to all previously-claimed games continues (Although the fact they even had to mention it suggests it isn't considered a permanent right, which hadn't really occurred to me.) 

I can see how we might lose access to the games that were playable only on Amazon's own gaming service, should that be terminated at some future date, but I hadn't considered that the titles claimed via GOG or Epic might also disappear. Not, I should make it clear, that there's any suggestion of that happening just now. But the phrasing does make me wonder about the long-term prospects for those libraries.

The bonus for Prime members is that now, instead of having access to a selection of games on Luna, Amazon's remote gaming streaming service, now we have full access to everything on the "Standard" package. Also Prime Gaming has been rebranded as Luna Gaming, effectively if not officially. All claims are now made through the Luna website.

It nudged me into wondering just how many games in my Prime Gaming library would be playable on the laptop. As I've often mentioned, sometimes satirically, there's always been a tendency for Prime to hand out some very old games. My laptop may not be capable of running much that's new but some of these Prime giveaways are virtually pre-historic!

I installed Prime/Luna and also Good Old Games and started trying a few out. I began with Lake, which I'd almost finished on the desktop, but the save files would appear to be held locally. I could transfer them, I'm sure, but it seemed like too much trouble, especially since I'm most likely only a session or two from the end.

I tried The Academy, Dungeon Rushers and Dark Envoy. They all ran perfectly but none of them grabbed me. Next, I looked at the huge quantity of point&click adventures I'd claimed, all of which, I'm sure, the laptop would handle easily, but nothing caught my fancy. I really wanted something combat-oriented and turn-based, like Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. 

Surprisingly, DoN has become my benchmark for turn-based RPGs. Well, I guess that would still be Baldur's Gate but it's a long time since I played any of that series The German spoof is a lot fresher in my mind. And so far I've had very little success finding anything that feels both similar and satisfying.

It was in that frame of mind that I was going through the list of games I'd claimed, well over two hundred of them, when I spotted a familiar title. Familiarish, anyway: Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I'd completely forgotten about that one.

It's a standalone game set in the same dungeon as the original, featuring some of the same characters only instead of being an RPG, it's one of those management sims where you have to set up and maintain the dungeon so that NPCs can come in and do the adventuring. I've never really fancied that end of things, which seems like all the work for none of the glory or indeed the fun but I figured I might as well give it a go.

And it hooked me immediately. I've played every evening for the last few days, at least ninety minutes each time. There's a campaign storyline, which is where I chose to start, but there's also a sandbox version, which I'll very likely try after I lose the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I will lose it because I had no idea what I was doing for quite a while. The first two stories of my tower are a chaotic, muddled mess. The third, to which I've just gained access, is only any better because it's mostly empty still. I'm sure it'll be just as bad soon enough.

That I'm already considering my options for a second run through the campaign, and imagining what I might do in a sandbox setting, says everything that needs to be said about how enjoyable I'm finding the game. I'm not sure what it is about the Naheulbeuk series that works so well for me but clearly it's something.

That constitutes the main thrust of my gaming at the moment. Apart from NDM, the rest of my game-time of late has been limited to Overseer missions in EverQuest II and the occasional, short session in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. 

I did manage to stay logged into EQII long enough during the Nights of the Dead holiday to collect the new craft books and buy my Necromancer all the petamorph wands she was missing from years past. There were a lot. I also had her buy the new, prestige house, which looks great and will be far more manageable than the vast, sprawling castle she supposedly lives in but which she barely ever visits. Now I just have to find time to move her stuff across and start decorating.

The very interesting-looking new scenario for Once Human has arrived, along with the oddly appropriate crossover event with Palworld. I'm keen to do something about both of those but there are several things stopping me and only one of them is personal inertia.

Even though I thought the stand-in computer wouldn't be able to run a big, flashy, new game like Once Human, I patched it up anyway and logged in to test the theory, which proved to be false. The game runs acceptably on the same graphic settings I've always used and better still if I turn them down just a notch. 

That means I can't use my old PC as an excuse for not playing. Another get-out clause would be that I'm holding back from trying out the new scenario because I'd need to swap characters. The one I'd been playing has finally found herself on a Permanent server and I am not about to move her after the time it's taken to get her onto one. I could either start over from scratch yet again or I guess I could move my original and best-equipped character to a server running the new scenario. Still thinking on it.

The real reason, though, is that I don't think I'll be able to find the time to progress any character very far. At most I might manage a bit of dabbling. That's about all I'm good for at the moment - dabbling.

I noticed Syp saying he was planning on focusing more on CRPGs and less on MMOs in the future. I find I'm no longer able to make that much of a distinction. Unless I stop and think about it, I'm not always even sure to what degree some of the games I'm playing are multiplayer or otherwise. What I do notice now is that the level of regular commitment required to make consistent and meaningful progress in a traditional MMORPG is often beyond me.

Of course, as this blog evidences, I've always been a dabbler and a dilettante by nature when it comes to gaming, be that on or offline, solo or multiplayer. I haven't undergone any kind of sea-change in attitude or approach. It's more that where I used to dabble at gaming for hour after hour, day after day, these days I just dabble at dabbling. 

Not that any of the above is enough to stop me adding yet more games I won't really play to the pile. Today's post was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be a First Impressions piece about Duet Night Abyss, that not-a-gacha open-world RPG I said I probably wouldn't be playing. Except then I read a piece at MMOBomb where they said the story was quite good. They also made it sound as though there was a lot more to the game than just fighting, which made me think I ought to take a look at it after all.

I remembered DNA was on Steam, which always makes me more likely to give something a try. No wonder almost three-quarters of game developers feel Steam "has a monopoly on the PC games market." Unfortunately, when I went to the game's Store page to download it, I found a note saying "This game is not yet available on Steam". There's no release date, either.

I could download it from the game's own website but who knows if an account there will be transferable later and anyway I really do not want to be filling out another set of details. I'll wait until it comes to Steam, by which time, with a bit of luck, I'll also have a PC capable of playing it properly.

And that, I think, is likely to remain the state of play regarding my gaming for the immediate future. As soon as I do get a new machine, I intend to re-install New World and take a look at the very considerable amount of content I've missed. I'll also be playing the EQII expansion as soon as it arrives, whether or not I have a new machine to play  it on. If necessary, this one should cope well enough.

Whether any of these games, or any more I haven't thought of, will get enough play-time from me to make a lasting impression is another matter entirely. I don't see me freeing up much in the way of gaming-hours unless something quite unexpected happens. 

But then, none of us expected the pandemic, did we? So you never know. 

How Very Civilized

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write.

Last night I played some Civilization IV.

Heh. After all those years of reading other people blogging about the Civ series and 4X games in general and thinking "Well, it's all very interesting to read about but I can't imagine ever playing something like that". A bit like EVE or Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, I guess. Some games are just more fun to read about than play.

Or so I thought. And quite possibly still do. Too soon to say for sure.

Obviously, I wouldn't have tried it at all if I hadn't gotten it for free from Prime. I'm scratching around at the moment, trying to find something to play that can hold my attention but which can also be stopped at a moment's notice. I was going through the options when I noticed it and thought, well, why not?

Talking of options, boy, there are a lot of them! Everyone likes to talk about their Steam backlogs but I've always said I don't really have that much of one. Which is true, as it goes, although not as true as it used to be. My Amazon Prime Gaming backlog though...

I have 162 games on Prime, of which I have played nineteen and finished five. On GOG I have 60, with just three played and none finished. On Epic Games I have another 40 titles, of which I have played exactly two - and one of those is Fortnite. All of them, across the three platforms, bar a handful, were freebies from Prime - and I probably claim less than half of the games Prime gives away.

And yet somehow, even with almost 250 unplayed titles to choose from, I can never seem to find anything I want to play. Worse, when I do pick something and give it a go, it doesn't stick. 

Which is how I came to install and open CivIV a couple of days ago. It seemed like it might be worth a try. I mean, everyone else seems to enjoy it...

So, did I? Enjoy it, that is?

Hmm. Tough question. I'll get back to you when I have an answer. 

So far I've played for a couple of hours in two sessions and it's been... occupying. Time certainly passes. There's a lot to do. It keeps you busy.

For my first session I jumped straight in and started playing. That wasn't so much a choice as a mistake, by which I don't mean it went badly, just that I didn't mean to do it. I assumed there'd be an in-game tutorial. There is not.

There is a Tutorial, of course. I just didn't notice it was a separate option on the main menu. I'd completely forgotten that's how they used to do it in the old days.

Starting without any kind of lead-in or explanation was an odd experience. Confusing but also fairly straightforward, by which I mean the game is somehow still playable, even when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing or indeed what you ought to be doing.

That's mainly because every single UI element seems to have a mouse-over tool-tip and most actions seem to require not much more than a left click. I just moused over everything and started clicking and something approximating a game seemed to coalesce around me.

I left everything on the defaults. I built a city. I killed some bears. I explored to clear the fog of war. I built another city. I kept picking from lists of options and the years rolled by. I started at the dawn of civilization, 4000 BC, and by the time I finished an hour later it was the Renaissance.

For some reason I kept founding religions, which seemed extremely weird. I was playing as Spain and yet I still managed to found Buddhism, then Confucianism, then Taoism. I would have thought a necessary corollary of founding Confucianism, for example, would be that you'd have to be Confucius, or for a ruler to take the credit, they'd at least need to count Confucius as a subject. It seemed unlikely either he or Buddha would have been living in Barcelona or Madrid at the time but I guess they must have gotten there from China somehow...

Other leaders kept popping up to ask me to make deals with them or break deals I'd made with other nations. I always agreed with whatever they wanted and always made peace not war. I hadn't figured out how to get my army to fight anyone except bears and lions so peace seemed like the best option.

I had trouble getting any of my units to go where I wanted anyway. I lost Barcelona because someone attacked it and I couldn't figure out how to get a Warrior unit over there in time. It didn't seem to matter much because by then I had a third city and I was having more than enough trouble managing two of them. I was quite glad to see Barcelona go.

I could tell there was some kind of score being kept in the lower right-hand corner of the screen but I didn't really know what made the numbers change or what the victory condition might be. I figured bigger numbers were probably better, though, and Spain was either at the top of the list or at least in the top half most of the time. There were always other civilizations doing a lot worse than me so I was happy enough with how things were going.

All of that went on for a little over an hour before it started to get on top of me a bit. I figured out how to save the game and stopped. I could see how someone could get into that "Just one more turn" frame of mind I've read about, especially if they knew what they were doing. It is quite compulsive, pushing the button to see what happens next.

I guess I must have enjoyed myself at least a little because yesterday I felt like having another go. I thought maybe I ought to try and find out at least a little about how to play so I googled around for a while and learned... there is a Tutorial after all. I did think it was strange there wasn't one but then I thought maybe, back in the day, the game would have come in a box with a manual as thick as a novel and you were probably supposed to read that before you got started.

Last night I tried again, only this time I didn't load up my saved game. I opened the tutorial instead. 

I learned a few things, not least what Sid Meier sounds like. At least, I assume that's him, reading out the instructions, like a high school history teacher, following a familiar lesson plan on a warm afternoon in front of a drowsy classroom, just before school breaks up for summer. And the balding fellow with the fixed smile, dressed like a sales assistant at a discount warehouse? That must be Sid, too. The guy clearly doesn't have much of an ego.

The tutorial was helpful, anyway. The most important thing I learned was that you have to right-click to get anyone to go where you tell them. That explained a lot.

There was some useful information about why you might want to do certain things, too, not just how you'd make them happen. As I said, for the most part it's not too hard to figure out what things do from  the tool tips but it's much harder to see why you'd want to do any of them. I mostly just picked stuff I like, like art and literature and music and ignored all the boring agriculture and industry. I probably should have played Greece.

What became clear from the tutorial is that the game is basically a management sim. In all the thousands and thousands of words I'd read about it, I don't think that had ever really come across. People always blog about the interesting stuff, don't they? Who declared war on whom or who invented what. They never tell you how many tiny little repetitive actions it took before anything interesting happened at all.

I was about to say I've never liked management sims but then it occurred to me that's not entirely true. Right at the beginning of my gaming life, I used to play them quite enthusiastically. I remember one my ex-wife and I used to play a lot on the ZX Spectrum, a political sim where you had to manage all kinds of factors to keep yourself in power. I remember we used to sit there in our bean bags and shout at the screen. 

I think it was called Dictator. Yep! That's the one. I bet I still have the cassette somewhere.

I even wrote a management sim once. I think it might be the only game I ever coded from scratch. I wrote it one afternoon at my mother's house on my step-father's Oric computer that he'd won in some competition and never used. It had some ridiculously tiny memory measured in kilobytes and I wrote a moonbase sim for it that worked, just about. I wrote it in RAM, though, so it only existed for that afternoon and never again.

All of that was back in the eighties. The early eighties. I don't believe I've played a management sim since. 

Of course, the 4X genre is a hybrid, with other gameplay beyond resource management. There's a big map to explore and you can fight animals and people but most importantly there are all those familiar names. That's what makes it interesting.

And surreal. It's very peculiar to have Elizabeth I suddenly appear and start schmoozing you, especially when Julius Caesar just left. It reminded me a bit of that Philip Jose Farmer series, Riverworld, where everyone who ever lived has been brought back to life at the same time, in the same place. Without that, I doubt it would be half as engaging.

I stuck with the tutorial for about an hour but then it was time for Beryl's evening walk so I had to stop. I couldn't see any way to save the tutorial so I just logged out. If I have to go back to the beginning and do it over, I don't think I'll bother. I reckon I know enough to get started now.

Will I, though? Am I engaged enough with the concept for another session? Possibly. It does, as I said, occupy the mind, which is welcome at the moment, as I negotiate some changes in routine, with my 93 year-old mother suddenly needing a lot more support to stay in her home than usual and her living an hour's drive away and we only having the one car.

On the other hand, there are plenty of games that do a pretty good job of occupying the mind and I can think of plenty whose gameplay would be more to my taste than 4X offers. Just none of the ones I already own, apparently. 

Maybe this is the time to buy Baldur's Gate 3. 

May The Fourth Be With You. Again. And No, Not That One.

I really did not think I was going to get a post done today, for various reasons including but not limited to being out most of the day and not having any ideas that weren't going to take a lot more time than I had to spare. But I'd forgotten it was the first Thursday of the month. And what does First Thursday mean?

Prime Gaming giveaways!

It sure took me long enough but I have now figured out that Chris Leggett, under whose byline the Prime Gaming Blog appears each month, isn't terminally disorganized. He can read a calendar. It's just that for him, for some reason I still don't, as yet, understand, the month always starts on Thursday.

So, what have we got for September? And I warn you, this is going to be quick because I've left it really late and I'm in a rush. I might not even get through everything.

Let's have the games you can grab right now, anyway. There are three of those and they're all reasonably interesting:

Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft Series

Ravenloft was my favorite of the AD&D campaigns I played through, back in the 'eighties. It was new then and there was only the one module: Ravenloft itself. Or at least that's how I remember it. It's been popular ever since and now there are loads of spin-offs, including the two in this double-pack, Strahd's Possession and Stone Prophet. I'll be claiming them but I had a look at the D&D games Prime gave away last month and they just looked so very off-puttingly old I didn't take it any further. These look a little more modern but not a whole lot. Can't imagine I'll play them but I did like Ravenloft...

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition

Didn't we have this one last month? Oh no, that was Civ III. Is this one better? I guess it's newer, at least. Might as well take it anyway. Maybe one day I'll be in the mood for one of these. The day has to come sometime.

Into The Breach

Now, this does look quite interesting. It's a turn-based strategy/puzzle game. I'm always looking for more turn-based strategy games, preferably without puzzles. I'm very picky so it's harder than you might think. I try quite a lot of them but very few stick. Marvel's Midnight Suns didn't and neither, I suspect, will the one I started last night, Dark Envoy, a previous Prime giveaway. Both of those are sorta-kinda third-person 3D games, which is not really what I'm looking for. I'm after something more along the lines of Baldur's Gate or Divinity: Original Sin, visually at least, with little characters you move about like pieces on a  board. This one looks something but not exactly like that. Worth a go, anyway.

Next Thursday (Because everything happens on Thursday in Primeland (Except Wednesday, of course, but that's another Prime altogether.) we get Afterimage, which looks beautiful but also not remotely like anything I'd ever play, being a 2D action adventure. Pass. Probably.

Then there's Spelljammers: Pirates of Realmspace, another D&D title, albeit from the sideloaded "Spelljammer" universe. My TTRPG group in the 'eighties knew about Spelljammer but I don't recall anyone ever suggesting we play it so it has zero nostalgia value for me. It also looks ancient and has a "mixed" rating on Steam. I'll still claim it but I know it's just going to sit there.

Third we have Tower of Time which looks exactly like the kind of turn-based strategy game I was saying I was after... well, in the screenshots, anyway. It seems like it can be played in various ways, from tactically, with pause and slow-time, through to full-on, real-time action combat. There are various difficulty modes and even a permadeath option so something for everyone. It's got some decent reviews so I'm optimistic about this one. Definitely claiming it.

And it it doesn't turn out to be as good as it looks, maybe  Subterranean Mines of Titan will do a job. It's yet another turn-based rpg. Seems to be the month for them. Can't say the screenshots are doing much to whet my enthusiasm though. Too fussy and not my preferred aesthetic. I'll take it anyway, I guess.

A week later we get Residual, a very nice-looking 2D platformer I will completely ignore, plus yet another in the FATE series, this one subtitled The Cursed King, and... er, no, that's it for Week Three, just the two. I'll take the FATE game but I haven't tried any of the earlier ones in the series yet. Prime clearly has a policy of scooping up entire franchises and feeding them out month by month, which is great if it's something you like but kind of annoying if not. 

Speaaking of which, on the last Thursday of the month, there's yet another dumb hidden object game I won't even bother naming. That's a hard no. I might, however, claim Pixel Cafe, a visual novel/time management hybrid. It's a prety weak ending to the month, though, especially since Pixel Cafe is currently a whopping 94% off on Steam, making it worth less than a dollar.

And that's it. I said it was going to be quick and for once I wasn't lying!