You Do Realise You Could Have Gotten A Full Week Of Posts Out Of This Little Lot, Right?

Friday Grab-Bag for real this time. No one story hijacking the post and running away with it like last week. Probably. I have eight or nine possibles bookmarked. Let's see how many I can get through before the whole thing collapses under its own weight. I'm going to take them in the order I found them so don't expect any kind of coherent through-line.

Also, anyone liking the introductory paragraph above the first illustration here? I think it works quite well for a portmanteau post. I have kinda spoilt the effect with this second para though...

Oops! I Clicked On One Of Those Side-Loading Ads On MassivelyOP And Look What Happened!

Seriously, what even are those? They're so annoying! I get that websites depend on advertising to exist and ad blockers screw that up but the reason people use ad blockers in the first place is because of how infuriating the ads are. Making them even more intrusive so they can circumvent the blocks isn't going to get anyone to click on them!

So, anyway, I clicked on this ad...

It was for a game called NIKKE. All caps, which should have warned me. The full name is actually NIKKE: GODDESS OF VICTORY, still all caps only the second part in smaller caps. Like that, sort of. 

The game describes itself as an "Immersive Sci-Fi RPG Shooter With Adorable NIKKES". Again with all caps all the way but enough of that. And what the heck are NIKKES? Is that a thing? Google doesn't think so. Not outside the game anyway. 

Inside the game? Well apparently that's a subject of some debate...

I lasted about ten minutes before quitting and uninstalling. From the website, I thought I was going to get a cut-price Hoyoverse knock-off  but what I actually got was an indescribable hotch-potch of hyper-sexualized robots with gameplay that ressembled duck shooting at the county fair, all set to a crashing soundtrack that had me turning my speakers down in the first five seconds because I couldn't wait long enough to find the in-game audio controls.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, MOP has you covered, although I note that although they promote it, they don't write about it. I wonder why that might be?

Do The Ostrich

Somewhere downstairs in one of my boxes of vinyl 45s I have a couple of singles I bought in the 1970s or maybe the 1980s, each of which features a couple of songs written by Lou Reed before he was famous. From memory, one of those is Do The Ostrich, in which Lou exhorts us all to do the ostrich as he attempts to kick-start a new dance craze. I haven't heard it for about forty years but I can still remember exactly how it goes, which isn't all that surprising when you consider the entire lyrics consist of "Do the Ostrich", repeated endlessly.

I can't remember who that one is credited to (It's by The Primitives.) but I can remember one of the others is "You're Driving Me Insane" by The Beachnuts. Or maybe they did "Little Cycle Annie". (They did. I just checked. It was The Roughnecks that did Driving Me Insane.) 

I can still sing the choruses of both of those after all these years, too, which suggests that Lou's early sixties stint as an in-house songwriter for schlock pop music factory Pickwick wasn't the misfire you might imagine. The guy had a knack with a chorus, for sure.

If you, like me, would love to hear all the songs he wrote for them then I'm very happy to tell you your dreams are about to come true. All twenty-five of them (!!) are due to be released in a compilation called "Why Don't You Smile Now?" - which now I hear it I realise is yet another one I already own.

I'll be getting a copy. Who'd want to miss Spongy and the Dolls doing “Really - Really - Really - Really - Really - Really Love” ? Not me!

Ashes Of Credibility

Back around the time the saber-tooths died out, just before the discovery of bronze, I pledged a kickstarter for a game called Ashes of Creation. Because all I really wanted was the base game and a quick look at it before it started but mostly because I'm cheap, I only pledged one of the lowest tiers. 

From memory, it gave me access to Beta 2. Might possibly have been Beta 1. I imagine there's some account I could log into to check but if I had the details I lost them long ago. I'm still going to get the game eventually, though, because developers Intrepid send me monthly emails about it so they must  have my details even if I don't. 

At the time, I was sufficiently enthused to take a second pledge for Mrs Bhagpuss as well, so we're going to get two of the damn things some day. The chances of me playing it for more than a session or two are slim. The chances of Mrs Bhagpuss even logging in are none.

I wrote the cost off as lost long ago but even so I found it more than a tad itrritating to hear Intrepid crowing about a new, year-long "Alpha Two", starting in October, that you can buy into for an extortionate amount. 

Initially, your hundred dollars was going to get you alpha 2 access and that was all because everything Intrepid have ever said about the game and everything they ever send me suggests they have a hyper-inflated sense of their own importance and we should all feel eternally grateful they even deign to let us kneel and touch the hem of their garment...

Ahem. Anyway, the reaction to that idea was... not favorable and now they've extended the offer to include Beta 1 and 2 and a month's subscription at launch. It's somewhat galling to realize that if I'd kept my credit card in my wallet way back when, for the price of those two $50 pledges I could have bought one $100 package now and been playing next May, which is likely still at least a couple of years before whatever passes for launch.

Not that I want to play the damn game any more. I wonder if it's too late to get my $100 back? The weirdest thing about the whole affair, though, is that the first two phases of Alpha Two won't have an NDA but the final one will. What's that about?

Robrat Summer

Back in the lockdown years I was quite excited for the future of the metaverse as I understood it, which was mostly as a way of watching live events in a three-dimensional virtual environment. There was a lot of that going on back then and I made an effort to join in where I could.

One of the more memorable meta-events I attended was PinkPantheress in Roblox. It was fun in a "This is New!" kind of way although in retrospect PinkPantheress's gentle, introverted re-interpolation of 90s drum'n'bass scarcely seems like the most obvious choice for the platform. Charli XCX seems like a much better fit, which makes it a shame the current Brat-themed Dress To Impress offer in Roblox is just some clothes and emotes not a virtual stage appearance by one of the acts of the summer.

Absent the novelty factor, it seems as though there's as much or more value in just watching events livestreaming in flat 2D or even in plain old sound-only. I've been listening to the recording of a French radio live broadcast of Lana del Rey's set at Rock en Seine in Paris last night for the whole time I've been writing this post and even faux-live and without visuals it does a pretty fair job of making me feel I was there.

The tech for immersive performance doesn't quite seem to be there yet. I still think it's the real USP VR has been searching for - I know I'd buy a headset tomorrow if it meant I could "attend" live performances all over the world from the comfort of my sofa - but apparently that's just me.

And So It Begins

Next month sees the debut of SM Entertainment's newest would-be KPop Idol, nævis . Not something I'd normally bother to mention only there's something a little different about nævis and it's not just that she spells her name all in lower case with a really annoying dipthong, either.

I'd forgotten until I started writing this section but we've met nævis here on the blog before. Back in 2023 I explained she was merely "a fictional AI who "connects" a real band [Aespa] to that band's virtual doppelgangers". Now it seems she's done with facilitating the success of others. She's out to become an Idol in her own right as an "AI-generated singer".

I'm not entirely sure how one of those differs from an already well-established virtual star like Hatsune Miko, other than that the vocaloid tech that underwrites Hatsune was specifically developed using vocal samples from a single, specific human performer, voice actor Saki Fujita., rather than whatever gestalt is likely to lie behind nævis. The NME article where I first read about her says "the virtual K-pop idol was created using computer graphics and AI voicing technologies, while her upcoming content will be produced using generative AI" but it seems a fine distinction.

Honestly, I don't really care about the exact methodology behind the project. I just love the whole idea. The metafictionality is dizzying. About the only thing I don't like about it are all those bloody dipthongs that make the names so damn hard to type. 

I'm going to namecheck Carole and Tuesday again, as you'd expect. We'll be in their world faster than you can imagine. We're halfway there already.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction (All I get Is Early Access, Baby!)

Nah, I'm happy enough. I just thought of the line and couldn't resist. If you can't make self-indulgent in-jokes and drop references no-one is going to get in your own blog then what's the point of having one?

I really enjoyed my hundred or so hours with Nightingale. I was looking forward to it and it did not disappoint. If it had been a single-player, offline title then the time I've spent with the game would have been a very solid return on the £22.49 I paid for it. Better yet, it had a linear storyline that made me feel I'd "finished" it, which is probably why I've barely touched the game since.

Or perhaps I should say I thought it had a linear storyline. It seems not everyone agrees. The upcoming Realms Rebuilt update doesn't just add new mechanics and content, it also includes a revamped central storyline:

"While the fundamental premise of the story remains the same (Earth has fallen, the Portal network collapsed, and what remains of humanity is adrift looking for Nightingale), in Realms Rebuilt the player journey has been…well….rebuilt!"

I have very mixed feelings about this. For one thing, I was more than fine with the story and progression as it was. It made sense, it was logical for the most part and I found it interesting but not so interesting that I want to see the extended Director's Cut. Especially not if, as I suspect, that would involve making a new character and going through it all from scratch. 

This is what you get with Early Access titles these days, though. It's not just that you come in at a relatively early development stage and accept there's content missing, which I think used to be generally thought of as the deal. EA is starting to feel much more like a beta or sometimes even an alpha, where everything is mutable right down to the fundemental premise of the game. 

I think that's why I'm starting to think of Early Access titles, even for games that strive to be Live Service titles or MMOs, as more like finite, buy-and-play-once games. Valheim is a great example. It was an amazing game when I got it and I put in over three hundred and fifty hours, almost all of which was in that initial run. 

I find now I don't much care that Iron Crown is still working on it. I finished the version of Valheim I bought. Whatever they're doing to it now might as well be a sequel or an expansion to a game I no longer play and I think I might feel much the same about Nightingale and quite probably every other Early Access title I'll buy in the future. 

It's fine. I just need to re-align my expectations.

(Also, I notice MassivelyOP is now using the form "Tencent's Inflexion Games", just like they're calling Funcom "Tencent-Owned Funcom". Not sure exactly what's going on there but I have my suspicions.)

Extinction Level Event Detected

And now some sad news: Nintendo finally noticed they've been giving something away for free so they're going to put a stop to it.  

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, the free-to-play mobile Animal Crossing game that's been running since 2017 and which I played, wrote about and very much enjoyed during the pandemic, when everyone who wasn't playing Valheim was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons and I couldn't because I didn't have a Switch, is sunsetting on 28 November.

I haven't played it in a long while. It was fun for a good few months but it gets repetitive eventually, like most games. Still, I wouldn't have said I was totally done with it so it's a bit annoying to hear that I won't be able to visit my characters any more.

Except, hey, guess what? I will! If I pay a ransom. 

After Animal Crossing Pocket Camp the free version ends it will be replaced (Possibly immediately, possibly a little later, it's not clear yet.) by a Premium, paid edition. How much that will cost and what, if any, will be the difference in gameplay remains to be seen but it is confirmed that you will be able to transfer your F2P characters into the new game.

Gee, thanks. I suppose it would be worse if the game was just closing down altogether and your characters would be lost forever but still, it feels like a really tacky move. I don't imagine I'll bother transferring mine but I have a couple of months to think about it. 

I might, if the new game is on Google Play Games, currently still in beta. Do they have paid games on there? Maybe I should look into it.

End With A Big Number

 

OMG! I have so many tunes backed up, waiting to their chance to shine in one of my famous music posts! Did you know my most-viewed post of all time is a music post? It's this one from March of this year and according to Blogger's own stats it has been viewed 188,531 times! And they say blogging is dead! 

If you want to know why I don't believe any of my stats, there's your answer. 

So, the question is, which of the hundred or so "possibles" do I choose for this single slot? I suppose I could let the dice decide...

Nah. I'm gonna go with something I think a few people might actually want to watch for once. I think it might be an idea to end these portmanteau posts with a cover. Let's start the tradition right here.

Don't go chasing any rabbits now.

It's All In The Report

I skipped posting the last couple of days partly because I had other things going on but mostly because I didn't have anything much that I wanted to post about. It goes like that, sometimes. One week I have half a dozen ideas; the next, none.

Actually, it's not strictly true to say I don't have anything I'd like to showcase here. There's plenty more I'd like to say about Noah's Heart, for example, but unless I can come up with some penetrating insight that feeds into an observation on the genre as a whole, I think it's probably best I ration myself to one or two posts a week on that one.

I can always do music posts, of course. Putting one of those together isn't much more than an excuse to play a bunch of songs I like and watch the videos on YouTube, a very acceptable way to spend an afternoon. On the other hand, I could just watch the videos and not write the post and the experience would probably be much the same - maybe even better.

There's always something about the other media - TV, movies, books and the rest - bubbling around in the back of my mind but the problem there is writing about stuff like that is quite a lot of work. It pretty much comes down to writing the kinds of essays media studies students have to do as course work, only without any prospect of getting a grade. I have to confess the bit when you got the essay back and saw what grade you'd got was always my favorite part. Without that validation the whole thing can seem a little hollow.

Then there are the posts that begin like this one; posts about the process of posting. Again, I find writing those easy and reflexively entertaining but even though I also enjoy reading other bloggers extemporizing on the topic of their process, I can't but feel it's a tad self-indulgent, a subject of limited interest to most.

Then again, I'm not here to entertain. Or educate. Or inform. Those are incidental benefits that may or may not, on occasion, attache themselves to my real purpose, which is self-expression and self-reflection. Just be glad I'm not asking you to read my poetry or hear about that one really weird dream I had the other night... 

What does any of that have to do with the picture at the top of the post? Frankly, not a lot. It's more in the way of a five finger excercise as I warm up for the post itself, another example of the process in action. What I came here to talk about today is a report published by IFPI "The voice of the recording industry worldwide"

IFPI stands for The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry although I had to go to Wikipedia to find that out; they don't explain it on their website. The organization has just released its annual report on music engagement, something I learned from a news item at NME, under the enticing tagline "Music fans are listening to more music than ever before".

That surprised me a little. I'd been under the impression engagement with music had been on the decline for many years. It had certainly been my belief, based partly on things I'd read but also on experiential evidence, that music - specifically popular music - no longer held the dominant cultural role it had enjoyed prior to - let's say - the turn of the millennium.

Of course, it would be very much in the interest of any organization representing the interests of the music industry to gainsay such a defeatist viewpoint. As you can see from the screenshot, however, this particular report does seem to be based on a good deal of well-sourced and properly weighted research. 

It's also very interesting and extremely accessibly presented. I have no intention of analysing, critiquing or paraphrasing the contents. Rather, I suggest anyone even the least bit curious clicks through and reads it for themselves. 

It'll only take a few minutes. Although the website offers the option of downloading either the Full Report or a Highlights Infographic, in fact both long and short form options are presented in the infographic format. 

They're really good infographics but I confess I was a tad disappointed not to get a traditional text report as well. There are pull-out quotes that make me wish I could find out more, like the one that reveals respondents cited more than five hundred musical genres, when describing the kinds of music they listen to. 

I was looking forward to plugging some of those unfamiliar genres into a search engine and thereby opening my musical horizons a little wider. I like hearing things I've never heard before. So, it seems, do most people. I find it heartening to learn that the number of genres people report listening to averages out to eight. That suggests a significantly more open-minded attitude than I would have expected. 

On the other hand, it's less than encouraging (and somewhat weird) to learn that "in those people most engaged with music such as people who subscribe to audio streaming and those who buy vinyl" the number of genres listed goes up just one, to "9 genres on average." It doesn't immediately stand out as a great improvement, does it?

Moving on to a subsection perhaps of more immediate interest to the readership of what at least used to be a gaming blog, we come to the section on music in video games. Or, more accurately, I probably should say the brief mention of same.

The report doesn't seem to concern itself with music made specifically for video games, although that may very well be one or more of those 500+ genres we didn't get to see listed in full. What it does want to highlight, to my own very great interest, is the use of video games as a platform for the distribution of non-video game music and/or as a venue for its performance. 

According to the report a truly astonishing 44% of "gamers" claimed to have "watched a virtual concert on a gaming platform in the last 3 months". Less astonishing is the statistic concerning the age demographic, almost half falling in the youngest bracket, 16-24.

The development of virtual performance and particularly the role of games as a platform for it, as regular readers will no doubt remember, has been an interest of mine at least since the begining of the pandemic. The only reason I have either Roblox or Fortnite installed on my hard drives is so I can visit them to watch singers, bands or movies on their in-game stages and screens.

Back when we were all banged up under viral house arrest, I predicted a bright future for these kinds of virtual shows. Given the kinds of unrelenting pressures currently threatening to crush the last remaining breath from the gasping live music industry, coupled with the relentless push of technology and the growing willingness of rights owners to join in with the fun, the road to a digital future for "live" music is looking wider and clearer than ever.

Anyway, as I said, I don't plan on picking the report to pieces or riffing on the dozens of themes it suggests. I just thought I'd mention it as something worth a few minutes of your day.

You're welcome!

Sometimes It Feels Like Every Day Is Prime Day

Today is Amazon Prime Day, or as Amazon would have it "Prime Day" because obviously "Prime" is, itself, now a brand everyone recognizes equally well.  To anyone who doesn't really give a toss who's behind it and just wants the cheap stuff I guess "The Sale" covers it.

Actually, I doubt there is anyone like that. People seem to feel about certain companies the way they used to feel about religion or politics. Can't say I'm able get that emotional about it myself but then I'm old. All my receptors are worn down to nubs.

I had a quick look through some of the offers but as usual there are so fricken' many of them I soon lost the will to go on. Sometimes I wonder if companies wouldn't do better with smaller, more focused sales but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might be in the market for a new phone, so I was looking to see if there was anything in that line going cheap, which led me to start thinking about the specs and whether in fact it made any difference whether a particular phone could or could not play games well, which in turn led me to muse over the whole concept of playing games on a phone and whether I would ever want to do it any more than I have up to now, which is really not very much at all, even though I first posted about doing it over a decade ago. All of that linked "Amazon" and "Games" together in my mind, which is how I came to log in to Amazon Games to see if there was anything new I should know about...

...and there was. I can't keep up any more. I mean, it's less than two weeks since I last posted about a new tranche of freebies over at AG and that was the second time that month. Should I be logging in every week just to check I'm not missing something?

Some of it was there already, I think, but I chose not to claim it then. Those Star Wars games, for example. Did I mention those last time? Let me check... nope, can't see anything so maybe they are new. The offer expires in two days so if they are they can only have been on offer for a couple of weeks. 

There's no time to dither. That's how I missed the Steam sale on Solasta. I'll almost certainly never play them but they're big titles. It seems rude to refuse. CLAIMED.

 Then there's a bunch that expire at the beginning of August. Those are definitely new since last time I looked. And guess what? There's a Lucasarts point & click adventure!  It's not Monkey Island but still! What's more, it's Manic Mansion, a game I have often thought about playing, not that I've ever done anything to make it happen. Well, now I have! CLAIMED.

Of the other three, only one drew my attention, the pretentiously and portentously named Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. I have no idea what it is other than what it says in the description: "a tactical RPG much in the vein of great classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre." I have no clear idea what those are, either, other than what I've read on Tipa's blog. She makes these sorts of games sound very interesting but then she makes everything sound very interesting so that's not much help. Worth a click, at least. CLAIMED.

The two I chose not to choose were the self-explanatory Fishing: North Atlantic, a trawler sim and Suzerain, a text-based strategy sim about running a newly-independent Scotland. No prizes for guessing why I turned either of those down. (Clue: life would still be too short even if I was fifty years younger.)

Having cleared my plate of free games I thought I'd better cast another glance towards the in-game freebies Amazon packages under their Twitch imprint. Those definitely have a faster turnaround so I thought there might be something...

I wasn't expecting more, free big name games but that's what I got. At first I was a little confused. Didn't I already claim one of them before? And turn down another because of some convoluted account-linking prereq?

No, I don't think I did. I'm probably thinking of Bio-Shock, which was free on Epic a while back and Far Cry, which was free on Prime if you linked to Ubisoft. This time around it's Mass Effect and Need For Speed: Heat, for both of which you need to link Prime to your EA account. 

Those are two games I very well might want to play at some point and as it happens I already have an EA account (For reasons long forgotten.) Amazingly, the login details still work and the process is very quick and simple. CLAIMED and CLAIMED.

Throw in yet another set of weapon skins for New World and I think we're done. I wonder how long I should leave it before I check again? A couple of weeks? I guess. They're bound to be giving away new stuff in August.

While we're on the subject, remember that Void Sheep Shoulder Pet I claimed for Roblox last time? No? Really? Well, I did. And now it looks like I'll get the chance to wear it. Throw it. Whatever you do with it.

According to a report on Pitchfork I read earlier today, from tomorrow until Friday, the excellent Soccer Mommy (aka Sophie Allison) will be hosting "a Metaverse listening party for her new album Sometimes Forever on the Roblox platform." 

Her own Roblox page doesn't invoke the dreaded "M" word, explaining "I’m hosting a Listening Party for my new album Sometimes, Forever July 13th-15th in select Roblox experiences! You’ll be able to hear the album and hang out with me in the below participating experiences. Check the dates and times to see where you can find me and be on the lookout for a private server link to be shouted out! "

All of which sounds quite complicated and daunting but I'm beginning to get the hang of how it works now, after the Pink Pantheress and Charli XCX appearances, so I think I can cope. Look forward to a report if I go and get ready to tell me just how terrible Roblox is in the comments, as usual!

Regardless of the widely-reported ethical issues, Roblox, together with Fortnite, does seem to be staking a claim to being the virtual concert hall of record for the 2020s. Maybe someone will come up with a more acceptable platform. How about... PUBG Mobile?

You what, now? PUBG? Where did that come from?

Well, from here, as it happens. The story, which I read in the NME, inevitably, since we're talking about KPop, involves legendary icons Blackpink, who "have announced they will perform a virtual concert within PUBG Mobile‘s in-game world later this month."

PUBG Mobile is not a game I currently have installed. It's not a game I've ever thought about installing and I don't believe I'm going to reconsider as a result of this news. I don't mind Blackpink. I 've heard a few of their tunes over the years and not really thought much about them one way or another. I wouldn't make the effort (and from the NME article it looks like there might be some effort involved, beyond just downloading the game.) just to watch their avatars dance while a few of their songs play.

Then again... I might. I do find this stuff fascinating and this is someone new entering the growing field. Maybe I should check it out.

What I'm really looking forward to is the day someone I really like announces a virtual gig in a game I already play. Regularly. As a game. Not just log into to watch and listen. Unfortunately, given my musical tastes and the kind of games I spend my time in, that's still a bit of a long shot.

Fortnite, Roblox and PUBG Mobile it is then! For now.

Excuse Me? I think Your Hat Might Be On Fire.

I had a vague memory of having read something about July being some kind of anniversary or special occasion for Amazon Games. There was going to be an extra large giveaway. Was it forty free games? Something like that. Even though it wasn't quite July yet I thought I might take a look anyway, see if anything was happening. 

Oh boy, was it ever! So many new games. So much new free stuff. Where to start?

The only way out is through as they say ("They" being children brought up on Michael Rosen's "We're Going on a Bear Hunt", presumably.) I started at the beginning and worked my way through to the end, looking at the thumbnails, trying to guess from the picture and the title whether it was worth reading the brief description, then clicking through to the websites of the more interesting ones.

I'm increasingly impressed with the way these monthly giveaways are presented. Compared to Steam, which sometimes make me wonder if it was designed by a bunch of teenagers on community service or the Epic Games storefront, which has all the authenticity and character of the Shopping Channel, the Amazon Games front end feels well organized, clear and helpful. I wonder if it's because they're not trying to sell me anything, just give it away?

Whatever the reason, I always look forward to browsing through the offers at the start of the month, whereas I have to force myself to dig through the jumble at Steam and can barely bring myself to log in to Epic at all. Even so, the sheer volume of offers this time around made getting through them all quite a challenge.

As far as I can tell, the splurge is a promotion for Prime Day, which is why it ends when that event does, on the 14th of July. Whether that means a second set of offers will land mid-month I'm not sure. I kind of hope it doesn't. I'm not sure I could cope with another drop so soon.

Or maybe I could. There weren't all that many titles in this batch that piqued my interest. For once the virtual shelves seemed empty of point&click adventures. There wasn't a Monkey Island game to be found. 

I considered several games that looked like they'd have very intriguing narratives but which told their stories by way of mechanics I don't enjoy. That happens in the analog world, too but at least, when you go to the ballet, no one expects you to dance.

I claimed seven of the offers, two of them packs of three. Those came from another platform by the name of Legacy Games. They specialize in casual games of the Match 3 and Hidden Object variety and they've apparently been in that unfashionable but highly popular business for almost a quarter of a century. 

I had to register an account with them to claim the games, whereupon they handed me yet another free game for signing up. It reminds me of the old 1950s pusher trope, where the first hit comes free. Only I never pay. Or wake up in flop house on the Bowery with a kidney missing. Oh wait... different cliche.

The titles I got from Legacy Games were these:

I can't honestly say I know what type of games any of them although the word "Adventure" did crop up somewhere.The one with the picture of a cow was the bonus title. If any of them turn out to be any good I'll probably do a post about it some day. Otherwise, I imagine this is the last you'll ever hear of them.

Of the others, the pick of the bunch was a second installment of the Darkside Detective series so beloved of Syp. I wasn't that struck on the first one myself but it was a decent enough occult comedy adventure. I'm quite happy to go again.

Crow's Eye, HUE and Rain World all look interesting but I suspect the gameplay will defeat me. Sheep and Clouds 2 might be fun for a session or two. Since I've barely even looked at any of the games I claimed last month, it's a bit of a moot point anyway.

Although not, perhaps, as moot as the in-game items I claimed from the Twitch portion of this month's offer. Once more, I found myself taking the trouble to make sure I didn't miss out on cosmetics for games I no longer play and may well never play again. What is wrong with me?

New to the offer this month, or at least I don't recall seeing it there before, is World of Warcraft. Blizzard really must be getting desperate. Despite not having logged in since the scandals began and having no intention of doing so until they're at least convincingly swept under the Microsoft rug, I made the effort and linked my Battlenet and Amazon accounts. 

It was surprisingly painless, although it did involve the usual near-clinical levels of paranoid security. I sometimes suspect we're already living in a cyberpunk noir timeline and we just haven't noticed yet. All I'll get for my diligence, should I ever log in again, is a transmog for a helmet that I'll never use, the Jewel of the Firelord. There are two more dramatically-named hats to come. I suppose I'll have to claim those, too. You can never have too many hats although personally I'd rather none of mine was on fire.

A much more compelling offer and one for a game I have no compunction in going back to is the Windhelm Cliff Ram Mount for Elder Scrolls Online. It comes with some facial tattoos (for your character, not the sheep.) and two Xanmeer Crates, whatever they are. Lockboxes, I assume.

Lost Ark, another game I keep meaning to revisit but somehow never do, trumps ESO's ram with a penguin. A penguin suit, that is. I wish a few mmorpgs I play regularly would acquire Lost Ark's bizarre animal cosplay fetish. I'd love to run around Norrath or Tyria dressed as a giant penguin.

New World has some fairly ordinary armor on offer. It looks a hell of a lot better than the hideous leaisure suit currently being given away to people with so little going on in their lives they're willing to give up four hours of their time watching one of the last remaining Twitch streamers pretending to enjoy the game. It's odd that there are two different giveaways for the same game from the same source at the same time but at least I only wasted a few seconds on mine.

The last freebie I grabbed was a Void Shoulder Sheep for my avatar in Roblox. There's a sentence that would have had almost no semantic value at any time before the turn of the millennium. It doesn't really have a lot now. Also, it's the third thing in this month's offer to involve sheep. Is it some TikTok trend I've missed?

All I have to do now is find time to play at least a few of these games before the next deluge of free gifts arrives. I'd better get on with it.

Chuchu! Egg Coming Through!

It took me a few months but I am now pretty much in the habit of checking my free games from Amazon Prime at the start of every month. As a result, I am starting to build up the kind of backlog everyone else is always complaining about. My days of being able to post smugly about how "I simply don't do backlogs, dahling!" are firmly in the past.

This month I even went so far as to play one of the games I'd claimed, the awkwardly-named SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech. It's one of those card-based battlers I keep reading about on various blogs. It has a peculiar hybrid steampunk/medieaval setting, charming graphics, likeable characters, a moderately amusing plot and at first it was fun for a short session at the end of the evening.

Unfortunately, it's fast becoming too tough for me on Normal difficulty, so its time as charming little divertissement may well be about to come to an end. I could reset the difficulty to Easy or I could go back and replay earlier chapters to overlevel the content but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently commited to do either.

Although I've been able to keep up with the flow of new, free games, I've done a much worse job with the trickle of free stuff for games I already play. Every month sees Amazon toss out a slew of freebies for dozens of titles like a befuddled old lady casting handfuls of grain to a clutch of club-footed street pigeons. Like that familiar scenario, it's not necessarily something you'd want to encourage but when it's games you play...

The thing that got me to pay attention this month was the unexpected appearance of Guild Wars 2 in the list. I can't recall the game ever having appeared in the hand-out line before but this month you can pick up a pack of five Heroic Boosters in honor of the release of End of Dragons. Boosters aren't the most exciting of gifts but I have to say they will come in very handy in my quest for the large amount of experience required to complete the numerous Masteries I'm working on.

I can't see the expiry date for the offer on my account any more but I think it runs until the end of the month. I imagine most of them do. I note with interest that the Amazon Games/GW2 page has two more "Coming Soon" panels currently greyed out. I look forward with interest to finding out what we're getting next month and the month after that.

There are giveaways for no fewer than forty-eight different games in the March offer. There are several mmos, among them RuneScape, World of Warships, Black Desert Mobile, Lineage II, and Warframe. I don't play any of those so I let them pass but as well as GW2 I spotted three mmorpgs I do play, as well as another for which the freebie seemed too desirable to ignore.

When I briefly dabbled with Roblox a few weeks ago, I mentioned how having nothing but the basic, default avatar made me feel more conspicuous than if I was togged up in fancy-dress. Now, next time some enterprising hyperpopstar chooses Roblox as the venue for their first, faltering step into the metaverse, I will at least be able to greet them wearing a ridiculous "Mardi Gras Steampunk Hat."

None of the updates to New World since the rather good Winter Convergence festival have piqued my interest sufficiently to get me to log in but give me a free outfit and I'm there. The game has an annoying appearance system in that good-looking gear drops all the time but hardly any of it can be converted to a look you can keep.

Full outfits, however, the ones Amazon would like you to buy from the cash shop, are permanent and can be easily and conveniently applied from the paper doll - once you've navigated the arcane combination of mouse-clicks and menus required, that is.

They're not at all bad, either. When I logged her in, my character was
wearing the very cosy, fur-trimmed greatcoat from the winter event and most impressive it looked, too. Now she looks equally warm but considerably less formal in her free Cloaked Charlatan get-up, which from the front looks uncannily like an anorak I had when I was about nine years old.

From the back it looks rather different, with a knee-length, hooded green cloak that Robin Hood would have admired. The cloak moves curiously convincingly as she runs, occasionally folding into itself as though caught by a fierce gust of wind. It goes rather nicely with her shield, too.

For Lost Ark, another game whose pull I'd been managing to resist without too much trouble until I saw I could get free stuff, the lure is a pet. We'd all log in for a free pet, right? There's also five days of Crystaline Aura, the premium membership buff, and some Amethyst Shards, a currency you can spend at an NPC, always assuming you can find him.

I already had some Amethyst Shards. Apparently you get five hundred just for joining or forming a guild, something I did a while ago. I generally make a branch of the guild Mrs Bhagpuss and I created way back in EverQuest II over a decade ago in every game that will allow one person to be their own club. 

Lost Ark was happy for me to set up my shingle alone although the extremely restrictive naming rules meant I had to go with a severely truncated version of the name. Given how easy it was, not to mention that there's a tutorial quest that points you to it, I was very surprised to see that the Steam achievement I got says only just over a fifth of players have joined a guild at all.

The free pet turned out to be an egg on legs. Very small, spindly legs. I'm used to eggs following me around from EQII but they're not usually quite as creepy as these. They come in a choice of colors, each of which denotes a different buff or resistance. Since I had no clear idea what those did, I just went with the color I liked best, blue.

The eggs all have names - Bouncy, Chuchu and Bonbon. My pet blue egg is called Chuchu. I swear, sometimes I can't believe I'm typing this stuff. I got him (Her? Them? It?) out and ran around town for a while taking selfies then I put him away and got my trusty bunny back. The bunny, which as far as I know everyone gets as part of the tutorial, has all the same abilities as the egg but also a 10% crit bonus so the free gift is worth about what you paid for it, I guess.

The last Amazon freebie I claimed was for Blade and Soul. It looks to be the least interesting of them all, a collection of various upgrade materials used in some of the game's abstruse systems and I wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't that I've been itching to get back to B&S for a while, anyway. I don't know why but there it is. 

I'd include a picture of what I got there  only I haven't been able to get my hands on it yet. When I went to log in I realised there had been some big shift a while back, when the game converted to Unreal Engine 4. It's a 41GB download and it's been grumbling away behind the scenes the whole time I've been writing this post. So far it's managed just over 17GB so it's got a while to go yet.

What I take from this experience is that giving away free stuff is a very effective way to get people to look at your game again but not necessarily to get them to stick around. It took me longer to claim the freebies, patch the games and collect my gifts than I spent doing anything in the games themselves. In fact, all I did was take screenshots and I wouldn't even have done that if I hadn't been planning to blog about it.

I very much doubt if any of this is going to make me more likely to play any of the games. My overiding feeling on logging back in to both New World and Lost Ark was "I can't remember what I was doing last time and I really don't feel like trying." I think there's a better chance I'll play a bit of Blade and Soul because I already felt like going back to that one and yet it's the one game of the five for which I wouldn't have bothered to log in to get the free gifts at all.

It goes to show. You bribe people all you want and they'll happily let you - you just can't trust them to stay bribed.

Live From The Afterparty

I wasn't sure I was going to make the five pm deadline for the 2022 BRIT Awards VIP Party ft. PinkPantheress in Roblox yesterday. That's the official title of the event although PinkPantheress just called it "the 2022 BRITS afterparty", which is a lot snappier. Mrs Bhagpuss was due home from work not too long before it was due to start and I was expecting we'd be having our tea around five because we are old people.

What kind of time for an afterparty is five in the afternoon anyway? Not to mention that it's three freakin' days after the event. I mean, there's after and there's after, right? I'm guessing it says more about the game's core audience than anything else. Friday after school has to be primetime for Roblox .

In the event, Mrs Bhagpuss got home around three and she was more than ready to eat early so I could disappear off to to put on my fancy clothes and party! Which I would have, too, if I'd had any. 

The area in front of the digital display counting down the minutes to showtime was already filling up when I logged in around half past four. That countdown has been ticking away ever since I wrote my post on Tuesday. It seems like overkill.

Looking around, I found myself feeling a little self-conscious. Not, as you might expect, because I was at an event intended to appeal to people young enough to be my grandchildren (Assuming a certain, consistent lack of caution spanning generations, that is.) No, I was fine with all of that. It wasn't like I had a sign over my head anouncing my age like the person I saw who'd gone with "I Hate Ronald Reagan" for a name. So long as I kept my virtual mouth shut I was just another blocky nobody.

And that was the problem. Mine was the only default avatar in sight.   

Everyone else was dressed to kill. It was a real festival crowd. People were sporting wings, hats, bunny ears, rainbows; they were carrying guitar cases and clutch bags, wearing headphones and bell-bottoms. One guy had massive speakers on each shoulder like a pair of World of Warcraft shoulder pads. Someone else was a cat in a spacesuit. 

I felt really underdressed is what I'm saying. Also fascinated. One of the best things about live gigs and live events generally is looking around at all the other crazy people who've chosen to show up and ever since I went to my first virtuality show in the theatre in Freeport over twenty years ago I've always been able to fire up those exact real life sensations just by looking around and taking in what people are wearing, doing and saying as they gather together in anticipation of some big in-game event.

Given what it has to work with, namely a lot of blocks bolted together, Roblox does a pretty good job when it comes to replicating the sense of the crowd. The music was loud and beneath it you could hear the faint echo of the BRIT awards ceremony itself. The colors were vibrant and the players filled the space with movement and talk.  

One thing I really love about gatherings in online games and virtual spaces is the way fragments of conversation pop up all around in speech bubbles. It carries all of the chaotic churn of a real crowd, the murmurs and rumors, exclamations and shrieks, the tiny moments of other peoples' thoughts and lives, drifting in and out of context, all at the same time.

I got in my car and drove around for a while, knocking down tiny golden BRITs and hunting for hot pink freebies. I'd bought a few Effects last time and picked up a few for nothing. Unfortunately, I hadn't realised they were all consumables not unlocks so I'd been firing them off at random for the fun of it. When it came time to use them in earnest I didn't have any left.

Something to remember for next time. I'm sure there will be a next time. This was fun, even if that fun was, it has to be said, more in the anticipation than in the event itself, which turned out to be something of an anti-climax.   

There was great excitement as the clock ticked down to zero, immediately followed by much amusement as it instantly reset to add another two and a half minutes. It wasn't last minute nerves on the part of PinkPantheress or technical problems with the sound system. The clock was out of sync. 

When the real five 'o' clock rolled round the digital display drew back to reveal a stage, set back behind a dance floor. I'd been expecting the performance to happen on a screen so it took me completely by surprise.

The stage set-up with the lights and speakers looked and sounded good. The Roblox graphics engine, designed for Lego-like block figures, is not the ideal platform for animating convincing representations of known personalities but if the basics are there, the imagination will do most of the heavy lifting. 

In this case, unfortunately, I'm not convinced sufficient trouble had been taken to get the most out of the system. It's not so much that the avatar purporting to be PinkPantheress wasn't recognizeable. It did look enough like her that you'd know who it was meant to be. It was more the extremely limited variety of movements she was given and particularly the way they weren't really synchronized with the music. It's slightly disorienting when the singer keeps taking the mic away from her face just as she starts to sing. 

Having watched some of the Royal Blood video, when the duo performed at the 8th Annual Bloxy Awards last year, it's clearly possible to do a lot more with the Roblox graphics engine than I saw last night. Theirs was a much better evocation of a stage performance, more and better animations, better synchronization and above all a much, much more dramatic presentation.

It also felt much more immediate, not surprising since, by the accounts I've read, Royal Blood were in fact playing live. PinkPantheress wasn't, or not so far as I could tell. While it's true her style is very different, far more back than the brash rock of Royal Blood, there was plenty of opportunity to liven things up with special effects and lighting, opportunities that were largely ignored. Any striking visuals you see in the screenshots here were created by players, not programmed into the show.

The songs seemed to be the original, recorded versions as per her her mixtape "To Hell With It". Although she introduced herself, made a couple of pre-song introductions and said goodbye, all of that sounded pre-recorded. There was very little live feel and no spontaneity. I thought she sounded a little embarassed by the whole thing although she also sounded very charming.

For all its shortcomings, the show was involving and highly enjoyable, which is why perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the whole event was how quickly it was over. The full performance was incredibly short. It felt to me like it lasted about ten minutes but as the recording shows it wasn't even that: it was just under six minutes long. Here's the whole thing:

I can see how you wouldn't want something like this to outstay its welcome but both the Royal Blood and Ariane Grande concerts were twice as long. I'd have thought ten to fifteen minutes would be about right. Five songs instead of three would have done it.

It is, of course, early days for this kind of thing and I'm sure all those companies and individuals busy building their various versions of the metaverse will have plenty of ideas on how to make these kind of events more immersive, dynamic, inclusive and entertaining. They'd better have. 

For me, it was very well worth the minimal effort I had to put in so I could experience a PinkPantheress performance that, if not really all that much like seeing her perform in person, did feel like more than just watching a video. I do think that it was absolutely crucial to have been there for the "as live" show, though, rather than one of the the on-the-hour repeats. 

Almost all of the "thereness" came from the audience, their excitement and eagerness, the build-up to something they at last hoped would be special. It's the crowd that makes events like this, what the're wearing, the things they do and say, the fun everyone seemed to be having. That communicates.

But I knew that already. I've been going to live events in mmorpgs for a third of my life now and the best part is always being in the crowd, waiting for it to happen. Why should in-game concerts be any different?

It's The Meta

Hold that bandwagon! There's people still trying to climb on!

I was most amused this morning to read this in the financial pages of Gamesindustry.biz:

 "Hiro Metaverse Acquisitions (HMAI) has raised £115 million through an Initial Public Offering on the London Stock Exchange." 

I was even more amused to find, further down the page, this summary of what HMA had in mind:

 "It intends to focus on the acquisition and development of games or games-adjacent businesses in the UK, Europe and Israel."

Seriously? It's that blatant now? The digital equivalent of Cash for Cars? I do like "games-adjacent" though. That could catch on. Maybe Haven Studios could use it for the "persistent and evolving online environment" they're building for Sony. 

As Paola Jouyaux, Haven's founder puts it, "these environments are not just games, they are also social platforms for many players. It has to stay that way. To last, a game must remain pleasant to visit." Well, yes, I guess it must. Maybe someone should mention that to Bobby Kotick. Probably a bit late. 

Meanwhile, as every wide-eyed venture capitalist with a couple of million bucks to rub together pulls a muscle trying to throw a bundle of money into the lap of the next self-appointed Architect of Tomorrow, the actual metaverse continues to pull itself up by its virtual bootstraps as we watch. We're already far enough in for NME to have put together a list of "The Best In-Game Concerts Ever", although I do think they might have waited until they had at least ten of them, just for the look of the thing.

Give it a year or two. We're almost at the heart of a perfect storm right now, when it comes to the virtualization of the live experience. Platforms like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft already have both the reach and the audience to attract the biggest of names but, more importantly, they also already have the technology and the infrastructure to offer them the showcase experience they and their fans deserve and expect.

At the same time, thanks to two years of a global pandemic and counting, live venues across the globe have been pushed to the edge of financial viablity. Even when the clubs are open, the whole live experience has become so awkward and problematic as to scarcely seem worth the trouble. Huge events like Glastonbury and the rest of the ever-growing mega-festival circuit will return, recover and flourish. It's the cellar clubs and small halls that could disappear.  

Meanwhile, as the streaming wars continue to escalate, with Spotify taking the brunt of the assault from the old guard, Arcade Fire's Will Butler puts his finger on an even bigger existential threat to the culture: 

"My deep dread, though, is that this ability to tune out and focus on art becomes an aristocratic luxury; that a lack of money for music means a lack of money for musicians; that new ways of doing business are destroying the possibility of a creative middle class."

And that's where the metaverse - the real one - comes in.

It's all very well for old rockers to shake their grizzled heads and mutter about nothing ever taking the place of beer down the back of your Charlatans tee and over-stimulated engineering students elbowing you in the ribs as you strain to see over the shoulders of the giant biker in front of you but the world moves on. These days a gig didn't even happen unless you recorded it on your phone. It's not such a big step from there to holding the event inside the phone itself.

Roblox vice president and head of music Jon Vlassopulos, who it has to be admitted could scarcely be described as an unbiased observer, reckons we're at the point when there will be artists whose entire careers will be lived online: "some artists will be able to launch and sustain successful careers virtually without ever having to play a real world show", he says and I'm sure he's right.

He's in a powerful position to facilitate that change and indeed he's started already. Two of those seven "best-ever" virtual gigs were staged in Roblox - Royal Blood and Lil Nas X. 

I only vaguely know who Royal Blood are. I tend to get them mixed up with Royal Trux, something I'm sure would piss both of them off, erm... royally, if they only knew. Everyone on the planet knows Lil Nas X. Neither of them, for all their undoubted qualities, would nudge me into downloading Roblox just to watch their blocky avatars emote. 

There are performers and events that would prompt me to find the website, register an account and install the game. It's already happened. I did it a few hours ago.

On stage this Friday evening, live, will be PinkPantheress, winner of the BBC Sound of 2022 award and increasingly frequent presence on this blog. She'll "perform a virtual concert in Roblox in collaboration with the BRIT Awards 2022." If I can, I'll be there as it happens. If not, the performance will be repeated, hourly, for the whole weekend.

I feel I should emphasize at this point that I am not now, nor have I ever been, remotely interested in The Brits. It's a shallow and fatuous, self-mythologizing award show of no cultural import or aesthetic value whatsoever. Apart from that, it's great!

Awards shows don't need to be meaningful. They just have to provide a platform. Many a great performance has been given by many a great performer on many a crappy TV show. It's a longstanding tradition and I see no reason why that shouldn't carry over into the metadigital future.

The prospect of being present at a virtual gig by someone who, were I forty years younger, I'd most certainly have made the effort to see live was what got me to sign up to Roblox this morning, then log in to see how the whole thing worked. Unsurprisingly, after a quarter of a century of signing up for things, downloading them and figuring out how they work, the whole thing went entirely without incident. It took about five minutes.

There's a major irony in all of this. At sixty-plus I'd feel insanely self-conscious at a live show aimed squarely at a Gen-Z audience. Mrs Bhagpuss and I stopped going to small club gigs by up-and-coming young bands back in our mid-forties. It had already started to feel a bit weird. Imagine that twenty years on.

You might think, at sixty-plus, virtual gigs in video games ought to feel even weirder, let alone when they're happening in Roblox, a gaming platform seen even by gamers as "for kids". Nope. Not in the slightest. 

Here's the thing about the metaverse, as it actually is, rather than as we're told it's going to be by people who want to sell it to us. It's freeing. It's democratizing. That old saw about how anyone can be a dog on the internet  remains true, maybe now more than ever. When you suit up in your blocky avatar in Minecraft or Roblox or your slick skin in Fortnite, that's not just who you are, it's all you are. Or, more appositely, all you need to be.

It must be obvious I'm quite excited about the potential and the possibilities for the true metaverse, which I imagine as nothing more scary than a somewhat slicker, sprightlier version of the good old worldwide web we've all come to take for granted these last twenty-five years. 

Back at the dawn of the mainstreaming of the internet there was a lot of talk about "Silver Surfers", the old people who took to the new medium, if not like ducks to water, then at least like elderly labradors to a shallow stream. You don't hear much about them now, other than a few jibes about how everyone only stays on  Facebook because their gran can't use anything else. 

These days we seem to have slipped back into the whole "old people don't get it" default mode for cultural change that's been in force not just since I was born in the late 1950s but at least as far back as the jazz age tales of F. Scott Fitzgerald or the fin de siecle decadence of Beardsley and Wilde. 

Yeah, well screw that.

As I look forward to my retirement and the inevitable shrinking of my physical capacities, it's joyous to think of a whole new world bringing itself to life all around me. A world where the sights and sounds and sheer exhuberance of life will come to me, even when I'm too old or unfit to come to them.

That, my friends, is the metaverse I'm looking forward to embracing. I'm happy to say that as far as I can see it's more than halfway here already.