Traditional And Modern - Scattered Thoughts On A Friday

Following on from what I said yesterday I was going to be posting about today, this isn't going to be the promised (Threatened?) music post nor my considered thoughts on Carole and Tuesday. It might have something to do with AI in but it's beginning to look very much as though everything will, soon enough, so probably no need to draw attention to it.

I guess we may as well just call it another Friday Grab-Bag. On Friday. Again! Two weeks in a row that makes it! Who had that on their bingo card? No-one, I bet!

Panda³

It's back! Panda Panda Panda, that is. (You can sing it to this tune - boy did I have to work to find a version I was willing to link!) 

I'd forgotten all about it. I had a clear window of a couple of hours this morning so I thought I'd try and nail down another instance in the signature quest from EverQuest II's soon-to-be-last-year's expansion, Renewal of Ro. As soon as I opened the launcher I saw two news items - one for Panda Panda Panda, the other for something called Gear Up, Swag It Up, which appears to be the new Gear Up, Level Up , another event that always runs around this time of year.

The main purpose of both GULU and PPP used to be to get everyone ready for the upcoming expansion but I guess it finally occured to someone that we only get a level increase every other year these days. Also, levelling up takes a fraction of the time it once did. I doubt anyone needs much help with that.

Gear is another matter. The panda quests, if you do the whole nine weeks of them, will get you something for every single slot plus all the necessary augments, not to mention a bunch of other useful stuff. When the quests were first introduced it made a huge difference to power levels but these days the difference is more incremental. 

I went straight over to check this year's rewards and they're good but not as good as the drops from the Shattered Overture instances. On the other hand, the panda quests are super-easy and extremely quick, plus you're guaranteed to get everything, whereas the SO instances take a while, aren't a cakewalk and give drops that have an element of RNG involved.

Of course, for anyone who plays more than one character at max level, the real attraction of the Panda quests is that they're account unlocks. You can get the rewards on as many characters as you like just for doing the quests once. Can't turn that down.

Usually I follow the walkthrough at EQ2 Traders but there doesn't seem to be one this year, possibly because Naimi Denmother is now the dev who writes them all, so I guess it would seem a little odd for her to hand out instructions. Never mind. The wiki has everything you need. Or it will have, when each quest appears.

As for Gear Up, Level Up I got a reward for it when I finished my main quest instance this morning so clearly you don't have to do anything in advance to qualify. I haven't been to look at the vendor yet but the Swag Shield buff ought to help me finish the Sig Line in good time for the expansion so I'll probably get that.

Speaking of which, isn't it about time we got the name of the expansion and the pre-order details?

How Are The Mighty Fallen

Demoted to a couple of paragraphs in a grab-bag. How humiliating! I read Amazon's blog on October's Prime Gaming giveaways last night and realised that even though I could have gotten a whole post out of the details, I really couldn't be bothered. 

I'd have to read up on a whole load of games that don't interest me and think of something snarky to say about them all and I really don't care enough to do it. I'm sure they're all perfectly fine for people who like that sort of thing and I'm far too mature to get a kick out of mickey-taking just for the sake of it. (Shut up at the back!)

Also, I get the feeling this has been one of the least-useful series I've done over the years in that no-one other than me really seems to mention Prime Gaming any more. I might be the only one left who cares, always assuming anyone else ever did. Or that I do.

I am still mildly interested to see what I can get for free each month. There's usually at least one game I think I might enjoy. This month that's definitely the bizarrely-named GRUNND.

The game's Steam page has a lot of detail, which is more than can be said for Prime Gaming. It's a kind of point & click adventure, which is good, but based on platforming design, which might not be. It's "inspired by the works of Franz Kafka and David Lynch", which is right up my street, as is the mention "Southern Gothic" but I'm not so keen on the influence of "Black Metal".

It sounds worth a look, anyway. I'll be claiming that one when it becomes available on 5 October. 

I'll probably also grab The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters the week after. It's"an atmospheric, story-driven game" set in a haunted school. All this month's choices are vaguely horror-related to fit in with Halloween. Horror's not really my thing but as I observed a while ago it seems to be creeping into everything nowadays, which has had something of a numbing effect on my sensiibilites. I can stomach a bit of horror better than I once could, anyway.

And that's probably it for this month. I suppose I might claim Ghostwire: Tokyo, which I had at least heard of, but honestly it's not speaking to me. Other than that, I claimed something for New World and Guild Wars 2 and that was it. The GW2 freebie includes a top hat, which is worth mentioning, I guess...

Still Looks Like A Brick To Me

I've never had a Facebook account and I have almost no interest in VR so I haven't been paying all that much atention to Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta project, other than to chuckle when Wilhelm points out the latest idiocy. As with Musk and Twitter, I really don't have a dog in the fight so it's easy to just sit back and treat it all like some wacky sitcom.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to see this pop up in my feeds yesterday, followed by some quite cogent analysis this morning. Inbetween the two, I did a little research of my own, from which I learned not just that "Smart Glasses" are a thing but that they've been one for several years.

If you put "Smart Glasses" into Amazon you get over two thousand results, everything from simple specs offering Bluetooth hands-free calling at less than a tenner up to AR/VR sets costing thousands of pounds. Plenty of them have built-in video cameras, allowing you to film whatever you happen to be looking at, which I thought was the feature that had pitchfork-waving mobs threatening to burn Larry Page in effigy outside Google HQ when Google Glass was making headlines a few years back.

I always thought Google Glass was a great idea. It seemed so obvious that a light, comfortable, inconspicuous wearable, offering a heads-up display and access to social media was the inevitable next step after the smart phone. Only mass hysteria over spurious privacy issues and Google surprisingly running scared of public opinion stopped the device becoming ubiquitous.

Despite publicly withdrawing from the fight, Google quietly kept on with the project, developing and selling "Enterprise" versions to industry for a decade before finally throwing in the towel this spring. What lies behind that decision only Google knows, although this article lays the blame squarely on the cost, which at $1500 does seem steep. 

Pricing for RayBan's Meta Glasses, which I believe you will need a Meta account to use, start at a fifth of the cost of Google Glass - just $299. Not only do they have the video capability that supposedly caused all the ructions last time, they allow for hands-free livestreaming through Facebook and Instagram. 

If it wasn't for the tie-in with Facebook, I'd be wishlisting a pair of those right now. They look like the future to me, at least in principle.

I would not, however, be considering the actual Meta Quest 3, the device whose launch triggered my investigation to begin with. It's a clever idea with its "Passthrough AR", meaning you can see a representation of the real world as relayed by cameras in the unit, rather than being cut off altogether from reality as in previous VR headsets. 

It's still waaaaaay too big and waaaaaaay too weird to imagine wearing anywhere other than in the privacy of your own home, though - and even then you'd only want to wear it when no-one else was home to see you doing it. I mean, doesn't it remind you of that face mask Hannibal Lecter used to wear?

Still, we are clearly edging closer to the future we all thought was coming a decade ago. The last couple of would-be hype trains - NFTs and Crypto - ran into the buffers of their own worthlessness and ineptitude, while the one before them - Virtual Reality  - shunted itself into a siding, where it remains, of interest only to a relative handful of hobbyists. The next couple coming down the track - AI and AR - look far more likely to instigate the kind of paradigm shift we're all hoping for.

We are all hoping for that, aren't we? If only it wasn't Mark Zuckerberg driving the engine. (And I haven't even mentioned Snoop Dogg as a Dungeon Master...)

And Finally

I had more but it's getting late and my mouse is being really weird so I'm going to stop. I was going to finish with a tune but it seems I don't have many new ones to choose from. Good thing I didn't try and do a music post after all, eh?

Oh, I know! Let's have some Carole and Tuesday!

Don't worry. I'll be obsessed with something else soon enough. You'll look back at this little fad some day soon and wish it could have lasted longer!

The Problem With VR or You Could Have Someone's Eye Out With That!

Virtual Reality. Is that a thing yet? I guess it must be because people keep talking about it.

Somehow it isn't shaping up quite how I imagined. As Pete says, back in the 80s, when William Gibson's Neuromancer was stoking the zeitgeist and cyberspace was all over the mainstream media, there was a general feeling that Virtual Reality wasn't just the future, it was our future.

Somehow, I don't think this is what any of us were imagining back then, especially not after three decades of technical innovation. It doesn't even come with straps.

With the default cardboard you have to hold the whole thing up to your face

Pete's description of Google's VR on the cheap sounded so bizarre I had to go to Amazon to see for myself. It does indeed look like half a shoe box, "Made from High Quality, Hard-Wearing Cardboard", into which you shove your smartphone. It reminded me of the old ViewMaster we used to have when I was a child, all the way back in the 1960s. 

And guess what? ViewMaster is still going. And they've spotted a marketing window they probably never dreamed would open for them again. Here's the ViewMaster Virtual Reality Starter Pack. For not much more than the cost of the Google Cardboard you can get something vaguely retro-futuristic in red plastic. And you shove your smartphone into it and hold it to your face. Again.

I don't know. I had something a little more...sophisticated in mind. Forget William Gibson and cyberspace. My desire for VR goes back a lot further than that. I grew up reading Philip K Dick, where housewives spent the day immersed in the lives of soap opera stars, their lonely monologues seamlessly integrated into the action streaming from their giant wall-screens.

Further down the VR rabbit hole, entire PKD families subsumed their consciousnesses to the doll world of Perky Pat. I wanted to join them  but when you've been waiting all your life for CanD and layouts, retooled ViewMasters and Skylanders just aren't going to cut it.

Image found at this blog

 Then I started wondering. What are the long-term implications for your sight of holding a smartphone four and a half centimeters from your eyeballs? Sure, it was never going to do any of us much harm, looking at  static three-dimensional images of the Grand Canyon for a few minutes, but if this whole thing takes off we could all end up strapped in for hours. Every day.

C. T. Murphy, in the comments on yesterday's post, wished for VR support for EverQuest. It sounds fanciful in the extreme, retrofitting the latest technology onto a game that many would believe should have been retired long ago. But is it? 

When a new medium successfully supplants an older one there's usually a rush to convert past successes to present standards. How many times have we bought the same music or movies, on vinyl, cd, dvd, mp3...? Who's to say that if VR goes truly mainstream we won't see everything and anything ported over, especially if it turns out that the process can be automated?

EverQuest was famous - infamous - for its addictive nature.  The whole MMORPG genre is. Gaming sessions frequently run for many hours even with the unimmersive pseudo 3D we've all been pretending to enjoy on our primitive flatscreens all these years. Wrap that drug in 360 degree sensory overload and who's going to want to stop?

So I turned to Google again. Someone must be researching the side effects and the downsides, right? Well not so much as you'd think. I read half a dozen articles on the web, from journalists, scientists, industry analysts and concerned bystanders. The takeway I got from all of them is that no-one has a clue.

Sharples is cautious about linking known “effects” with “problems” - the evidence, she says is simply not available.

 when it comes to understanding how VR affects the brain, scientists "don't really know what's going on," said Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at UCLA

I asked whether using VR systems for long periods of time could result in long-term vergence-accommodation problems.
“Well, we don’t really know,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a smoking gun out there, but what we don’t know is long-term use — let’s say 12 hours a day — would that have any long-term effect? I doubt it, but I can’t prove that to you scientifically.

 the lack of long term studies on the possible impact of VR headsets may make caution sensible

All quotes from the linked articles. No one knows. Go ahead. Be your own guinea pig.

I think I need glasses.

Of course, if you're a gamer, chances are you won't be content with a twenty dollar strap-on for your phone. Most likely you'll be in for a few hundred when Playstation VR arrives just in time for Christmas; that's if you're not already in hock for your Oculus Rift.

Does a higher price tag mean better health outcomes? Possibly, at least when we're talking focal length and comfort fit, but definitely not when it comes to all those many imponderables from nausea to vergence-accomodation to psychological dependency.

Of course, as some of the writers of the quoted articles point out, every new technology arrives with a slew of  fearful warnings and dire threats. Even reading a novel was once considered a danger to your health. We all seem to muddle along with books, radio, cinema and television somehow, and all of them were reckoned in their early days to be harbingers of the end for civilization.

Still and all, I think I'll wait a while. Much though I'd love to wander the mean streets of a three-dimensional Freeport and watch as The Overlord pushes another dissident into the pit, I'm holding out for a tabletop hologram system. Should be along any day now. Delivered by drone, naturally.

Hold That Pose : Black Desert

It probably won't come as much of a surprise to anyone reading this to hear that in the first month of playing Black Desert I've taken almost seven hundred and fifty screenshots. The problem with BDO isn't finding something to snap - it's knowing when to stop.

Much has been said about the beauty and quality of the game's graphics but it's the strength of the world-making that cannot be overstated. Rarely, probably never, have I traveled the roads and footpaths of an imaginary world that so meticulously, painstakingly replicates an authentic managed environment.

I've mentioned before how every village, town and city uses street plans that are logical, workable and convincing. No compromise whatsoever appears to have been made for player convenience. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the designers used the layout of real-world towns as templates.

The road networks are similarly naturalistic all the way down to the dirt tracks leading to isolated farmsteads and mountain hermitages. The countryside looks and feels wild at the borders and tenanted where civilization encroaches.

There's much more than good geography to why Black Desert feels so immersive to explore, though. The level of detail throughout the built environment is exemplary. The set design and placement of props would do a BBC historical drama proud.

What takes the whole thing to another level is the extensive use of tableaux vivants. Everywhere you go small dramas play out around you. Not a roadside camp or farmstead goes without its own staged set piece and once you enter a city the feeling of being surrounded by stories is overwhelming.

It's a fascinating approach to world-making. I'm not convinced it has the edge over GW2's enormously complex, nested scripted NPC narratives, where entire storylines with thousands of lines of dialog, all voiced, unfurl across whole maps, but it has a deep charm all the same.

In Metrica Province, to take my favorite Tyrian example, it is entirely possible to spend a whole afternoon trailing NPCs and eavesdropping on their quotidian lives. Just by watching and listening that way you feel it might be possible to come to a rich, nuanced understanding of life among the Asura.

Wandering through the bustling streets of Altinova or Heidel the impression is more one of walking through a gallery. Screenshots taken at random look, almost literally, like paintings in the style of the great Renaissance masters. Where GW2 is a watercolor dreamscape, Black Desert is naturalism done in oils.

It's those tableaux that hold the eye, though. The eye and the mind and the imagination. Black Desert's designers have dared to be lavish, not just in the size of the cast or the scale of the production but in the detailing.

When dressing sets with NPCs, almost all MMOs re-use animations primarily intended for other purposes; emotes, combat, idling. I can't be certain but it seems to me that the Pearl Abyss team has gone to the trouble of creating specific animations for certain tableaux just to make them more convincing.

Take, for example, the soldier pictured above fixing something - a mirror? a shield? a sign? - to a wall in Altinova. That animation seems bespoke. Or his colleague, painting a symbol on a wall a few doors away. That action has to be handcrafted just for that scene, doesn't it?

That symbol, too. Found in many places in the
area, it has a significance I don't understand. Wherever it appears it looms, darkly. The sight of that soldier, marking the clay while a hulking guard and a lackey look on, is chilling.

Whatever it means it can't be anything good. The tableau of cowering refugees - or are they citizens? - surrounded and menaced by more armed and armored soldiers just a few doors up the hill make it plain this is a city in turmoil.

And yet, meanwhile, business must go on. Black Desert's is a world of trade and commerce as well as violence and magic. As you watch the heated bargaining between a gesticulating Shai and cold-eyed goblin dealer in art and artifacts you have to wonder about the provenance of the goods. Were those gilded frames looted by the militia or are they the family heirlooms of some wealthy Altinovan, liquidating his assets before he flees to Heidel or Calpheon?

It's entirely possible to stand for hours looking at this world and wondering. For all I've supposedly "played" Black Desert for a month now, what I've mostly done is watch. In some ways the "game" part just gets in the way.

The players certainly do, with their hundreds of wagons parked on top of each other, their lines of horses lined up like so many black cabs on the rank, their garish dyes and Las Vegas showgirl glitz. So, too, the odd clusters of milling wildlife placed down conveniently at the edge of town, just waiting to be killed. Without the need to provide a game there'd be none of that.

Black Desert makes a good case for the old-school vision of the Virtual World but, once again, a huge question mark hangs over the compatibility of virtual world-building with the making and playing of video games. Perhaps VR will finally drive a wedge between the two. If I could "walk" through Altinova in three dimensions and 360 degrees I'm not sure I'd need anything more by way of  "gameplay".

Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure I do, even now.

My Beautiful Balloon : Ninelives

It's going to be a fair old while before I experience Virtual Reality in the comfort of my own home, I imagine. I've never been much of an early adopter when it comes to technology. I'd rather let someone else pay ten times the eventual price to road-test kit that's a tenth as good as the eventual mass-market breakthrough version is bound to be.

My feeling is that some form of VR will, eventually, achieve widespread public acceptance and, in time, a great deal of popular entertainment, both factual and fictional, will be produced and consumed. At which point we'll all stop thinking and talking about the tech and just get on with enjoying whatever it is that we use it for.

That singularity is still a long way off. Isn't it always? There have been predictions of the imminent arrival of A.I. for most of my adult life and yet the stilted versions that have so far gained the widest public use and acceptance, Siri, Cortana and their like, with their emphasis very heavily biased towards the "artificial" rather than the "intelligence", bear small resemblance to the idiosyncratic, self-aware digital entities we were promised or warned about.

V.R. seems, at least, to be doing better than that and, with the buzz in the air, wandering through Ninelives last week I couldn't but be aware of what it might feel like, one day, to be exploring such a delicious, delightful new world in the round. After all, even without the benefit of 360 degree vision, the tiny team behind the game have done a stellar job of creating an atmospheric, absorbing three-dimensional world on a flat screen.

For the current alpha two character slots are available, which is handy, since there are only two classes at present, Blade and Mage. There are four races, Humans, Goblins, Ogres and Nightbreeds. The racial choices, along with the music, soundscapes and textures, are a large part of what reminds me so strongly of City of Steam in its alpha days.

Over time, that game veered away from its complex, nuanced, fascinating world, choosing instead to promote a garish, fairground experience, reliant on countless mini-games and shills. Once upon a time I was sufficiently engaged with CoS to imagine making many characters just to explore fully the racial backgrounds and stories of the divergent branches of  Greenbloods and Riven.

In the end the only character I played seriously was a goblin. This time, in Ninelives, I thought I'd best expand on that a little, while the choice still seems worth making. So, I rolled a Nightblood Mage.

It's a quick process since there's no character customization at present. Neither, so far as I can tell, is there any particular difference in the content available. Despite that, playing a female Nightblood doesn't feel very much like playing a male goblin at all.

Appearances matter, for one thing. Roaming the world as a six-foot tall shock-haired woman in a robe is an entirely separate experience from doing exactly the same as a five foot male goblin in a leather harness and furry boots. Similarly, speaking to NPCs who talk about the cursed history of your own imagined race has a frisson that's absent when they tell you exactly the same story about someone else's imaginary race.

There's also the nuance that comes from doing something for the second time, yet not in exactly the same way. When I first approached the great city at the start of the game, as a goblin it was a moment of awe and wonder. Everything blurred into an imagistic reverie. The statue of the stag, the smoky barroom, the hot air balloon above the towering rooftops, it was all too much to take in for a small, greenish goblin who'd just woken up in a stream.

Striding up the hill as a confident magician with a fair idea of what lay ahead, however, I found I was able to take much more on board. Discovering that the stag represents the curse of my race and that the great city of Crimson Crest was founded and built by Nightbloods after their escape from the desert and their own terrible error, brought the world into a focus it had previously lacked.

All of which is a lengthy preamble to explain how I came to notice, as I jogged along the road north of the city, that the hot air balloon I'd thought to be no more than an excellent piece of atmospherics was actually descending towards a landing platform not a hundred meters away. I dropped my immediate plan of re-heading scarecrows and instead scrambled up the slope to meet the airship as it arrived.

I had FRAPS running so I hit F9 to record the whole thing. I'd already spoken to an NPC in the city who'd told me about balloon flights to another city being suspended because of some outbreak of conflict, so I was aware the game might have some method of supposed aerial transport. I imagined it would be enabled at some future stage of testing, when more maps came on line.

What certainly never occurred to me would be that the balloons, when they were running, would be physical objects in the world; craft onto which you could clamber and stand and be carried as they rose and flew. I'm racking my brains to try and remember if I've ever encountered this in an online game before. I haven't come up with anything yet.

EQ2's Moors of Ykesha expansion has balloons as the intra-zone auto-travel option and I seem to remember that World of Warcraft has air balloons as the Horde's equivalent to griffins, but in both of those cases the mechanics are entirely different. You interact with an interface that effectively renders your character an integral part of the vehicle. Thus you remain until either you reach your destination or you cancel your connection by jumping off.

What you don't do is clamber into the basket as it rests, briefly, on the ground, then see yourself taken up by the balloon as it rises. You don't stand, free and clear, able to walk from one side to the other, turn, take in the view. You don't have the vertiginous sensation of balancing precariously on a floating platform that moves and changes direction against your own inclination, aware that a false step could send you over the rail. You don't get the thrill.

It was as the balloon took a long, sweeping curve high over the city that it occurred to me to wonder how this might all feel if I was encompassed in V.R.. It felt immersive enough to bring butterflies to my stomach as it was. For the first time I was able to imagine an application in a game I actually play that might benefit from the new technology we are all, most likely, going to have to come to terms with eventually.

At this point I'd love to be able to post the video, which would give some small impression of the event as I experienced it. Unfortunately, FRAPS, usually so reliable, decided to give up the ghost just after the balloon left the ground and all I was left with was a corrupted file the size of a small MMO.

I could go back and try to shoot it all again but why bother? Ninelives is free. It's a small, fast download. It takes seconds to register an account. Go see it for yourself. It's worth the ride.

Synchronicity : City of Steam(puff)

I do like a bit of synchronicity. Not the awful Sting thing, obviously. No-one likes that. No, when similar stuff just seems to happen at the same time for no particular reason.

There's often a ton of it going on in this corner of the blogosphere, mostly because everyone is always feeding off the same news squibs, trying the same new games and generally bouncing off everyone else like toddlers sliding down a coal chute. Sometimes it seems a bit less predictable than that, though, and that's when I really start to enjoy the ride.

Wilhelm linked an excellent Extra Credits piece on Virtual Reality and started a feisty discussion. J3w3l outed herself as a grudging admirer of Eastern MMOs while Bhelgast had some positive things to say about going Pay To Win. Jeromai jumped that train and swung it back around to the never-resolved problem of difficulty, something Sonja had been looking at sidewise to considerable effect not long before.

While all this was rumbling and roiling away I had my head down grinding my way through City of Steam. After four years of laid-back pottering suddenly it's hell-for-leather to the finish line. Telwyn took note and vowed not to make the same mistake with other supposedly stable MMOs.

At least we all know how LotRO's Main Questline finishes. I'm on Chapter 3 Part 3 (I think) of City of Steam's story but I have no idea whether I'm still at the beginning, stuck in the middle or just about to turn over and see the author's picture on the inside the back cover. If it wasn't for City of Steam being all Pay To Win (for a given value of "Win" and not a big enough value either) and if Mechanist Games hadn't decided to throw money at the remaining players (of whom there seem to be one heck of a lot for a game about to go into a tunnel and not come out again) then I'd have no hope whatsoever of cracking through the levels needed to get to the climax.

As it is, it's flipping hard work! In common with many Eastern MMOs (although, of course, City of Steam is a Western MMO funded by an Eastern MMO developer, but let's not confuse matters...) there are gates on how many dungeons you can do per day and how much XP you can get. Even blowing cash shop currency like a beaching whale I still hit the buffers 1% short of Level 34, where the next quest opens up.

Luckily CoS also uses that weird Eastern MMO trope of Calisthenics. I left my Gunner tabbed out in the browser doing leg-bends and knee-stretches, while I played GW2 for a while and, magically, that one per cent ticked over on its own. Now I'm stuck at 24% into level 34, waiting for the daily refresh to let me buy my way to 35 and the next quest that matters.

It occurred to me around this point that there was a very good chance I'd run out of time before I ever found out what was really going on at the top of the Spire, so I did what anyone would do; I turned to Google. Surely someone must have wiki'd it or posted the conclusion on YouTube.

Like hell they have. Even the game's own website has removed all the original lore, although someone has handily re-posted it in the forum and I now have it safely saved away to read later, once those forums themselves vanish into the mist.

While I was googling, however, I came across this. Now that's what I call a coincidence. Well, actually, that's not what I call it. What I do call it I'm not about to say, or at least not in a public place.

Intrigued, I watched the first episode. It was pretty good. Don't take my word for it though. Have a look for yourself:

I'm going to watch the next two on my tablet later tonight, when I go to bed. Unfortunately the similarity to City of Steam doesn't seem likely to end with the name - this is another story that I'll probably never get to finish.

There was a City of Steampuff Kickstarter last July, it seems. It didn't go well. It appears to have had the exact opposite problem to the Kickstarter that Smed's new company, Pixelmage, unleashed for Hero's Song. Smed had a very easy to understand product that looks like a decent purchase at under $20 but his KS pledges added no value whatsoever and made no sense. Steampuff's pledges, on the other hand, look pretty coherent and attractive in and of themselves but they appear to have a lot more content than the project they're supporting.

That project barely seems to exist - just two more short videos to finish up a series of five, three of which are already complete and viewable for free on the KS page. Although, who knows where the whole thing was (or is) going? There's a downloadable demo for some kind of City of Steampuff VR demo linked to the Occulus Rift. Maybe it was going to be a game after all?

I downloaded that demo. I don't have an OR and I don't plan to get one. I am as curious as anyone to see how it feels, though. After the discussion with Wilhelm in which he debunked my mistaken impression that we were getting the Holodeck (I didn't really think we were but I did think we were getting Kinnect with a Helmet) it was a very useful find.

Even on a flat screen it's very easy to imagine what it would be like to explore this imaginary space just by turning your head and looking around. It certainly immersed me for the few minutes I played with it. I can imagine how powerful it would feel as a narrative platform, able to put you right in the middle of the action.

Which is a lot more than you can say of Dark Era, a new "time travel" Eastern MMO I read about on Massively yesterday. I downloaded that, too. I could do a review. I got to level 25. That's enough, isn't it?

Yes, Level 28. I literally made three more levels just logging in to take this screenshot. It took less than a minute.

Well, maybe not when twenty-five levels takes less than twenty minutes and doesn't require you to touch the keyboard once. Okay, I did have to click the mouse to collect my quest rewards and equip my upgrades so it wasn't entirely hands-free gaming. They need to work on that.

Whether Dark Era is Pay To Win or just utterly pointless I can't be sure. I don't plan on finding out either. Sometimes synchronicity just takes you somewhere you didn't want to go after all.