Ikonei Island: Open Beta. Very First Impressions

Remember, back at the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone was playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons? I wanted to play, too but AC:NH is a Switch exclusive. You can't play it on PC. 

Well, you can, if you want to download an emulator and jump through a bunch of hoops, some of which look highly dubious to me. I don't think I'm even going to link to the site with the instructions. I'm sure you can all find it the same way I did if you're curious.

I considered buying a Switch just to play New Horizons but as far as I remember availability was poor. It would have been aberrant behavior for me anyway, buying a console just to play one game. It was 2020, just after the first lockdown and I was still on furlough so that may have had something to do with it

In the end, I found a much cheaper and more reasonable cure for my rare case of FOMO. I installed Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp on my Kindle Fire instead. As I'm sure everyone knows, AC:PC is considered a hugely inferior entry in the Animal Crossing canon but I liked it. I posted about a few times, played just about every day for several weeks and then sporadically for a few months more until I eventually, inevitably, drifted away. 

I occasionally think about playing Pocket Camp again but I'd forgotten all about New Horizons. Or I had forgotten about it until this morning, when I read this post at MassivelyOP. Describing a new game I'd never heard of, Ikonei Island, a quote from the developers namechecks both Animal Crossing and another game I've read a lot about over the years, Stardew Valley.

Srtardew Valley has never appealed to me, partly because of the graphics, which lean very heavily into a nostalgia for a period of gaming that means nothing to me, but also because farming games are boring as hell. Part of what appealed to me about New Horizons as I was reading about it was the way it didn't seem to revolve around planting and watering. 

GIven that level of disinterest, I'd probably have carried on by had it not been for the two embedded videos. Particularly the second.

Four and a quarter minutes of piratical hurdy-gurdying is a hard ask, for sure, although I'd totally rock a red velvet frock coat like Patty's. It says something about the game and its developers that they thought it would make an effective - or even appropriate - promotional tool. I guess they must have been on to something, though. I mean, it landed me.

I watched as much as I could take of the video, which was about a minute, then I took a look at the gameplay trailer. At just over ninety seconds it's a lot more approachable and it shows the game to good advantage - or it does if you can tune out the bilious voiceover. Cheese and ham, anyone?

It immediately reminded me not of the two mentioned games I haven't played but of another I have: Yonder the Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Yonder was one of the first games I bought on Steam. I played and posted about it several times, most recently in June 2020, when I picked it up again after a long layoff for precisely the same reason I've ended up writing about it today: I saw something that reminded me of it.

I have never finished Yonder. I haven't given it a fair crack, even. I realised that as I was reading Kluwes' commentary on his own time with the game. I'd always struggled to find the thread of the narrative when I played, ending up rambling inconsequentially through the gorgeous scenery, getting nowhere and not really minding. Kluwes made it seem a much more coherent, completable game than I'd ever felt it to be. He 100%ed the entire thing and made it sound easy.

I was seriously considering starting Yonder over from scratch but of course I haven't done anything so dramatic. Or decisive. Instead, I seem to have jumped on the first available train heading the other way. 

As soon as I'd watched the videos I opened Steam, found the Ikonei Island store page and registered for the open beta. Acceptance was immediate so I downloaded it and started playing.

It says "Beta" in the description but the version number (bottom left) says "Alpha". Feels more like an alpha build to me.

First impressions are excellent. There's a charmingly illustrated introduction in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of four orphans - two humans, who look like they might be brother and sister, a lizard and a ... pig? - all of whom narrowly escape being taken by slavers (Who are also pigs for some reason.). 

They speed away on a raft powered by a magical wind released from a flask tossed to them by the mysterious narrator and end up, wrecked in a storm, cast up on the beach of some desert isle. It's a great beginning and the gameplay that follows backs it up admirably.

I would go into detail but I've only managed to play for about three-quarters of an hour.. Yes, okay, I could easily spin those forty-five minutes into a five post series if I had the mind to but I don't think that would do the game any favors. I want to leave a good impression because for the short time I was able to play, I really enjoyed myself.

"Rain, rain go away..." Or actually don't. I quite like it.

I can fill in a few notes, at least. The characters, animations and models are delightful, albeit a little hard to see, what with them being so tiny. There's seemingly being no way to zoom in with the fixed camera. The island, what little I saw of it (Mostly the shore and some ruins near the river.) is beautifully rendered in lush blues and greens, all softened contours and rounded edges. 

It rains all the time, which is both a plot point and an aesthetic pleasure. Everything looks and feels like it's been drawn in pastels then gently smdged with a damp cloth. Frogs hop, crabs burrow and occasionally an aggressive plant detaches itself from the undergrowth and has to be soundly clouted with your "sword", a branch with the leaves still attached.

Hedda is the only charracter I've tried so far. I think you can play all four of them although I haven't figured out how to swap yet.

The UI is clear and attractive and I found the controls quite manageable, which may put me in a a very small minority indeed. The game opens with a warning that it's best played with a controller because the mouse and keyboard options aren't optimised and there's a thread on the game's Discussion page, in which the OP describes the beta keyboard controls as "unbearable" and everyone else agrees. I'd have to say I've seen a lot worse. Try playing Final Fantasy XI sometime...

That said, the controls do need some tweaking and the developers have already said it won't happen in the current beta, so even though I'd encourage anyone who likes the look of the screenshots or the gameplay in the video to give it a try, do be aware that it's not even Early Access yet. It's a proper beta. Or maybe an alpha...

Fear my mighty leaf. Sword! I mean sword!

It's so much a work in progress, in fact, that I ran into a proper, gamebreaking bug. When I got to the second area of the island and a new cut-scene played, the game registered a fatal error and shut down. The same has happened each time I've returned to that area, which is why I stopped and wrote this post instead. 

Otherwise I'd still be playing.

Catching Clouds: Yonder

I started playing My Time At Portia because Tobold mentioned it as an alternative to Animal Crossing: New Horizons for people who wanted something similar but more traditional. At the time, following the suggestion of Jen of Book of Jen, I was already playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as my own alternative to not having a Switch.

Almost as soon as I began playing MTAP I was reminded of another game I'd bought, played and forgotten a few years back, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher. As I carried on playing I found I thought about that game more and more.

Last night I fired up Yonder for the first time in three years. As it was loading I read a little bit about it. Seems Yonder is now available for the Switch.

I played Yonder for an hour or so. It took me a while to get used to the slightly off-kilter controls and the floaty movement. After a while, though, I fell back into its comforting groove. It's a gentler, slower game than My Time At Portia. It might well be a better match for those who find Animal Crossing too formless but MTAP too rigid.

After a while I put down Yonder and picked up My Time At Portia again. I spent a good while there, looking at plans to expand my house and working out how to make some money to do that. I did a dungeon. There was fighting.

By the time I'd finished it was getting very late. When I went to bed, for the first time in what feels like a long while I didn't feel able to log into Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. I wanted to but it was just too late.

Only a week ago I felt I might be running out of ideas for what to play. Now I can't fit everything in.
It looks as though I may be back at work by the end of the week. Something will have to give. I hope it's not Animal Crossing.

It's a pity Tobold couldn't have discovered My Time At Portia a month ago...

Off The Charts

In a serendipitous sequel to yesterday's post on non-MMO gaming, this morning I clicked the link from Atherne's Adventures to nominations for 2017's Golden Joystick Awards. Most of them I'd never heard of, unsurprisingly, but a few names I recognized from brief flurries of attention they'd enjoyed on various blogs I'd read over the last year.

What did surprise me was how quickly and completely whatever attention those games received in this corner of the blogosphere had shriveled and died. It's not even as though people had reported on their endings or their play-time coming to a close.

Did anyone finish Horizon:Zero Dawn? I remember several people starting but that's about all. I know someone was posting about Final Fantasy XV because I recall being curious about the apparently contemporary setting. Never heard any more about that one.

I could kill for a rum punch.

Much was made of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with its open-world gameplay that was either compelling or purposeless depending who you were reading at the time. Several people seemed to have bought the Nintendo Switch just to play it but other than a couple of tales of buyer's remorse I never found out how all that ended.

Mass Effect: Andromeda might be the only exception. At least a couple of people blogged the whole of that journey, not just the amusing visual glitches and the bad launch horror stories. Other than that, the games that keep coming up, the ones I was reading about last year, read about this year and will almost certainly read about next year, are all MMOs.

Various kinds of MMOs, certainly not all of them MMORPGs, but the genre's a broad church, wide enough to embrace PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds at one end and FFXIV at the other. It's something even the creators of the Golden Joystick Awards recognize: in the "Still Playing" category, defined as "...your chance to celebrate the games that have held your attention for years or even decades after release" almost half the nominations are MMOs. More than half if you want to count Diablo III and Overwatch.

Is anyone there?

Of the two non-MMO games I bought this year, no-one else ever mentioned Tanzia and I'm pretty sure no-one wanted to hear me going on about it either. I was browsing the always-fascinating Steam Charts last night and I noticed that Tanzia's all-time peak concurrency on the platform was ten players.

That's ten. Not ten thousand. Just ten. Although right now I imagine ten players online at the same time would be living the dream for developers Arcanity Inc. since September's average concurrency was 0.07 of a player with a Peak of three. And as far as I can tell, Tanzia is only available via Steam.

Yonder, the other game I bought, did much better, with an all-time Steam Peak just shy of 1300 players and a September average of just over 45. You can also buy and play Yonder outside of Steam as well as on the PS4 so that's just a portion of the audience. Still, it hardly represents the break-out hit and potential phenomenon I thought it was going to be when I jumped the bandwagon back in July.

Every MMO has to have a zone called "Crossroads". It's the law. Only this isn't an MMO. It just wishes it was.

Contrast those numbers with 2017's genuinely unexpected breakout, PUBG. Featuring heavily in the Golden Joystick Awards as "one of the year's biggest success stories", the survival arena phenomenon currently tops the Steam chart with a staggering 2.39 million players all playing at the same time.

With room to improve, because that record was set yesterday and the numbers are still trending upwards. PUBG's concurrency has increased inexorably since it appeared seemingly out of nowhere in March, almost doubling month on month.

I haven't played, just like I haven't played the game that seems likely to have suffered the most from PUBG's meteoric rise, H1Z1. Arena survival is hardly my thing, although ironically I played three games of Southsun Survival for dailies in GW2 yesterday and, as someone said in chat during one of them, "ANet invented PUBG years ago".

Adorable the explorable.

Bad things happening to H1Z1 always worry me, not because I have any interest in or affection for the zombie slaughterfest but because I imagine it's the Catalonia to DBG's Spain, doing most of the hard lifting and paying most of the bills. Certainly that won't be Planetside2, currently languishing at #154 on the chart.

Although perhaps "languishing" isn't the right word. Not at all. That placing still represents four thousand players at Peak and nearly half that on average. And again, PS2 is available through other channels than just Steam.

H1Z1: King of the Kill (soon to be rebranded without the unfortunate, foreign revenue sapping corollary) is still in the Steam Top Ten. Just. Number nine and falling, with a September Peak of 105,000 players but a current 24-hour high of less than half that number.

I hate to be the one who has to break it to you but that really isn't an Ice Shard.

Still, it's a lot of people. I knew H1Z1 was popular but I hadn't quite realized just how successful it was and still is.

DBG's current re-focus, both the upcoming rebranding, the significant changes now on the Test server and the re-invigoration of H1Z1:KOTK's thought-to-be dead in the water prototype, H1Z1: Just Survive, suggest a clear understanding that the entire playing field has shifted with the arrival of PUBG. (As an aside, DBG's evident current revitalization, the new decisiveness and increased intensity across all projects, is a topic for another post. Something's going on, I'm sure of it, and I'd be all over it... if only I knew for certain what that something was.)

Back to PUBG, success that fast and on that scale changes everything. Amazon's Breakout won't be the only project going on hiatus or worse, I'll wager, as executives around the world try to figure out how to get some of that sweet PUBG action. Brace yourselves for another half-decade of WoW-killer hype, only with "WoW" airbrushed out and "PUBG" scribbled in.

One day this will all be yours. Oh, wait, it already is.

The perhaps ironic upshot of all this is that I might, finally, get around to downloading the original H1Z1. The re-purposed Just Survive is beginning to look quite interesting. As for the many nominees for the Golden Joystick Awards, though, I'll probably pass.

Except, maybe, for a couple of the Indies. The annoyingly-named Everything looks intriguing. Thimbleweed Park, with its curious USP of "Monkey Island meets Twin Peaks" could be worth a try. In fact, I could imagine playing and enjoying any of the ten entries in the Best Indie list, which is not something I could say with a straight face about many of the various AAA nominees.

Aywren offered an early entry in the inevitable swarm of "what I'm looking forward to in 2018" posts but right now the only game on my radar that's guaranteed to launch next year is We Happy Few. I was fairly sure I'd get that but Compulsion Games' decision to go full AAA with a launch price of $60 has made me think twice. I'm not really price-sensitive when it comes to video games but bearing in mind what I said yesterday about Tanzia and Yonder it does seem like a good way to throw money down a hole.

Nope, I think I'll stick to my MMOs for now, and my old MMOs at that. I played a lot of EQ2 yesterday and it made me want to play a lot more. I know I don't need any new games but right now I'm not even sure I want any.

Maybe we already have enough games. Anyone ever think of that?

The Right Prescription

Every single post on Inventory Full, well over a thousand now, carries the tag "MMO". When I started writing here, back in 2011, almost every blog I read was much the same - all MMOs, all the time.

Over the years that's changed a lot. Glancing at my blogroll, there's almost no-one left who writes only about MMOs. There's Telwyn, whose "Categories" list includes nothing but MMOs (except "Uncategorized" but now we're getting meta). I think Shintar may only write about SW:tOR, which would make hers the only single-MMO blog I follow. And there's Bhelgast, who writes about a lot of non-gaming stuff but only MMOs as far as gaming goes...

A lot of bloggers still write more about MMOs than any other kind of game - Syp, Wilhelm, Isey, UltrViolet... too many to list, really - but mostly these days it's a mixed diet of MMOs, co-ops and single player stuff. Which is fine. My interest lies more in the quality of the writing than the topic anyway - I enjoyed Tipa's blogging on bridges as much as her MMO coverage, for example, but then I'd just be happy to see Tipa back blogging about anything.

If I was going to start blogging about anything other than MMOs I would move away from gaming completely. Most likely to music (which would give me a chance to enthuse openly instead of just dropping allusions no-one will ever get into blog titles) or books (since I get to read a wealth of wonderful stuff six months to a year before it's published) or even movies (although for that I'd have to start going to the cinema again, I guess...).

When it does come to gaming, though, even I stray from the true path sometimes. I bought two single-player games this year: Tanzia and Yonder. They both play like MMORPGs, which is what drew me to them and was how I justified hanging an "MMO" tag on the posts I wrote about them.

I enjoyed them both, for a while. A short while. I don't have buyer's regret because they were cheap and I got my money's worth, but although I enjoyed the gameplay in both I found it utterly impossible to maintain my interest, knowing I was playing alone.

It's hard to explain. Many have tried. In these days of solo MMOs, which is pretty much all of them if that's how you choose to play it, there's little logic to why doing exactly the same things has such a different emotional heft, but it does.

Grinding xp or farming mats in a single player feels...well, let's be quite brutal...it feels idiotic. Tanzia and Yonder both feature those mechanics, which I enjoy in MMOs, but I had to stop playing because I began to feel that what I was doing had no function, purpose or meaning. After a few sessions I felt I would quite literally be better off spending my time staring out of the window, let alone getting up and going and doing something useful.

To do exactly the same thing in an MMO feels completely different. Even in an MMO where no-one else appears to be playing, one where I know not a single person, where I'm in no guild or group, where the chat channels are silent for hours on end so it feels as though I might be the last person left playing.

Indeed, I sometimes feel it literally would not matter if I was the only person left playing. I know that someone else could be playing and that's all that's needed to make it a social experience not a solitary one.

So, after a couple of noble but failed experiments, I'm trying not to buy any non-MMOs, even if bloggers I read are singing their praises and they do sound like something I'd enjoy. But, what if the game in question happened to be free? And what if it only took twenty minutes to play?

Last night I read a typically entertaining post at The Forbidden Codex of The Pink Beyond. Xyzzysqrl covers such an infinitude of games so amusingly and authoritatively that I mostly feel no need to try them for myself but this one was a little different, because all Gordy was prepared to say about it was this:

"I cannot tell you anything about this game, as it would ruin the experience, and in fact the mere knowledge that I cannot tell you anything about this game is already ruining a small part of the experience for you, for which I apologize profusely"

The game in question is called  "Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist". It's available as a free download (donations accepted) direct from creators Crows Crows Crows  or you can get it free without guilt from Steam.

I played it last night. It took me more like half an hour than twenty minutes. I played it again this morning and it took me more like forty minutes than half an hour. It is linear but stands repeating at least once - possibly more than once.

More than that I shan't say. I don't think it is particularly the kind of game that would be ruined if you knew in advance what it was about but on the other hand, it takes twenty minutes to play (if you crack on) so if you want to know then you might as well just play it. Like I did.

I think even I could manage a few bite-sized games like this without the scaffolding of an imagined social structure to hold up my interest. I'll keep an eye out for a few more.

If you do play, one tip (not, I think, a spoiler): don't miss the tape-recorder. I didn't even see it first time round.

Busy Doing Nothing: Yonder

About a mile from where I grew up there was a hill fort. For some reason it was always known as "Up Yonder". I spent countless hours playing there, unsupervised, back in those Just William days, when parents pushed children and dogs out the door at 9 am and didn't expect to see them home again before teatime.

When I first heard of Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, my thoughts drifted back to those happy times, not least because the game is supposedly both an "explorer's dream" and "very relaxing", two phrases that recur frequently in the very positive (Official Steam Rating) reviews I read. I imagined wandering aimlessly with no agenda across the sunlit greensward, idly lopping the heads off daisies and humming to myself.

Did I miss an Apocalypse?

I wish! After around six hours play according to Steam (really, it seems a lot more, which is revealing in itself) I would sum Yonder up very differently: a directed, intense, Achiever's agenda.

Just read the headline pitch on Steam:

"Gemea maintains the appearance of a paradise, yet an evil murk has enshrouded the land and its people in despair... As the hero of Yonder you will explore Gemea and uncover the islands secrets and mysteries within yourself".

Does that sound laid-back? Relaxing? I don't think so! It sounds like an emergency, a crisis, a problem that has to be solved. And since this isn't an MMO or even a Co-Op, there's really no-one to solve it but me.

The Moth Sanctuary. Took me two days to fix this. Moths. I ask you.

It's all very well for reviewers like the writer for Rock, Paper, Shotgun to dismiss the set-up as "Blah blah shipwreck blah blah magic compass blah blah find something" and advise you to treat it as "... a giant space in which you can do the bits that interest you, when you want to do them" but the game doesn't want you to do that. Instead, it constantly encourages - you might say nags -  you to follow the storyline, do the quests, be useful.

The UI is inflexible. You can only have one quest highlighted. You must have one quest highlighted. Whichever quest you've chosen (and if you don't pick one the game will pick one for you), try to forget it as you may, you can't help but see it out of the corner of your eye. It broods there, in the upper right corner of the screen, while down in the lower left, the mini-map pings exclamation marks, points the arrow of your character in the direction the game wants you to go.

I have been attempting to ignore all this. I've been trying to skip around the gorgeous landscape, trilling "Hullo Flowers, Hullo Sky" in my best Fotherington-Thomas but it's not working.

Hello, Flowers!

There's my farm for one thing. My two farms. If I get too far away I worry I'll get lost and my Grassfox will wander off. Grassfoxes get anxious. An NPC told me they have been known to hold hands in the dark to stave off loneliness. Grassfoxes don't even have hands.

And there's the Murk. I don't know what it is but it's bad. I need sprites to clear it but I can't find any more sprites and I don't have enough. The big patch down by the water is a sixteen sprite job. I only have eight.

I haven't seen a sprite for a while but I've seen a lot of cats. There was a patch yesterday and more cats came. The patch notes said "Added surplus cats to the world". Surplus cats! Now I hear them mewing everywhere.

I could jump off cliffs all day!

Trees. There's another thing that's changed. Before yesterday's patch I was blithely chopping down trees, stump and all, then planting the seeds I found in the circles that crop up occasionally in the grass. That gave me a nice, satisfying increment to a counter for Trees Planted in the region. It felt like I was making progress. Making a difference. Doing Something Good.

Post-patch, I discover via a pop-up that each tree I cut down decrements a counter for Trees Growing in the region. It's a zero sum game! So much for progress. Now I just chop the trees and leave the stump, which apparently still counts as a Tree, but I don't get any Seeds so my planting has come to a dead stop.

Worst of all, I have no home. Oh, I have a Farm. I have two Farms. They come complete with cosy farmhouses whose windows glow cheerily through the dark nights but I can't go inside. There are no opening doors in Gemea.

I can't lie down. I can't even sit on the soft, lush grass. That's to say, it looks soft and lush but how would I know? I can't touch it. I can only reap it for Fodder.

Last night I slept in the archway outside my own home. Standing up. My animals can lie down but I can't. They have pens. They can go inside. They can lie down. Meanwhile, I can't even get into my own house. Is that fair? Is that right?

At least it's safe to sleep out. There's no Combat in Yonder. None at all. Don't take that to mean there isn't Adventure or Action, though. In my opinion there's almost too much. I've been running from place to place clearing Murk, talking to Wizards, fixing ferries and generally adventuring away like there's no tomorrow.

Excuse me? Miss! Could you stop slacking and Solve My Problem? Please?

Only there's always a tomorrow. Days flick by like minutes. Years flick past like days. I'm always On The Clock and there's no time to relax and no place to relax in. It's busy busy busy all the way.

Something about Yonder reminds me of Landmark but Landmark was zen meditation compared to this. If Landmark had had this focus perhaps we'd all still be playing it.

Inventory space: that's a major issue. There's a storage chest at each farm but I have to go to the farm to get anything out of it and there is no means of travel other than jogging everywhere at a fixed speed. There's extensive crafting but every recipe requires a range of things that have to be bought from vendors in specific villages or stations, which means a lot of jogging.

Or you can forage the raw materials and make them yourself, which takes up more inventory space and requires even more jogging. Oh, and did I mention there's no money? All trade happens by barter, which eats up still more inventory space.

Oh, I'm...off to see the wizard... Like it or not. Just look at those lighting effects though.

If it sounds as though I don't like Yonder, well that's wrong. Very wrong. I like it a lot.

It's genuinely lovely to look at. The weather and lighting effects are some of the best I've ever seen - so good you can't wait for a thunderstorm so you can watch the rain sweep in or for night to fall so you can get your lantern out and play with shadows.

The characters are delightful. I connected with mine immediately. I love the way she runs, the way she looks, the way she dresses. The animations are solid and satisfying. Chopping trees is a never-ending pleasure.

Follow me, fox. No need for us both to sleep out in the rain tonight. Sniff...

The animals are cute and cuddly but of course they are. Everything is cute and/or cuddly in Yonder. There's a great deal to love about the game. I expect to keep playing it for a good, long time. Just not for relaxation. When I step into Gemea I know there'll be work to be done and I'll be the one doing it.

Better get on with it, then, hadn't I?

Short Attention Span

"Of course, all of this means EverQuest II and the Fallen Gate server will drop by the wayside as I jump games after a month yet again".

Wilhelm at TAGN

Ah, yes. "All of this". It's a problem, that's for sure.

In March I was enthusing about returning to Lord of the Rings Online. That didn't last.

In April I was thundering through Twin Saga  on a turtle until FFXIV's endless free trial shouldered it out of the spotlight for a while.

Along the way I took the unusual step of buying Tanzia, a game that plays like an MMO but isn't. I barely even wrote about that one but I did play it quite a bit before yet another distraction came along.

I ended up enjoying Secret Worlds Legends more than I thought I would, although many of my original reservations remain. (For a more considered take on the problematic nature of this ill-conceived revamp, read Karinshastha's excellent review) but, much though I wanted to get to the end of the story, something else soon caught my eye and it was off to Norrath once again.

Did it stop there? No, of course it didn't. This weekend I found myself dithering between two new possibilities. Dark and Light appeared unexpectedly on Steam and Yonder cropped up on several blogs I follow.

I vaguely remember D&L from its original, disastrous launch as an MMO back in 2006. I didn't pay it much attention then and I hadn't been taking much more notice of the revamp but I visited the website and it looked somewhat intriguing.

Given that I'd been speculating about what a hybrid Survival/MMO might look like only a few weeks ago, it seemed churlish to ignore one when it came along. I got as far as reading some of the Steam reviews but while I was there I also took a look at what people were saying about Yonder.

It was neck and neck for a while but in the end it was Yonder's delicate footprint that nudged ahead. D&L is a 50GB download; Yonder is less than a tenth of that.

So I ponied up my £15 and downloaded Yonder, which took less than five minutes. That was on Saturday and I was working Sunday but Steam tells me I've already played for four hours. I would have guessed longer but time seems to drift when I'm exploring Gemea.

Posts specifically about Yonder may or may not follow. There's an awful lot I could say. It's as gorgeous as I was led to believe but nowhere near as relaxing. In some ways it's not so much an Explorer's dream as an Achiever's tick-list. I certainly wasn't was expecting so many quests, let alone a central storyline.

Perhaps we'll get back to that in a proper review sometime - or a First Impressions piece at least. Or maybe we won't because the next cab's already pulling away from the rank.

Tomorrow the Living Story Season 3 Finale drops. Titled "One Path Ends" it supposedly takes us back to Orr. Once the dust settles everyone's expecting the official announcement of GW2's second expansion, which so rumor has it, could be with us as soon as the end of September.

That's going to push everything else off the table for a while. Looks like I won't have time to take advantage of the Level 105 boost that comes with LotRO's imminent Mordor expansion after all. Maybe I'll ask for that one for my birthday in November.

Except, that's when the still-under-wraps EQ2 expansion will probably appear...most likely right on top of the XPack for GW2 (which I don't for one moment believe will land in September - at least I hope not, because I'll be in Italy then...)

Anyway, getting Legion for my birthday last year didn't work out so well. I still haven't found a window for WoW.

Remember when we used to talk about Three-Monthers? Ah, those were the days!