Coming Back To Wuthering Waves or How Can I Miss You If I Never Go Away?

The main problem with having played fifty hours of Once Human in two weeks and having written several thousand words about the experience is that it's left precious little time for anything else. Before all that, I was perfectly content with Wuthering Waves. I feel like I ought to apologize to my Resonators for ghosting them. It wasn't like they - or the game - did anything wrong.

The tide has yet to turn on my obsession with Starry's survival MMORPG but today I did at least manage to tear myself away for long enough to log into Wuthering Waves, finish some quests and reach Union Level 30. I also took a whole bunch of screenshots because damn! this game is beautiful!

I don't have a big essay to write about it (Waits for the cheering to die down...) but I would like to share a few of those shots with a comment or two on both the process and the content.

In particular, I'd like to praise the game's exemplary screenshot functions. Both of them. There's one of those stop-everything-and-pose-for-a-picture features that allow you to change the focal length, lighting and so on so you can get the shot just right without having to wait for the right time of day or whatever. 

Those are great for serious compositions but you always have to go into the UI and fiddle with the controls to get things set up and that's not so good for quick snaps or action shots. Luckily, there's also a camera you can get from the storyline and add to the selectable wheel menu you control by a single press of the "T" key. 

You can T-bind a grapple or a sensor and a few other devices as well as the camera and I imagine most people do but I have the camera selected most of the time. It comes in handy when I turn a corner and happen on something like this...

That's two gigantic bears locked in a vicious battle to the death. When I first spotted them going at it, there was some human or other in the middle of it  but whoever they were, they didn't last long. The bears finished them off then turned on each other. 

I absolutely love it when games have hidden animosities or factions that pit certain creatures against each other when they meet but it's going above and beyond to set things up so even two of the same species can start a ruck. Or maybe it was friendly fire in the original fight that started it, which is something I enjoy seeing even more.

As you can see from the second shot, these two were really going at each other. Those are some great facial expressions. What I didn't get a shot of was my character running back to a nearby node that had an exploding rock she could pick up and throw. There are lots of those all over the place. It's a mechanic designed for a kind of physical puzzle but you can chuck the rock at anything. 

I chucked it at the bears. It exploded and did damage so I kept doing it to see if they'd notice and come for me. The rock reappears instantly on its spot after it's been used so I just kept throwing it until the bears were almost dead. 

Not that my rocks were responsible. I wasn't even doing enough damage to draw their attention away from each other. They were evenly matched so they both got to about five percent health at the same time, at which point I jogged over and killed them both. That's what I call entertainment!

This is the Great Banyan. It was corrupted somehow and I cleansed it. Here I am, admiring my handiwork. I forget the exact details because I started the quest before Once Human and didn't finish it until today.

A slightly unusual feature of Wuthering Waves I really like are the regional quests to cleanse large areas from some kind of corruption, after which you really get to see them change. There was one region that was so polluted with some gaseous chemical that drained your health really fast if you even tried to pass through on the way to somewhere else. I died the first time I went there because I didn't notice just how bad the pollution was.

It's very satisfying to see places like that change into really lovely, scenic countryside and stay that way. That's the big advantage single-player or co-op games have over true MMOs: the developers don't have to fudge permanent change with awkward workarounds like phasing that never really seem to work.

And finally, something that can often be an under-rated feature in many games: player-character resting animations. In Wuthering Waves they're seriously good. There's spoken dialog with some of the animations, too, and that's almost always charming.

Given that they're something you end up looking at one whole hell of a lot, it's always a pleasure when the artists have really taken some trouble over them, which they very much have here. Encore is especially fun to watch when she's doing nothing. Her fighting style involves summoning a couple of pets she calls "Woolies", little stuffed toys that fly around and do a lot of damage. When they're not fighting, they vanish into some other dimension but if Encore isn't doing anything in particular they have a tendency to pop out and try to get her to play with them.

In the shot above, she's spinning around, trying to get one of them to go back where it came from. But that's not even her best resting animation. This is:

After a while she just sits down on the ground and starts counting. Best of all, that's always what she's doing when you log her in. I dunno, maybe I'm easily pleased but this sort of thing is worth more to me than a good boss fight. It's what makes the characters sing.

Hmm. Now there's an idea ...

Journey's End or Are We Nearly There Yet?

I'm going to begin with a quote from Kaylriene's excellent post entitled "Losing My Way With Lost Ark", in which he nails a number of reasons why the game just isn't working for him the way it seems to be working for others.

"...I can only play for an hour before feeling a sense of ennui and aimlessness..."

Me too. It's a strange sensation. I find myself wanting to play but when I do I find it hard to remember why. Being bored while playing a game I chose to play is a very unusual sensation for me, possibly a unique one. I'm generally very good at knowing when I'm having a good time. When I'm not, I stop.

With Lost Ark, for some reason, I don't. I keep going. I've only played for six hours so far but I know I'll play some more today after I finish writing this. I'll probably play at least one session every day this week. There's an odd pull to the game that I can't figure out and that I don't much like. It almost feels like an unhealthy compulsion.

Partly it's that, as Kaylriene says, people who like the game a lot more than I do keep saying it gets much better, later. But how much later? Certainly not at level fifteen or eighteen or whatever my character's at right now. That mere fact that I can't even remember what level it is speaks to my lack of engagement. 

Really? Maybe you'd let the rest of us in on it, then.

 

Isn't it a lot to ask, that a player trudge through thirty or forty levels of tedium before the game gets good? Well, yes, but it's a demand many mmorpgs make. It would be unfair to single Lost Ark out for particular opprobrium on that score alone.

Kaylriene, at least, has the comfort of thoroughly enjoying the combat, which he believes has plenty to teach its supposed role-model and progenitor, Diablo. I don't have that lifebelt to cling to. 

I loathe the combat in Lost Ark. I have never liked ARPG combat since the first time I encountered it in Dungeon Siege, one of the most disappointing purchases I have ever made, so I wasn't expecting to but it's even worse than I imagined it would be. If I already objected to the fundemental concept of ARPG combat, the implementation here just gives me more reason to dislike it.

My starting point is that ARPG combat is infantile and inane. It's mechanical to a disturbing degree: faceless, souless mobs feeding themselves into the maw of your whirling weapons or blazing spells, like cattle mindlessly charging towards the abattoir gates. Making that process, as Kaylriene puts it, skill-dense, really doesn't improve matters. It just makes it annoying and fiddly as well as stupid. 

Listen kid, don't start complaining. At leas she lets you wear flats.

The odd thing about the way Lost Ark plays, though, is that during the side quests, when NPCs ask for the usual help with things they should be sorting out for themselves, the ARPG combat almost goes away. Instead of a counter that asks you to kill eighty or a hundred mobs, you're tasked with killing three or five. You fight them individually and it feels like any other mmorpg.

When Lost Ark is like that I quite enjoy it. There are still many reasons why I enjoy it less than most other mmorpgs doing the same thing but it is at least tolerable, sometimes even fun, for a short while. 

It's better still, when there's no combat at all. The best time I had with the game on Saturday, the last time I played, (I was working all day Sunday and then writing a blog post in the evening.) was when I was sent all over the first town to talk to various NPCs in order to learn about some of the game's many systems.

That, however, only happened after a bizarre and extremely unpleasant Main Quest sequence, involving a truly ridiculous amount of slaughter. The entire town was invaded by an army of demons and put to the torch. Literally the whole town was ablaze. The streets were full of demons and the buildings were all on fire. The townsfolk were cowering in terror as well they should have been. There was a face-off in the cathedral between the forces of Evil and Maybe-Going-To-Be-Evil-Later and then... 

I can't help but imagine a couple of seven-year olds gripping those characters, yelling "Pew! Pew! You're dead!", "No I'm not. You are!"

 ...and then it all stopped. The town was back to normal as if nothing had happened. To be strictly fair, there was some ambient dialog that referred to the events but there was no damage to the buildings, no-one seemed to have died. All the markets and the bars were open and it was business as usual.

The emotional effect that had on me was exceptionally confusing. I was very pleased the town was back to what it was. I had been expecting to emerge from the cathedral to a smoking ruin and the prospect was seriously pissing me off, so the relief was palpable.

On the other hand, I'd hated the whole event as it was happening. I found the fighting onerous and dull and it took far too long. Having gone through all that just for the whole thing to be wiped away as if it had never happened made me feel, even more intensely than while it was happening, that I'd wasted twenty minutes of my life, time I could more valuably have spent doing just about anything else. 

Would that be "hottest" as in "charred by hell-fire"? Or do you mean... wait, I don't think I want to know.

 

These are not the kinds of feelings for which I come to video games in general or mmorpgs in particular. In the case of Lost Ark, I feel the core problem is that it's two entirely different genres, roughly and thoughtlessly hammered together.

As Kaylriene says, that is "not a model for sustainable gameplay." He would like to get rid of all the mmorpg trappings and turn Lost Ark into a pure ARPG. I feel just the opposite. It seems to me that there might be a half-way decent mmorpg in there, somewhere, although I wouldn't go much further than that. I'd quite like to see it given the chance to breathe, without the ARPG combat buggering everything up at every turn.

Even then, though, I very much doubt it would be an mmorpg I'd want to play for long. I have almost as much of a problem with the graphics as I do the combat. I don't believe 2.5D isometric graphics are the best choice for mmorpg gameplay but given free camera movement I can just about get past that. With a fixed camera, though, it's really not a tenable proposition. 

Like almost every screenshot I've taken, this is from a cut scene. It's about the only time I can really see what I'm looking at.

 

There's an opinion I've seen expressed that Lost Ark is a beautiful game. Is it, though? I find it hard to say because I can't see most of it. It's too small to make out the details when you're fighing or travelling but if you stop and pull in the focus for a close look you can only see what's directly in front of you. 

About the only time I get any real idea what I'm looking it at is when I click on one of the Vistas, which work exactly like their namesakes in Guild Wars 2. Then the camera spirals and swoops and behaves like a normal camera should, adding insult to injury for a few seconds. For some reason, those panoramic views are always slightly blurred, possibly to obfuscate the generic and bland scenery they reveal.

I've also noticed already that there's some heavy reuse of art assets in the set design. I know all mmorpgs do it but it usually takes a lot longer than this before I notice. I suspect Lost Ark's no worse in that respect than, say, Black Desert or Bless Unleashed, or any of the other worlds where oil paintings lean in stacks against the walls of every market town but the lack of any opportunity to swivel the camera up, down or around to look at the environment as a whole only serves to emphasize the repetition. 

Okay, that's an art asset I can really appreciate.

 

The maps I've seen so far are also extremely linear. They remind me very much of the ones from the first iteration of Final Fantasy XIV, before it was re-tooled into A Realm Revisited. They're all mazes with hard walls to stop you straying. They might as well be dungeons with the roofs taken off. If this is supposed to be a world it definitely doesn't feel like one, more like a series of outdoor rooms.

It's true you are free to explore. I tried dropping the main quest and wandering around a few times. It's unrewarding. There's little to see and even less to do. Except for the NPCs offering quests there are no interactables in the environment. I understand gathering plays a part eventually but at this stage there are no nodes to cause the kinds of distraction Kaylriene complains of.

Other things he has bad things to say about include the community and the character animations. I can't comment on the first for the simple reason that virtually the only "conversation" I've seen since the moment I set foot in the game has been a seamless scroll of gold spam. Very occasionally a single sentence about something other than selling silver or gold will bob to the surface for a moment, before being swept away on the tide of illegal currency trading.

As for the animations, I quite liked the way my character moved until watched her walk away. At first I almost laughed. It was so outrageously camp. When you appreciate the context, however, as Kaylriene points out in some detail, it really isn't funny at all. It is indeed a "completely unrealistic, objectified, and very odd way to walk." Even if you don't find it subjectively offensive or gender-politically unacceptable, both of which I do, the fact that it's the only option available most definitely makes it objectively terrible game design.

All of these factors and many more make it seem extremely unlikely that, even if the game does ever, as promised, open out into some kind of free-roaming, gathering-focused sandbox, it would be one I'd choose to spend much time with. I already have a game that does all of that, but it also lets me choose from dozens more different body-types, decide freely on my own gender identity, walk how I please, including skipping, all while I swing the camera every which way so I can fully appreciate the beautiful world around me. How Lost Ark is meant to compete with all of that I can't imagine.

As for the seemingly never-ending torrent of systems and mechanics that Kaylriene describes as "incredibly overwhelming" and "a bit too much", I'm not quite so bothered about them. For my own tastes I'd separate those into categories of desire or disdain. 

The combat-related ones I find largely unappealing and unwelcome in their complexity but then I rarely find combat skill trees interesting in any mmorpg. The currencies are mildly annoying but I've seen much worse. Ditto the login rewards. The rest of the plethora of systems as outlined at some length in Kaylriene's post seem to me to be very much on a par with just about every other imported mmorpg I've played in the last few years. That's the genre, like it or not.

I don't even find the systems to be particularly poorly explained. Lost Ark probably does as good a job of it as most games of this ilk. The difference, from my perspective, is that whereas I've found the same things fascinating in other games, food for thought and the basis for numerous lengthy blog posts picking apart their complexities, in Lost Ark I can't seem to summon up anything like the same degree of enthusiasm. It has a lot of systems but so what? If I'm not engaged with the game in the first place, why do I care?

Lack of engagement and boredom, those seem to be the key identifiers. And yet I haven't stopped playing. Then again, looking back as I was yesterday, it's clear it generally takes more than a couple of sessions before I give up on an mmorpg altogether. I'm not sure Lost Ark is any more mysteriously tempting than any of those. It's just new and people are talking about it so it has a potency that doesn't relate all that specifically to its own merits.  

Based on prior experience, I'd say for me the tipping point lies some way ahead. I can be stubborn about these things so if I want to see whether the game really does change character once you can sail a boat and the world supposedly opens up, I'll most likely keep playing until I get there, if only out of sheer bloody-mindedness. I do feel, from what other people whose opinions I respect have said, that it would be unfair to come to a judgment before then.

I'd be happy to get to that point and find they were right.  It would be great if Lost Ark were to turn into a game I could really appreciate and enjoy. To arrive at a destination like that would go some way to justifying the hours I'd spent getting there. 

I'm as guilty as anyone for trotting out the old saw about the journey being more important than the destination but that does rely on the journey not being a crashing bore from start to finish. Sometimes its only the prospect of what might come when the journey's over at last that keeps you going to the end.

They Rot Your Brain. You Know It's True.

I mentioned a while ago how I'd been watching some animated shows on Netflix, mostly Western-style animations but also some anime, about which I know next to nothing. Xyzzysqrl gave me some great suggestions on how to improve on my ignorance and I did follow some of them up but the sheer effort of having to go to a different platform to watch was enough to make me drop off the back of that particular wagon pretty darn fast. I am lazy and easily dissuaded by anything that feels like work.

A couple of days ago I was having a mini-discussion with Tyler F.M. Edwards in the comments at Superior Realities over the merits of the Star Trek spin-off cartoon Lower Decks (I think it has some, Tyler disagrees.) and it occured to me that over the last year or so I have at least tried to watch more animated TV shows than at any time since the mid-90s. I don't always stick with them but it gives me the flavor, at least.

As I may have mentioned about a hundred times, I like making lists. I also like writing capsule reviews or, if you prefer, making so-called smart remarks that I think are funny, even if no-one else does. Despite having my own blog, on which I ought to be able to write anything I want, I still don't seem to be able to come up with as many excuses to indulge myself along those lines as you'd think. This is one of them.

I thought about trying to do something serious and insightful with all of this but then I thought why bother? So here they are, all the cartoons (Do we still use that word? I don't seem to see it much any more.) that I've watched or tried to watch since the last time I did this. Not in any order, unless there's some shape or form to the Netflix algorithm that's passed me by, something that seems quite likely now I come to think of it.

Currently watching:

The Hollow - (Season One) - "Three teen strangers awaken in a dangerous world and try to make sense of what connection they have to each other as they attempt to make it out alive." - I had no idea this was Canadian until I looked it up on IMDB. Amazing how many things I like turn out to be from Canada. I've always quite fancied living there although not just so I could watch Canadian TV. I can do that from here. 

The Hollow has likeable characters. I took to them from the start. It also has a good, albeit well-worn, premise that made me want to keep watching, if only to find out what the hell was going on. Supposed to be "for kids" but seems equally suitable for immature adults. I get the feeling it might remind me of Lost if I'd ever seen it, which I have not. I also realize as I write this that I'm almost at the end of the first season and I still don't have the slightest idea why it's called "The Hollow"...

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts - (Season One) - "A girl explores the possibilities in a post-apocalyptic world." Produced by Dreamworks and about as good as that would suggest. Excellent characterization, very good voice acting, smart dialog, funny lines, solid, well-constructed plot. The animation is good but the background art is even better. The story has a moral dimension that doesn't feel forced because it grows organically out of the characters and their developing relationships. Really enjoyable and highly recommended.

Disenchantment  (Season Four) - "Princess Tiabeanie, 'Bean', is annoyed at her imminent arranged marriage to Prince Merkimer. Then she meets Luci, a demon, and Elfo, an elf, and things get rather exciting, and dangerous." - That's the Season One blurb. It seems so long ago. I'd actually forgotten Bean was called Tiabeanie until I copy-pasted that from IMDB. I love this show so much I literally bought the tee-shirt. Tee shirts, plural. Three different designs, no less. We're on Season Four now and I'm not quite convinced it's as strong as the previous three. I can't quite see what the season arc is this time around but I still have several episodes to watch so I mustn't pre-judge. Still superior to anything else in its class, anyway.

Watched all the way to the end:

Lower Decks (Seasons One and Two) - "The support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos, have to keep up with their duties, often while the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies." - I'm no kind of Star Trek fan. I wasn't going to watch this at all even though Amazon seemed determined I should. It's the only Amazon Prime show on this list, Netflix having hoovered up every other animated series since the dawn of time, which is possibly why they were so insistent on me seeing it. 

I was resisting, staunchly, when I read a passing comment in a post at the (Now sadly dormant) Legion of Super Bloggers. One of the writers was bemoaning yet another ruinous version of the LSH, contrasting it with Lower Decks as an example of a spin-off that gave due respect to the original IP. Since I've found myself to be in general agreement with the opinions expressed there, I thought I'd give it a go after all. Nothing like a personal recommendation. Honestly, though, I have such a vague understanding of what Star Trek is supposed to be I doubt I'd be able to tell if any given iteration was "true to the spirit" of Gene Roddenberry's vision. With that noted, I can say that Lower Decks is a great animated show in its own right. 

It's smart, funny, intelligent, well-observed and has some thoroughly likeable characters, who grow and change visibly throughout the course of the two seasons. The stories manage to be both complete and satisfying in the individual episodes and also fit convincingly into larger arcs that feel organic and unforced. It's certainly the tightest, most focused, most satisfying Star Trek show I've seen, although as I said I'm anything but a fan of the IP, let alone an expert on it. I'd recommend Lower Decks to people who previously haven't thought all that much of Star Trek. Whether actual Trek fans would enjoy it or not is a different question.

Kid Cosmic (Season Three) - "A young boy who dreams of becoming a hero, stumbles across some cosmic stones of power. His dreams appear to have come true". - Sadly, this was the final season. I could have watched more. At least it all came to a very satisfying conclusion with no loose ends and everything wrapped up convincingly. The whole Season Three arc was very cleverly handled. To say more would be to give too much away. A really top-class show throughout; great characters, great animation, consistently funny and with some of the best music of any cartoon I've ever seen. There was a different, original song at the end of every show and I watched to the end of the credits every time just to hear it. I'd buy a soundtrack album.

Saturday Morning All Star Hits! - A live action/cartoon hybrid with some connection to Saturday Night Live that I was totally unaware of until I wrote this post. Paul Rudd and Emma Stone feature in the voice acting. Didn't know that either. It's a very specific, I want to say loving, parody of eighties and nineties Saturday Morning TV and when I say specific I mean actual shows (Care Bears, Thundercats...) not just the genre as a whole. 

Given how American the context is supposed to be, I found it extremely familiar. Not only did we get most of the same shows (Maybe not Denver the Last Dinosaur - never heard of that one and I can't say I'm sorry I missed it, based on this.) but we had presenters with much the same attitude and appearance as Skip and Treybor. When I started watching, I thought it was going to be too annoying to stick with but it's very skilfully paced. Everything changes just subtly enough and just soon enough to keep you invested in the story and the characters, both the live action and the animated segments.

The Polygon review makes a point of stressing just how age-critical SMASH is and I suspect they have a point. If you didn't watch this stuff growing up it probably won't have quite the intended effect. That said, I was a grown adult when I watched the Saturday Morning cartooms in the eighties, usually with a hangover from the Friday night and it worked for me. Recommended to anyone of a certain age and anyone who likes scabrous parodies.

Started but didn't finish:

Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese - "Following the adventures of two families as they come together under one roof." Is it? Is it really? Can't say I got that from the one episode I watched. It was the title that hooked me, obviously. I watched the first episode and enjoyed it but I haven't watched another. It's about as manic as you'd expect from that title. The characters seemed not just anarchic but quite unpleasant at times although you can't really judge from a single episode. Often they soften. It's some kind of international production and it was first aired on the BBC. Probably not going to watch any more.

Johnny Test - "The adventures of average suburban boy Johnny Test, who wittingly plays test subject for his genius twin sisters' various experiments, reluctantly fighting evil villains in the process." Nice use of "wittingly" there. Respect! This one's really old, like more than fifteen years old. Prehistoric, even. Once again, the title lured me in with its obvious reference to Johnny Quest, another even more ancient show I never really watched, so why that worked I have no clue... Once again, one episode was enough. Nothing wrong with it but you probably need to be about nine years old and stuck in the past.

Aggretsuko - "Frustrated with her thankless office job, the 25-year-old red panda copes with her daily struggles by belting out heavy metal karaoke after work." Come on, you'd watch that! It's anime, it's metal and I was really out of my comfort zone not to mention my depth. I did like it, kind of, but boy was it loud. And spiky. Can't say I wasn't warned. I managed three episodes: there are four seasons. I don't think I can cope with much more but I'll probably try anyway. It was pretty good.

Super Crooks - "Johnny Bolt recruits a group of ragtag supervillains for one last heist. Their target: A ruthless super-powered crime boss. What can go wrong?" Anime again, although this felt much more like a traditional American Saturday morning cartoon, if you ignore the death count. It was perfectly comfortable to watch. I just didn't think it was very interesting. Or good. I managed a couple of episodes and that was probably one too many.

And that's about it. I've looked at many, many more - Netflix is stuffed like a sausage with these kinds of shows - but so far nothing's sucked me in. Something will, though, you can bet on it. When it does, I'll be sure to come back and tell you about it.

He's Not A Bad Dog. He's Just Drawn That Way.

Anyone remember Dogs in Space, the 1986 Australian movie directed by Richard Lowenstein, known, according to his IMDB entry, for "He Died with a Felafel in His Hand". Really, guys? You're sure that's what he was known for? 

It starred Michael Hutchence, known about equally for being the lead singer of INXS and the lover of Paula Yates, aka "Bob Geldof's Wife" or "Her off The Tube". Ah, the eighties, eh?

Yes, well, there's no reason why you should, really. It wasn't a very successful move into acting for Hutchence. Again, as IMDB puts it, "Michael attempted a film career, but his first film Dogs in Space (1986) earned an 'R' rating, completely alienating it from teenagers, its intended audience."

I saw it around the time it was released. I can't honestly remember now whether I saw it at the cinema or only at home on VHS. I know I had the tape at one time. I remember watching it although I can't remember an awful lot about the film itself, mostly one long party scene in a squat/student house with a lot of drinking, drug-taking and some moderately good music on the soundtrack.

Back in the eighties and nineties I was keen on films like that. They don't seem quite so endearing now. I strongly suspect that to fully enjoy watching such scenes of debauchery and nihilistic, self-destructive hedonism you have to be either drunk or drugged yourself. Or both. All kinds of trigger warnings on the clip, by the way.

So, why am I mentioning it now? Funny you should ask.

I was idly browsing through the "New to Netflix" section a while ago when I happened on something called, you guessed it, Dogs in Space. I immediately thought of the movie and then, a microsecond later, of the Muppets' Star Trek parody, Pigs in Space. (Pigs.... In.... Spaaaace!!") I imagine that's what the show's creators were thinking of, too. I hope so, anyway.

Of the two, Netflix' Dogs in Space is far closer to the Muppets than Michael Hutchence and his degenerate pals. It's an animated show (I'm guessing we don't call them "cartoons" any more?) featuring a bunch of dogs in a spaceship. Literal, much?

Seeing it there made me curious. When did animation become such a major part of mainstream television? It's always made up a huge proportion of children's programming, of course, but when I was growing up, animated shows for adults, or even ones suitable for collective family viewing (Remember that?) were rare. 

"Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home" is the first one I remember being touted as something new, a primetime cartoon specifically aimed at an adult audience (As opposed to, say, The Flintstones, which was fun for all the family but in a somewhat "Let's indulge the kids and watch what they're watching" kind of way.) It was the only US animated show to run in the evenings that got more than one series until The Simpsons arrived in 1989. WTYFGH ended in 1974 so it took a quarter of a century for the concept to catch on.

After Matt Groening kicked them down, I guess the doors were open for good. I begged off television from about 1998 until five years ago so I missed the whole sea change, when TV overtook movies as the new, serious medium for the visual arts. 

When I backed away there were already plenty of animated shows that seemed to be intended for what we now euphemistically call "young adults" - Ren and Stimpy comes immediately to mind, not to mention Beavis and Butthead - but they and the few more genuinely adult-oriented shows, like the downbeat, depressive King of the Hill, were firmly on the margins, tucked away in niche time slots or minority channels. Now, they're everywhere, at least on Netflix. On broadcast TV? I don't know! Who watches that?

Even as I type I'm aware I'm skipping over the anime deluge, which is like reviewing Jaws without mentioning the shark. I'm very much not qualified even to speculate on anime or how it fits in to any narrative after about 1990. I was there for what must presumably have been the opening of the non-specialist market to the concept of Japanese animation but I bowed out, without much grace, just about as soon as I could make my excuses.

 

I remember seeing Akira on its UK television debut, when a very big fuss was made of it. I also remember not being very impressed. It was alright but I coudn't see what the fuss was all about. 

At that time I would have counted myself a low-key animation fan. I watched cartoons and animated movies, I read books about animators and animation studios and I even wrote an article or two about the topic in comics fanzines once in a while. 

I was in that happy position of being the ignorant expert in a group of genuine ignoramuses (Ignorami?) when it came to animation. Comics fans, as parochial and elitist as most self-appointed keeprs of a flame, tended to look askance at any lesser artforms that threatened to impinge on their self-appointed preserve. You could look like you knew a lot just by dropping a few names. They didn't even have to be the right ones so long as you did it with sufficient confidence. A bit like here, really.

Anime put a stop to all that. I'm still not entirely sure why although I suspect it has something to do with the kind of visuals TV cartoons don't usually allow. Whatever the reason, a subset of my comic-reading contemporaries seemed keen on adopting an attitude to anime that was very different to their interest (or lack thereof) in classic Hanna Barbera cartoons. Almost without exception, the most vocal and enthusiastic among them were the very people I usually did all I could to avoid having to talk to at any length at conventions or marts. I quickly developed the impression that whatever this new variant was, it wasn't for me.

And it still isn't, even though I've long since lost that particular set of prejudices, along with any contact with the people from whom I acquired them. My new problem is, I think, that I'm just too old. Or possibly too English.

I can't follow anime-style narrative very well. It jumps about too much and seems to assume you can fill in the blanks. I used to have the same issues with live-action movies that used those super-fast jump-cuts that were all the rage in the twenty-oughts. Fortunately that fad seems to have passed for live action but it feels like it's going strong in the small amount of anime I've watched. Of course, those may be a decade old...

Age, origin and genre don't seem to figure much in Netflix's suggestion algorithm, which certainly doesn't make much of a differentiation between animation styles. It doesn't even really seem to care whether the actors in the shows and movies it suggests have two dimensions or three. There is one strand that's all animation but animated shows and films pop up everwhere. Reading the descriptions rarely tells me anything I can get a grip on. If I'm interested, the only way to find out if there's really anything there is to watch an episode.

So far I've tried F is for Family, Kid Cosmic, Disenchantment, Bojack Horseman, Tear Along the Dotted Line, Trollhunters/Wizards/3Below (Tales form Arcadia), BNA, Dogs in Space, X-Men (Japanese edition) and, of course, Bojack Horseman. 

 

I didn't do any of them any favors by watching Bojack first. That was a bit like getting into alt rock by listening to the first four Velvet Underground albums. If anyone knows another animated show that's even twenty-five per cent as strong as Bojack Horseman, please don't keep it to yourself.

Next best on that list, without any doubt, would be Disenchantment. I like it so much, for my birthday I asked for three different t-shirts featuring various characters and got them all. Now I just have to wait for next summer before people can see me wearing any of them, which is, of course, why I wanted them in the first place. Apparently I've learned nothing in the way of sophistication or self-control since I was fifteen. However much I like the show, however, it doesn't seem to be enough for me to get the name right. I keep calling it Disenchanted, which I actually think would be a better title. The writing is subtle, the characters convincing, the stories compelling and the animation supple. Looking forward very much to the next season.

Very close behind Disenchantment comes the Tales from Arcadia trilogy. Created for Netflix by Guillermo del Toro and produced by him, too, it's predictably well-written, coherent and smart with gorgeous CGI work. It's also solidly in the tradition of children's animation, which has a much higher quality threshold, so in effect it's even better than I'm making it sound. Top notch primetime tween/teen TV and plenty for adults to enjoy, too.

After that things get patchier. The first season of Kid Cosmic was highly enjoyable, not least the music parodies over the credits, but the second was a disappointment. It wasn't bad but it had a strong "We didn't really expect to get a second season and now we have no idea what to do with the characters" vibe about it. Might pick up in the third, if there is one, once the writers have gotten used to the idea they have to keep going. The animation is the highlight here: good enough in itself to make the show worth watching. Very much an homage to the classic 1950s/60s look with enough contemporary zazz to make it much more than a retro wannabe.

F is for Family is disorienting. It's like a twisted reboot of Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home, set in a peculiarly dour vision of the 1970s with a lot of edgy swearing to no obvious purpose. The animation is of a kind with the tone; flat, deflated, tired, albeit knowingly so. There are five seasons of it, the final one of which is either just about to end or has just ended. I've only watched a few episodes of the first season. I found it hard going, not because it isn't good but because it isn't fun. It's bleak and draining. It might be worth pursuing but I'd need to be in the mood.

Tear Along the Dotted Line is very odd. It's an Italian production that appears to have been dubbed into English by one person, who doesn't do voices. It's a very odd conceit. It works because, structurally, the entire narrative is subjective, seen from the point of view of the protagonist. He literally says, in the first episode, he can't remember what his quasi-girlfriend Alice sounds like so her voice is him, talking like a robot through some kind of vocoder. His female friend, Sarah, he just voices as himself and for his other pal, Secco, he puts on a Welsh accent even as he explains he can't do accents.  Once again, it's very sweary and extremely downbeat but somehow that doesn't detract from a certain joyous exuberance. It's also occasionally very funny. The animation is way more "European" than anything else on this list, if you know what I mean. It has a kind of roundedness and a lot of grubby edges. It's also very political in a particularly Italian way. Overall, effective and engaging if a little unsettling.

BNA stands for... erm... hang on, I had it a moment ago... Brand New Animal! That's it! It's the only genuine anime series on my watchlist, having originated on Japanese TV before Netflix hoovered it up. It exemplifies my difficulties with the form. I really liked the first three episodes, even though they went very fast and darted about all over the place. The animation is full of attack and pace in the action scenes but comfortably relaxed in the conversational pieces. There are some lovely, subtle touches. 

 

Even though it's not as confusing or exhausting as it might be, I still have trouble following the plot. There was such a radical shift of tone in episode four I actually paused the stream and checked I hadn't somehow skipped a whole season. Then the entire premise of the show gets thrown under a bus and never referred to again and all the characters have complete personality changes. Disorienting barely scratches the surface. Even so, I will persevere. I really like the main character and the story, even when it makes absolutely no sense, keeps things rolling.

X-Men (That appears to be all the title it's getting.) is also a Japanese production, with the team flying to Japan in the first episode to investigate a clutch of mutant abductions. That's mutants being kidnapped not mutants doing the kidnapping, in case I didn't make it clear. Given it's an X-Men show I guess it could go either way. The animation is average to really horrible, looking like someone tried to do Todd McFarlane on the cheap. Or Rob Liefeld, even. That bad. The story, dialog and voice acting is okay, though, and it's the X-Men so you know what you're getting. Once an X-Fan, always an X-Fan, sad to say.

 

And that brings us back to where we began with Dogs in Space. DiS is an absolute joy. The pace is gentle and slow (Rather like the leader of the team, the hapless and unhappily-named Garbage.) All the dogs are both characterful and likeable with some great ensemble dynamics, very much like you'd get in a well-cast, well-developed live action sitcom. You definitely don't need to be a dog-lover to appreciate the dog jokes but I'd guess dog-lovers would dog-love it even more. The animation is tidy and functional, never spectacular or flashy. It's entirely appropriate to the tone and structure, which is basically sitcom, although halfway through the season, which is where I am, an unexpected and potentially dark undertone comes creeping in around the edges. 

I'd recommend Dogs in Space. I obviously don't need to recommend the multi-award-winning Disenchantment and Tales of Arcadia. They recommend themselves. The rest, taste them and try.

I imagine there will be plenty more animated shows popping up in my Netflix suggestions so there could be a Part Two  of this post someday. Odds on I'll watch quite a few. 

Oddly, Amazon Prime hardly ever pushes any animation my way. Maybe Netflix bought them all.

Defiant Pose : TSW

I kind of tired myself out, writing the last two lengthy EverQuest posts, which is why I skipped a day yesterday. I have several ideas for posts in mind but they all involve a lot of writing, possibly some research. Not sure I have the energy for that right now.

God put the sun there just for me.

Still, I don't want to get in the habit of skipping days. I was casting about for something short and succinct, when I thought of a post Mailvaltar put up about clothes and stats in The Secret World. By co-incidence, I recently swapped my desktop background to pull images from my folder of Secret World Legends screenshots, which reminded me just how great that game looks and how much I love my character there, as well as her fore-runner in its still-extant but almost forgotten predecessor.

Ripped jeans and mirror shades. My Sunday-go-to-church look.

Unusually, I really I only have the one character in each version of the game. I have tried to make others, not least so I could experience the world from the viewpoint of al three factions but it just didn't work. When SWL replaced TSW I remade my character as closely as the new options allowed.

What have I got in my hand? You'll never know.

As I've mentioned many times, I'm not in the habit of making characters in games that represent my self-image, at least not physically. Not in the way that, for example, Belghast would. I do create characters to stand in for certain personality traits I perceive myself as having or which I would like to believe I have, but I no more look like one of my Asuras or Ratongas than I ressemble a random toy plucked from the playbox.

Although playing TSW was Mrs. Bhagpus's idea in the first place, she never took to either the mechanics or the setting. I felt her character always looked a little uncomfortable.

The Secret World is very different. It's one of the very few MMORPGs I've played where I found a character that looked like me staring out of the screen at creation. If I was a few decades younger and female, that is.

I've got an itch.

We all probably carry some core identity inside us that remains broadly unchanged as we age. It would be precocious, precious even, to claim this was mine, what with me being a cisgender male, but where some of my other characters feel like me, my Secret World character looks like me, too. The me I might have been, anyway.

This is exactly how I would sit in real life. Cross-legged and on a roof.

It's not something that would have found expression in the kinds of video games I normally play. The heroic archetypes of traditional fantasy settings don't really lend themselves to any look I'd choose. Even futuristic worlds don't seem to provide the right templates. It requires something more contemporary. If I wasn't concerned about showing my age I'd say something more rock'n'roll.

"Inappropriate footwear"? Come here and say that!

As I said in a comment to Mailvaltar, "Clothing in TSW is just better-looking than any other game I’ve played and, extremely importantly and unusually, individual pieces fit better with other individual pieces than pretty much any other game." This is really significant. In most games I've played, if you want to put a look together that works you need to source most of the pieces from some kind of pre-designed set. It's restrictive and formulaic. (Ironically, TSW has those, too, and they're almost universally bad).

What did you say? Sorry, I had a crick in my neck.

Very skilled players can always circumvent those restrictions, go around them to find combinations that work. Mrs. Bhagpuss is brilliant at it. I'm not.

Are you following me, cat?

In The Secret World and its successor, the designers have done the prep for you. Very little you can wear clips or clashes or conflicts. Not everything you throw on is going to look good with everything else you're wearing but it will almost always look like that's because you don't know how to dress yourself, not because the clothes you've chosen conform to the physics of some alien dimension.

Excuse me, have any of you Jawas seen my droid?

The choice is amazing, too. As far as it goes. As Mailvaltar says, it's a great shame Funcom didn't choose to double down on what has to be one of the great strengths of their game and fill the cash shop with a torrent of new season designs every couple of months. Guild Wars 2, whose clothing options aren't even a pale shadow of TSW's, has been making bank on that for close to a decade now.

Well, if he didn't want to be stared at...

The clothes aren't the only reason I find my character so personally connectable and convincing in The Secret World. There's something about the way the characters inhabit their environment. It's naturalistic in a way that's subtle and unforced. They have body language that connects to some level of my understanding in a more nuanced manner than most games.

Yes, officer. I can walk in a straight line. I'll prove it to you now.

When I look at my character and at those of the players around me, it's not that they look normal or familiar or weird and outré. It's rather that they exude a heightened sense of reality. Everyone seems to be cooly conscious both of how they look and of how others see them. Every character seems to be the star of their own, private show.

It was this big. And it had wings...

 The game's camera colludes with the characters' self-awareness. I'm not sure I can think of another game where posing for screenshots seems so effortless, so inevitable. I have hundreds of shots with my character stage center, perfectly poised, holding the eye. These are the kind of poses I strive and struggle to strike in every game, often with sparse success, but in TSW everything seems to fall instantly into place.

The character animations, particularly the idling gestures and movements, are exceptionally rewarding in still photographs. Many of the shots look as though I'd triggered a specific emote to get the mood just right but no, it's not that. My character just knows the right moves. Also, I swear the at rest action stance is modelled on that iconic photograph of Patty Hearst.

One of the first songs I ever wrote was about Patty Hearst.

Anyway, I said I wanted to keep this short and I've already run on longer than I intended. The pictures tell the story.

I really ought to revisit The Secret World, too. The real one. I miss my true self.

Imperfect Is The New Perfect: Secondhand Lands

I thought I'd post a few screenshots of Secondhand Lands today. Last time I wrote about the game, Jeromai described the visuals in a comment as "the blob graphics of yesteryear". A reviewer on Steam, one who was otherwise very positive, went much further: "Its graphics were not impressive in 2008 or 2009, and time hasn't made it look any better. So if graphics matter very heavily to you, I will honestly suggest you don't try this game".

I really can't see it. Or, rather I can. I can see something rather charming and quite delightful.

Starting with the lighting, someone clearly has the same love for supersaturation as I do. When I'm posting screenshots here I often tweak the saturation a few notches to make the colors pop. Not going to need to do that for this game.

Sunsets and sunrises are spectacularly colorful. I've had to stop playing just to watch the sky change. At night it gets very dark. The stars come out in a glorious wash of distant nebulae. The moon is vast and ghostly.

Trees tower above the tiny characters. They seem lost in an enormous forest, as they should. It's a fairy tale. Ferns and grasses cover the forest floor. Half-forgotten tracks lead into the depths.

The limited field of view only adds to the sense of enclosure, mirroring that odd sense of outdoor claustrophobia so familiar from early EverQuest. It's by no means the only similarity between the two games. I'm well aware that much of my affection for Secondhand Lands derives from emotional connections to experiences I've had and cherished elsewhere but plenty of games have tried to stike those chimes and failed.

There's such character in these graphics. They pulse with personality. The animations on my Scrapper are joyous and yet his foxy features often ache with melancholy. He's so filled with life it makes me smile to watch him. I want to create one of every creature a Scrapper can be just to see if they're all the same or whether each has an internal life of their own.

I particularly love the way his idling animations include a cheery wave to the camera. In every other MMORPG I've ever played this would be an emote triggered by the player. Here it's the character, waving at me. Somehow that makes me feel included and him seem real.

Then there are the clothes. I love the clothes. So far I've found a hat, a back item and some shoes. I like all of them more than just about anything I own in Guild Wars 2, supposedly the apogee of dress-up in the entire genre.

The shoes are easy to see in the shot above. The game describes them as "claws" but they display as metal flip-flops with spikes. They suit my Scrapper well. Spikes are a bit of a theme for him right now. The back item he found comes in the shape of porcupine quills. They look so much better than a cape.

On his head in the picture above is the baseball cap he was given in the starter pack. I figured out how to use a kit to dye items so now it's red and blue with a plaid pattern. It looks jaunty in contrast to his wistful expression. This is a fox with issues he's doing his best to hide.

The makeover and dye kits you start with have a rubric that says they're single use but a tip elsewhere in game tells you they can be used over and over again, which is true. I played around with mine for a while. The options are many and varied. Now I just need  more clothes.

Yesterday I finished up the final quest in Cat Village and Puss in Boots sent me to see Mother Goose with a delivery of mittens. Mother Goose has her own eponymous village at the end of the cobbled road. I ran all the way, excited about what I might find. I wasn't disappointed.

Mother Goose Village, according to the wiki, is Secondhand Lands hub city. Some people call it the game's capital. It's the place to go to craft or just to hang out. It even has a stage and a dance floor for Catgirls to provide buffs that last much longer than usual, reminiscent of the way, I believe, cantinas worked in the original Star Wars Galaxies.

The entire place was deserted. It made my fox sad. You can see it in his face. The tragedy of Secondhand Lands is that no-one plays. One reviewer on Steam said "Its a decent game with a major problem, especially for a MMORPG and that is population. Over the last week or so I have logged in for a couple hours, even left the game idle and rechecking /who commands to see how many are online. I did some in the morning, afternoon and night time as well. The pop never went over 3 people. The only burst of activity was on a saturday where I seen 10".

That made me think. Firstly about how much work Reese Lansangan still has to do, then about the /who command. Those used to be common in MMORPGs. You could tell how busy things were with a few key-presses. It's so long since I've played a game that allowed it I'd almost forgotten. I just logged in to test it in Secondhand Lands and the result was dispiriting: "There is one player in this reality".

It makes me feel I shouold play as much of the game as I can right now. Who knows how much longer I have? It already closed down once. It's been back for two years and still no-one's playing. No time to lose....

It shouldn't be too hard. I'm enjoying the gameplay more as I go along. I'll get to that in detail in another post but before then I need to push on and see how things develop. For now, I'm just happy to be there, enjoying the beauty all around me.

Jeromai, who once opend my eyes to the beauty of Orr, was entranced by GW2's latest map, Dragonfall. I found it over-familiar and a little dull. For me, Secondhand Land's blurry, aging, lo-fi graphics snap synapses ANet's top-of-the-line art team no longer seem able to access.

We all see what we want to see. The important thing is to keep on looking.