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

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

Prime Gaming giveaways!

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

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

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

Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft Series

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

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition

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

Into The Breach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Still Summer! Have Some More Free Stuff!

It has only just occurred to me that late summer seems to be freebie season in the video game industry. Okay, the free stuff trundles out, month on month, all year round, but it has been feeling lately like this is peak giveaway season. If only I had something like a diary of things that happen in video games that I'd been keeping for a few years, eh? Then I could just flip back through the Augusts of yesteryear and see if my theory holds true.

Ah, but that's the stuff of fantasies, isn't it? No-one keeps notes on what hapens in the video games they play. That would be crazy. And anyway, what would you even call it? Some kind of gaming log? A glog, maybe? Well, that sounds dumb! No wonder no-one's doing it.

Evidence from the past notwithstanding, there certainly seems to be a glut of giveaways in the games I'm "playing". I just did a whole post on the massive hand-outs in EverQuest II and this morning I logged into two other MMORPGs to pick up my rightful dues. (Also, that little ironic meta-conceit about the non-existence of game blogging does kind of fall apart when I link to a post right afterwards, doesn't it? If I had a decent editor they'd just put a blue line through the whole of paras 1&2 and tell me to start over. Lucky I'm self-editing this thing...)

I am now in a position to add some detail to the aforementioned post, although not as much as you might expect. I claimed the one-per-account crate plus the one everyone gets on my Berserker but now I'm wishing I'd read up on it a bit more first because it turns out that not everything in the one-time crate is Heirloom. That is made clear in the announcement but looking at the forum thread I'm not the only one who didn't bother to read it carefully.

Luckily, I did at least claim it my "main" so none of it is going to go to waste. Had I been paying better attention, though, I'd have claimed it on the character I'm working so hard to turn into my new main, my Necromancer. 

On the bright side, EQII's ceaseless vertical progression escalator moves so ludicrously fast, anything with stats is going to be replaced in a matter of weeks anyway. We've got Pandas soon and then it's the expansion, so even though the gear in this crate is a huge upgrade (It is stat gear after all, not appearance as I wrongly suspected.) I don't imagine I'll be wearing it come Halloween, let alone Christmas.

As for the rest of it, I haven't sorted through it all yet but it sure looks impressive. But there's no time to sit around admiring my unearned goodies, not when there are more to be grabbed.

Game #2 on my loot list, quite unexpectedly, is Lord of the Rings Online. I have MassivelyOP to thank for this one. They PSA'd the offer yesterday and I logged in and claimed it this morning. Well, after I'd waited half an hour for the game to patch, naturally. Is there any other online game that takes this much time to get back up to speed after only a few weeks absence? 

I last logged in on 16 June, when I moved my characters off their old 32-bit servers and onto the shiny new lag-free 64-bit upgrades. (Golf clap...) I hope you've done the same because if you haven't it's too late now. 

No! Wait! No it's not! You still have a couple of days! Go! Go! Go!!!

Out-of-place illo.
The one I took of the LotRO store
somehow vanished. Thanks SSG!

Possibly because their entire year has been such a roiling, heaving mess, Standing Stone decided to throw some bones our way and they're pretty big bones, too. Oliphaunt bones, maybe. (Oh, look! I know what an oliphaunt is and I didn't even have to look it up. I guess I must be right-wing now. They do say it happens as you get older.)

Not as far to the right as all that, though. I have no clue where Gundabad is, although I suppose it's worrying that I even know it's a place not a person. Or a weapon. These people name their weapons, don't they?  Have you ever done that? Can't say I have. I might start but first I'd have to have some weapons. I suppose I could name my garden spade. Digger. That's be a good name for a spade.

I seem to have whimsied myself into a hole here. Hang on while I dig myself out. Now, where did I put Digger?

(See? If I had an editor you wouldn't have to put up with any of this. Not that I imagine there are many of you left by now...)

The code for the giveaway is EXPLOREOURWORLD, all in caps, which presumably is some kind of GenZ thing, judging by half the bands I listen to these days, who all seem to think all capitilization is nothing more than a style choice. You wouldn't have thought the devs at SSG would be so cutting edge... 

It gets you a huge swathe of content, all the quests and expansion content up to about three years ago. There's no particular rush. The code, which you have to redeem in the in-game store, is valid through to November. Why they do it this way, rather than just make all content before a certain date free automatically, the way every other game does, I have no idea but that's Standing Stone for you.

Thirdly and finally, at least until the next game announces a summer gift bonanza, comes DCUO. This one's slightly different in that you actually have to play the game to get most of it. It's not a straight log-in event so much as a holiday, the holiday in question being possibly a regularly recurring event albeit not one I remember doing before.

Specifically, it's Teen Titans Homecoming, a big party the Titans throw for Starfire to try and cheer her up after her sister Blackfire confirms her exile from Tamaran for another year. I don't know what it says about my politics but I could explain all the italicized words in that last sentence, in more detail than you'd want to hear, without having to look anything up, just like a Tolkein fan could tell you all about elves. (That's the remake of the old Bette Davis movie, starring Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler, with Sydney Sweeney in the Marilyn Monroe part, by the way.)

Focus, dammit! Focus!

Since it's a seasonal event not a giveaway as such, you do need to do some missions to get the currency to buy the rewards off the special vendor and I wouldn't normally have bothered only one of the items you can get is so weird... 

It's Starfire. You can buy Starfire and she'll come live at your base and talk to you about her life. You can ask her about her Homecoming party, her team the Titans, her adopted planet Earth, her home planet Tamaran and who knows what-all else. I'd like to know what she thinks about her sister for a start.

I'd also like to know if she thinks it's appropriate for a Princess of Tamaran to be sold like... well, I guess we'd have to say like a slave because if she was a servant she's have working hours and I'd have to pay her, like I pay my mercenaries. I've played plenty of games where NPCs come to stay in my character's houses and work for them but it's always assumed to be on some kind of contractual or apprenticeship basis. (In EQII there's literally a contract involved that you have to hand over for some of them.)

There's a kind of precedent for it in DCUO in that I have Krypto flying about my base but although technically he isn't my character's pet he is a dog. People do buy dogs. That's how Mrs Bhagpuss got Beryl. 

When I read about it (Again on MOP although I'll most likely get an email from DI about it at some point.) my first thought was "I'm having one of those!" Me and the Teen Titans go back a long way. As I've mentioned before (More than once, most likely.), I once interviewed Marv Wolfman about the New Teen Titans comic he was writing at the time and for me Starfire will always be that golden-skinned alien with the wild hair he and George Perez created but I've also watched all seasons of the Titans TV show, so I'm very comfortable with the current version, which is of course the one you get in DCUO.

It's going to take a little while before I can install her. It costs 75 tokens for the "Base Invite" (Ah, wait! Now I get it! She's my guest! That's a lot less weird. Although still a bit weird...). You can pick up a dozen tokens each day just for doing the two daily missions and the event runs for almost a month, so it should be easy enough.

I did the very easy mission Raven hands out first. That gives four tokens and takes about a couple of minutes. Then I did the Miss Martian one, which is an On Duty, meaning you have to grab a group from the group finder and let them carry you play your role to earn eight more tokens.  

Doing daily group missions in DCUO is about as painless as it gets. Mine popped in seconds and lasted maybe five minutes. I do have some idea how to play my character but certainly not after months away so I just button-mashed through the whole thing. No-one died, not even me, and at the end, when you get a scorecard, while I definitely did the least DPS (As a DPS character, too.) I didn't do none.  No-one complained, anyway. No-one even spoke. So that should be fine.

You can also pay some currency to reset the dailies and re-do them on the same day. Don't ask me which currency. There are sooo many. Whatever it is, I had plenty of it, so I did Raven's easy one again. If I did that each time it would only take me five days to get Starfire but there are quite a lot of other things on the vendor that look interesting so we'll see.  (You can also just buy the tokens in the cash shop, which seems like a great idea to me, espcially given how much DBC I have lying around doing nothing.) 

I will make the effort to get Koriand'r at least. (That's her real name. Didn't have to look that up, either. Not even the spelling.)

The Homecoming event itself has some kind of progress bar you can complete to get other rewards as well but I just want Starfire. When I get her, if she has anything interesting to say, I'll let you know. 

Until then, where's my next freebie, game devs? Don't you know it's Giveaway Season?

PSA - Free Stuff In One Of The Few Games I Actually Play These Days!

I probably ought to do a proper post on this at some point but it's late and I'd like to get something up for today to keep my Blaugust run going, so in the spirit of Wilhelm's Motivational Post, where he says "I am very much of the mind that publishing something, even half formed, is better than publishing nothing", here's a rushed PSA for anyone who plays EverQuest II, cribbed entirely from the official press release, which I just skim-read five minutes ago.

Freebies! Grab 'em while they're hot!

Everyone, free players included, is entitled to something snappily named the EverQuest II 2025 Crate. It's available for free in the in-game cash shop and you can have one for every character on every account you own. I doubt I'll bother to log in all nine or ten accounts I have access to, including Mrs Bhagpuss's old ones, but I'll certainly grab a crate for every character on my regular account.

Inside that crate you will find:

• Cloak of Winning
• Goldstone Sentinel
• Visage of Growth
• Portable Translocation Device - x5
• Portable Circle of Growth - x5
• Mercenary Unlock Scroll 
• Zimaran Swag It Out Familiar Infusion

As you might be able to tell, I've lazily cut and pasted this from the official announcement, which you could easily just go read instead of this post. It has pictures of everything, too, which is just as well because I sure don't have time to claim the crate this evening, open it up, sort the contents, equip the visible stuff and take screenshots. I'll save that for the putative "proper post", should it ever happen.

So much for the FTP side. On to the Subscribers. Or Members as Darkpaw like to call us.

Here, you just get the one crate per account. It'd better be a good one, then. 

I'll let you all judge for yourselves.

This crate is called the EverQuest II 2025 Subscriber Crate. You really do have to hand it to whoever it is that's coming  up with these names. I couldn't do it, could you?

What's in it then?

• Allyrian Wings of Winning
• Magical Equipment Unattuner - x3
• Nagafen's Abode Deed of Ownership
• EverQuest II 2025 Celebration Subscriber Gear Bag 
  • Full set of armor, weapons, accessories
  • Zimaran Rune: Money Sink
  • Zimaran Rune: Ready Check
  • Sovereign's Rampage
  • Sovereign's Remnant
  • Spirit of Drakkel
  • Well Prepared
  • Vrakorr Scroll Case - x2
  • Velium Drachma - x50

 Blimey, Charlie! That is a lot! There's a flippin' prestige house in there. And a full set of gear.

Is that actual gear with stats, though, or just appearance?  Hmm. Not sure. Appearance, I think, but the runes and accessories, which are all deteailed in the press release, have stats. BIG stats. You'll want those, especially if you're a casual like me.

I'll get back to you on the rest of the deets when I've claimed mine, which as I said is not going to be tonight.

There's no need to rush, anyway. The crates are in the Marketplace until 22 September. 

And remember - they're free! 

 

Dog Days And Giveaways

No, not Beryl again. Prime Gaming Giveaways, which seem like they're really becalmed in the doldrums of late summer this year.

Remember when I said I was going to stop reporting on these every month? Well, it's just too easy a post to miss. Also, it's nice to have regular features. On a blog, I mean. Not on your face. We can't all be Sydney Sweeney, which is probably just as well.

So, what have we Prime Gamers got to look forward this month? So far, not a lot. But then, we haven't hit Second Thursday yet.  

Week One nets us a couple of big fish and tiddler. The big fish are well past their prime, but I imagine there's still some good eating in them...

Look, I'm just going throw that metaphor back into the lake, if it's alright with everyone. Or even if it's not. I mean, I bet I could keep the fish-related imagery going all through the post because fish puns are like shooting a hippopotamus in a barrel (How he got into a barrel I don't know - © Groucho Marx.) But I'll restrain myself (Insert dad joke here...)

Five paragraphs in and I've said nothing. Beat that, ChatGPT!

Ahem. Getting back to the point. 

The three games in question are

Sid Meier’s Civilization® III Complete 

Sometimes it feels like I've played the Civilization series because I've read so much about it on blogs, especially TAGN, but I never have. I don't believe I've ever played any 4X games. I don't even know why they're called "4X". I could look it up but I'm not going to. I probably won't start with this one either but it's not out of the question so I'll take it. It's currently 80% off on Steam anyway, making it less than a pound to buy, so it's not much of a bargain, even for free. 

THIEF: Definitive Edition 

I have a feeling Thief was already in the offer from last month but I'm too lazy to check. I seem to remember mentioning before that I dislike stealth games and Thief is the reason why. I bought it when it came out - the box is still in the house somewhere, with the disc still in it. I really did not get on with it at all. Too hard but worse, too boring. Pass. Also, since I'm just noticing how very low-value this month's offer is, I'll mention this is just £3, at full price, on GOG...

The Academy: The First Riddle.  

As for The Academy, it's "a puzzle-packed adventure set in a school filled with mystery", which sounds  like something I'd play if I was in the market for a cheap-ass Harry Potter knock-off, which I might be now the real thing is off limits. I was planning on claiming it but it wasn't showing up on my Prime Gaming page so I had a closer look and guess what? I already claimed it back in March 2021! It may be twice the price of Thief on Steam but this is the second time they've given it away. At least. Another non-bargain, then.

So much for this week. What's upcoming? And I'm only going to talk about the interesting ones. If you want the full line-up, it's on the blog.

Not this blog. This blog. 

Two days from today, on Thursday 14th, you can make your choice from 

FATE: The Traitor Soul - Not the first FATE game that's come up on Prime, I think. There was one last month. Looks like they're giving the whole series away. They do a lot of that. "Very Positive" Steam rating. Suppose I'll take it.

Tin Hearts - Compared to Lemmings in the Prime blog, which is worrying. I was addicted to Lemmings for a while. Everyone was. Not sure I want to go there again. It doesn't actually look anything like Lemmings, though. It looks mildly interesting. Might as well claim it.

Filthy Animals -Not to be confused with the movie of the same name. Or the "Australian supergroup".  A "heist simulator" apparently. Is that a recognized genre? Looks mildly amusing but only "mostly positive" on Steam. Probably going to end up claiming it then forever afterwards forgetting I own it.

Not in the running: Necroking.

 And a week after that, on the 21st, because this month Thursdays are all a handy multiple of seven...

Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective - I was sure this was going to be one of those tedious hidden object games Prime likes to use as filler but it turns out it's an actual game and a weird one. It's like a Where's Wally book come to life. (Where's Waldo if you prefer. Or Where's any other pop culture phenomenon you care to name - Taylor Swift, Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog... we have a whole shelf of them at work.) So I guess it is a hidden object game but a much more original one than usual. Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam. I'll give it a go.

Silver Box Classics - Four very, very old games but possibly of some interest still. "This collection brings back a gathering of adaptations of the events in the first four Dragonlance role-playing modules, at the beginning of the War of the Lance. These were the first games that brought the world of D&D to PC."  Dragonlance was my era. AD&D rather than D&D as it once was and later reverted to being. I read and reviewed the first Dragonlance novel when it came out. Didn't think much of it as I recall. Never read any of the others. I'll claim this but looking at the screenshots on Steam (Where it has a Positive rating from just eleven reviews.) I can't imagine playing any of the games. Or not for long, anyway.

It's just those two for the third week. I didn't skip any. On to the last week, starting on the 28th.

... aaaaaand nothing. That's an anti-climax, isn't it? I mean, there are games being given away in the final week of August. They're just not anything I'd consider claiming and I said I wasn't going to preview stuff I wasn't interested in. 

Okay, two of them are things I theoretically might have been interested in. One's a sort of dungeon crawler and the other's yet another D&D game, but the first is a sequel to a game I wasn't bothered about the first time around and the other looks older than gaming itself. It's embarrassing in a way, the kind of games Prime is trying to pass off as interesting or exciting these days.

Oh, alright, I'll do you the links...

Heroes of Loot 2

Fantasy Empires

Happy now?

And the final game, which I am not going to link because it only encourages them, is a hidden object game called City Legends: The Ghost of Misty Hill. The Collector’s Edition no less, although I wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with anyone who actually collects these things.

That's the lot for August. Roll on September, eh?

Here, Boy!

It's been a while since I played DCUO. Given that I post about it every time I play, it seems safe to say it was back in January, when I got stuck on Felix Faust at the end of the first chapter of the game's new "narrative-led" approach and never bothered to go back to try and beat him on a second try.

At least I did actually play the game that time. Usually, all I do is log in, claim whatever's on offer, wander around my new Base wishing I hadn't torn down the old one, put up a few posters, sigh at the prospect of redecorating, wish once again I'd stayed where I was, even if the new Base does have a better view, then log out.

Now and again, probably no more than once a year and mostly not even that often, I might go outside for a fly around. Perhaps even do a couple of missions. The days when I tried to keep up with even the most basic solo content at the start of each new Episode are long gone.

DCUO is a game I used to play. Worse, an MMORPG I used to play, making it even harder to return. How many of those are there, now? Literally hundreds, I think. 

It is, at least, one I still very occasionally write about, which puts it ahead of 95% of them, but it's a game I write about less and less. So, why am I writing about it today?

Because there's a freebie I want of course! Just about the only thing guaranteed to get me to patch up and log in to an MMORPG I no longer play is the prospect not just of something for nothing (You get that in virtually all of them every time you log in these days so it's no incentive at all.) but the offer of something I find specifically appealing, coupled with a limited window of opportunity to grab it.

It's a very weird kind of FOMO. Mostly, fear of missing out is not an emotion I'm personally familiar with. I can let most things slide without being at all bothered. If it's not too much trouble I might extend the very slight effort necessary to pick up something I'm not all that interested in or attend some event that only very mildly intrigues me but if I happen to forget to log in and miss it, I really couldn't care.

There are a small number of games to which I still think, with increasingly slight evidence, I might one day go back and for those I might make a little more effort to acquire something that could be useful, if I did ever return. Things like level boosts or an extra character slot that sometimes attend a promotion, those might be worth not missing out on. 

But these days, even the sort of giveaways that would once have had me looking up my old passwords - mounts or hats for example (I do like a hat, as I believe I have established previously.) - aren't always enough to trigger a response.

So, why am I patching DCUO as I type this? An 8Gb download it is, too. 

I'll give you one word. One name. 

Krypto.

But wait a moment. Don't I already have Superman's dog? Didn't I post about it when I got him and haven't I posted several screenshots since then of my character playing with him in her Base?

Yes, yes and yes.  

But, see, here's the thing... that Krypto can't leave my Base. This Krypto can!

DCUO has a mechanic I've never bothered with. It's called the Ally System and it's relatively recent, dating back only to 2021. When it was announced, I imagined it would be something like the Mercenary systems in the EverQuest games, an NPC you could hire and have fight alongside you as a permanent companion. That would have been great. 

It wan't that. It was more like one of those dumbfire pets EQ mages and necros get, the ones that have fancy names but really just appear, do some burst damage and vanish. They're fancy spells with a visual is all. You'd have, say, Harley Quinn as your ally and when you called her she'd appear out of nowhere, do a big AE, then vanish. 

Big whoop.

Okay, they all also had some secondary and passive effects and there was some upgrade system you could use to enhance them but once I found out you'd barely get to see them before they left, I lost interest. Until now.

What's happening in the current update is a complete overhaul of the system to turn it into something a lot more appealing. Instead of just popping in, doing a special attack and leaving, now your allies will stick around for a while. Still, sadly, not for good like a proper Mercenary but long enough to cycle through their signature attack twice and do some regular fighting alongside you while they wait for it to recharge.

I mean, it's still not great, is it? But it is better. 

The name of the update is Superboy Ally and Ally Update, which doesn't even sound like something thought up by a committee. In a committee at least one person would have vetoed that gibberish. Seriously, who's naming these things now? I'd blame AI but clearly no AI would come up with anything that dull. It takes a human to be that unimaginitive.

Also, as you've probably spotted, it's "Superboy" in the lead, not Krypto. But where the Lad of Steel flies, can the Dog of Steel be far behind?

Well, yes and no. Krypto is part of the package but he's kind of Superboy's Ally, not yours. What happens is, you call on Superboy and Superboy calls on Krypto. 

Okay, technically you do the actual calling, too, in the form of burning a Supply Drop trinket. Nothing's ever simple, is it? 

And what's a Supply Drop trinket, anyway? It's a consumable you can get from a dispenser in your base or from a vendor or in various other ways. Again, I knew they existed but I've never bothered to use one, so I'm not speaking from personal experience.

I guess that's going to change. I'll have to do it at least once, just to see Krypto appear whereupon, I'm assured, he will attack enemies, weaken them with his super-bark and if anyone happens to get knocked down, attempt to revive them. I suppose that means I'll have to do some fighting just to see it happen. 

Also, as I have only just discovered, Krypto has been in the game as an actual Ally in his own right since 2022. So maybe I should just go to Cyborg and buy him. Cut out the middle-dog, so to speak. In fact, seeing he was once given away as a freebie, chances are I already have him and I've just forgotten about it. 

Oh, and Superboy will be there too, of course.

I have only a very vague understanding of who Superboy is in the DC Universe these days. 

I used to know exactly who he was. He was Superman when he was a boy. Just like Superbaby was Superboy when he was a baby. Even a kid could follow the logic.

I have literally hundreds of comic books featuring Superboy's adventures in and around Smallville, growing up on the Kent farm, going to Smallville High, hanging out with his best pal Pete Ross and, of course, courting and being courted by my favorite character in the entire Superman mythos, Lana Lang. 

Sadly, Superboy hasn't been young Clark Kent for a long time. I know Jon Kent had the name for a while but who's using it now I'd have look up. Hang on... let me do that... okay... that's a new one on me. 

So, in answer to my google query "Who is Superboy in 2025?", Gemini's summary reads

"In 2025, Superboy is primarily known as Kon-El, also known as Conner Kent. He is a genetic clone of Superman and Lex Luthor. Conner Kent is a prominent member of the Superman family and is known for his involvement with the Teen Titans and Young Justice. In the Young Justice animated series, he is a founding leader alongside Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Robin, and his relationship with Miss Martian is a significant part of his character. "

I'm not vouching for all the ancillary detail there but after cross-referencing the substantive point then, yes, it does seem that the Superboy we'll be allying with is going to be Conner, who I do actually remember from when I watched Titans. I seem to recall he was a colossal ass then but that was Titans. Everyone was. 

Anyway, I don't care about Conner. Or any of the Superboys, unless its the Silver Age Superboy I grew up with. I'd take him as an ally although it goes without saying I'd rather have Supergirl. Any of the Supergirl variants, really. And believe me, there are plenty of those.

Would I rather have Supergirl's pet Streaky the Super-Cat as an additional Ally instead of Krypto, though? Hmm. Not so sure about that. Streaky was always kinda sneaky. He had a great line in that side-eye cats like to give you. Also he was not exactly what you'd call reliable.

Moot point. No-one's offering me Streaky. Or Supergirl. I'll just have to settle for the boy and his dog. 

And after all that, the game has patched up and I can log in. I believe there's a bit of work to do before I can take possession of the pair ("Complete Patrol 3 in Campaign 2025", whatever that entails...) so I'd better get on with it.

I'll report back when I'm done. With pictures to prove it. 

Get To The Back Of The Line, You Two!

This seems to be buying season. Or acquiring season, at least. Since I last posted about adding seven more games to my collection, just a few days ago, I've added a couple more. 

The first was a freebie from Amazon in celebration of Prime Day, a spurious self-generated "event" the megacorp has been trying to hype into something worth caring about for weeks now. All it is, of course, is a generally disappointing sale in which anything I'm vaguely interested in is never discounted enough to make me feel it's worth buying and anything I'm really interested in has barely any money off at all.

I wonder a lot about both the psychology and the commercial effectiveness of big sales like this. Everyone does them but I never see any feedback about how successful they are in terms of raising revenue. Do they really generate enough additional sales - purchases that otherwise would not have happened at all - to offset the money lost on purchases people were always going to make anyway and most likely would have made at a higher price? 

Sales are only ever really satisfying if you were already dead set on buying something pretty much right now and suddenly there it is at half price. That counts as a genuine saving in my book. It's less exciting but still quite nice when purchases you were definitely going to have to make at some point, just not necessarily right now, turn up at a discount. That also counts as a real saving, I 'd say.

Anything you otherwise might or might not have bought doesn't count as any kind of "saving", regardless of how much less you had to spend to get your hands on it compared to if you'd bought it at another time. That's extra money you've now spent that would otherwise still be in your pocket.

From the seller's perspective, it's the reverse, of course, although making you buy something now, even for less than you might have paid later, may be what they're after. In my limited experience, businesses are constantly trying to finesse when the money comes in as well as how much of it there is.

So far, Amazon has yet to persuade me to buy anything purely because of Prime Day. I may or may not have bought something during the event in previous years - I have no idea whether I have or not - but if I did it was entirely co-incidental. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time but only ever things I need or at least believe I need when I buy them, which admittedly isn't quite the same thing. 

I don't go trawling through the warehouse deals looking for bargains or anything like that but purely because they make such a huge deal of it, I do fall into the trap of browsing the Prime Day offer every year (Or however often it happens. I have no idea if it's more than once a year. It might well be because it sure isn't really a "Day".) It never takes long. It's always so dispiriting. I must remember not to bother next time.

I wouldn't be here, posting about the dumb sale at all if it wasn't for one thing: Prime Gaming also likes to get in on the action. I'm fairly sure they already gave away some extra games as some kind of pre-event but today they're handing out four more to celebrate the thing finally happening and for a miracle one of them is something I actually want!

The four games are Football Manager 2024 (No thanks.) Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Bleh.) Amnesia (Much too scary.) and...

Marvel's Midnight Suns

That's the one! I remember it from when it came out and tanked. According to GameRant, the complaints at the time revolved around the "narrative elements that had players navigate an all-star lineup of Marvel heroes through some fairly mundane slice-of-life interactions." 

I've been droning on since at least the 1980s about how super-hero comics are primarily soap-operas and how the fights are largely incidental to the mundane slice-of-life interactions between the huge, sprawling casts, so that sounds much more like a recommendation than a caveat to me. I hope it turns out to be true.

As for the combat, the game was developed by Firaxis Games, the people who made the X-Com series among other well-known titles. I didn't get on with X-Com at all but that was because of the setting and the graphics, not the gameplay, which I otherwise liked well enough. I'm far more interested in a tactical RPG based on super-heroes than one centered on a bunch of far-right military types battling faceless aliens with xenophobic and genocidal tendencies to the fore on both sides, a scenario in which I'd just as soon leave them both to it and hope they wipe each other out.

Of course, Midnight Suns isn't a particularly generous gift from Prime. It's been on deep discount almost since it crashed and burned on launch back in December 2022. Currently you can pick it up in the Steam Sale for 85% off, which is a very good discount indeed. The only problem there is that it was a full-price game to begin with so even at that price it'll still cost you $10. 

I'd like to play Midnight Suns but based on my logic as outlined in the intro to the post, I wouldn't consider it a "bargain" at 85% off. For that to be true, I'd have had to have had a definite intent to buy and I certainly did not.  At a cost of absolutely nothing at all, though, a bargain it sure is!

Whether it's any good or not is another question. I'm optimistic but it's going to have to join the ever-growing line of games waiting to be played. As soon as I get around to playing it, I'll be sure to let everyone know.

The other fresh addition to my stable of games did cost me something. And I very much wasn't about to buy it anyway for the simple reason that until this morning I'd never heard of it. 

I was wondering when the Steam Sale was going to end, in case I decided to buy one of the titles on my wishlist (Most likely Sovereign Syndicate at 60% off...). While I was looking at that I thought I might as well check the Deep Discount section, in case they'd added anything interesting late in the day (The sale has two days left to run.) As it turned out, they had. Or quite possibly they hadn't but I'd missed it the last time I checked.

The game I didn't recall being on the list before and which I ended up buying was

Beyond: Two Souls

This one's "a unique psychological action thriller" originally produced for the Playstation 3 all the way back in 2013, although it didn't make it to PC until six years later. It was developer Quantic Dream's follow-up to the much-publicized Heavy Rain, a game even I remember. 

That was all back when the idea of video games turning into something that played like movies you could control was all over the mainstream media.  There was a lot of talk about new forms of storytelling and immersion and of course VR got in on the act and in the end... what happened? 

Nothing much, other than that games continued to become more filmic and everyone got used to it, so they stopped banging on about it like it was the beginning of a new age, I guess. Now we all just expect games to be like that at least some of the time and we only get excited when they do it particularly well. We're long past the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs stage or I hope we are.

This particular, probably transitional, example features two big Hollywood names - Elliot Page (Viktor from Umbrella Academy) and Willem Defoe (Everything from Platoon to a whole bunch of arthouse films I really like.), which was the main thing that drew me to it. I like both of those actors so if they're in it all the time it's probably going to be worth a look.

Especially at a very attractive 90% off. And the game was only £16.99 to begin with, so that means I had to stump up just £1.69. (That's $2.29 to save you the trouble.) I had an ice-cream yesterday that cost more than that and it lasted me about two minutes. I'm pretty sure I'll get more for my money out of Beyond: Two Souls than that.

It's all relative, isn't it? At least, that's the rationalization.

 

Anyway, if nothing else, all these new games give me something to write about without having to... y'know... play any of them  Following on from yesterday's post, the forecast is for a lengthy spell of very hot, very sunny weather starting today so it might be a while before I get to any of them. Still, nice to know they're there, isn't it?

Well, "there" for a given value of "thereness" that is. I'm sure everyone's been following the progress of the Stop Killing Games campaign in Europe? I haven't. First I heard of it was when Tobold posted about it although Wilhelm might have mentioned it when he was talking about game preservation. Other than that I'd managed to avoid it until now.

My uninformed take on it is that it's entitled twaddle but I'm not going to elaborate because I don't care to give it even the one or two molecules of oxygen a personal blog can muster.  I mention it only because, when I bought Beyond: Two Souls on Steam, I had to acknowledge my acceptance of the EULA, the very first line of which read, all in capitals,

THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED. IT IS NOT SOLD.

That seems clear enough. I guess the courts would need to confirm the validity of EULAs with that provision at some point but once that's done, the entire problem - if we're going to call it a problem - goes away.

Doesn't it? 

Buy One, Get Six Free

So, finally, as if anyone cared, here are the five games I claimed from Amazon Prime gaming in June. Or was it July? And why are there six of them?

Do. Not. Ask. I am beyond trying to make sense of the Prime Gaming offer now. The information in the "blog" that Amazon sends out each month, usually late, doesn't match what I see when I go to the website. 

The blog itself, which is in fact a press release, so why they call it a blog beats me - it's not like blogs are fashionable any more - is laid out so chaotically it's actively off-putting, with huge lists of games in various formats that repeat themselves and overlap. I can't be bothered trying to unpick it any more.

There's this whole, rolling release schedule that makes no sense, particularly since the whole supposed thrill of the new they seemed to be trying to inculcate, whereby we'd all rush to get the next batch of games each week, is completely undermined by most of the games then sitting there for a month or more, waiting to be picked like a bunch of schoolkids hoping for a spot in the team.

Add to that a whole new bunch of games they're throwing in just now in anticipation of Prime Day (Which actually lasts about a week so clearly the entire company shares the same lack of interest in calling anything by its proper name or acknowledging any kind of conventional calendar.) and it just all becomes so much more trouble to decode than it could possibly be worth.

Much easier just to check the website every couple of weeks and claim whatever's new that looks good. Who cares what offer its in or when it arrived or when it's leaving? Snapshot and be done with it, I say!

The games I claimed at the end of June were:

Stray Gods  

Not Stray Gods: Orpheus as it says above but let's not get into all that again. Already covered in a previous post. Naturally, I haven't played it yet. I haven't played any of the games I claimed. Let's be realistic - I don't claim them to play them. I claim them so I'll have them should I ever want to play them, which I most likely won't. I'd love to blame it on late-stage capitalism but actually I think it's more likely just me.

The Last Show of Mr. Chardish

75% off in the Steam Summer Sale with a "Very Positive" review rating, although since that's only from 71 reviews and the game came out five years ago, I'm not sure it has much authority. More like no-one's really tried it. It's a puzzle mystery game about an actress who goes back to an abandoned theater to recall her past history with the eponymous director. Mostly I took this one because the screenshots looked pretty. 

Fate: Undiscovered Realms

20% off in the sale with a Very Positive rating. The sequel to FATE, which I may or may not own on some platform or other. Certainly never played it. It's a dungeon crawler and I occasionally get the fleeting urge to play one of those so I guess it's good to have one on hand for those few minutes every decade or so. The screenshots are incredibly blurry for something that's supposed to encourage people to want to buy it. I hope the game doesn't actually look like that...

Dark Envoy

64% off in the sale with a Mostly Positive rating. Even the highlighted pro reviews they've chosen to promote it on the store page are lukewarm at best so I don't have a lot of hope for this but then it's often better to go in expecting nothing much and be mildly surprised to find its not as bad as you thought it would be than to anticipate greatness and get something that's merely very good. It's a "cRPG", which is a term though we'd gotten rid of around the turn of the millennium, when we stopped putting the word "computer" in front of everything we needed a computer for. Baldur's Gate on a budget is what they mean, anyway. A very small budget...

Wild Country

20% off and Mixed. Mixed is not good. It's a "cozy-competitive" card game, whatever the heck that means. I don't play many deck-builders, mostly because I find building decks about as engaging as picking talents from a talent tree. I thought these were exactly the kind of tedious, faux-administrative tasks computers were designed to do for us but apparently in some quarters they're considered to be too enjoyable to hand off to a machine. I picked this one despite the genre and mechanics because it has amusing-looking funny animals, some of whom wear hats.

All of those are probably from June's offer, if anyone cares. July's offer looks poor so far but I don't remember most of  the games I've just been talking about coming up in the conversation when June's slate was announced so I'm hopeful something better will turn up, unnanounced. 

Of the July games available so far, I've only taken one:

TOEM

This one has a massive 80% off in the Steam sale right now and and Overwhelmingly Positive rating. It's a hand-drawn, black-and-white photography adventure in which you wander about, chatting to a bunch of people and solving their problems by taking photographs. You'd think, given the crazy amount of screenshots I take, I'd be all over photo games but I've only ever played one or two. Should make a nice change of pace when I'm in the mood. When that's going to be is another question.

And since I've been plugging the Steam Sale all through this post, it's nice to be able to end with something I actually bought there! Yes, I paid money for a game, something that seems hard to justify given how many games I get for free and how many of those I haven't even looked at yet, but it was sooo cheap...

Steins;Gate

A whopping 90% off and Overwhelmingly Positive. Also the only game I've ever seen to use a semi-colon in the title in quite such an aggressive manner. It looks right in my wheelhouse, being "a time-travel, science fiction interactive visual novel". Can't really walk away from something like that.

Obviously, I haven't played it yet. The description on the Steam page gleefully claims "30-50 hours of reading time", which is something I've never seen offered as a positive feature of a video game before. I could read several full-length novels in thirty hours, let alone fifty, so the writing damn well better be good! 

And that's my list of acquisitions for June and the very beginning of July. I'm still wavering on a couple of wishlist purchases in the dying days of the sale. As I just suggested, it's increasingly hard to justify buying anything even at huge discounts unless I absolutely, positively need to play it right now. For a time it made sense to build up a cushion of games to fall back on should the need arise but I think I'm fully furnished with those now. 

I'll take a bet with myself that, when I post about the Steam Winter Sale, as I inevitably will, I won't have played Steins;Gate or any other games I might buy in the Summer Sale. 

If I win that bet, will I also have lost it?

Just Because It's Costing You Nothing Doesn't mean You Can't Complain

I may not be playing many games at the moment but that's not going to stop me collecting more. 

Ooh! Sidebar! Is that a legitimate way to look at all those gaming backlogs everyone keeps complaining about? I've been in the habit of referring to mine as a Gaming Library, in an attempt to add some gravitas and alleviate some guilt (Guilt, I should clarify, that I personally do not feel but which I understand to be some kind of a general problem among the community.) by suggesting a large stack of unplayed games represents a resource rather than an obligation but how would it be if instead we re-framed our backlogs as Collections? 

Collections are cool. Everyone loves them. Every item they contain exists to be owned, treasured, curated and occasionally looked at but no-one expects you to use any of them. Collections are always growing, too. It's part of their charm and appeal. Adding to them is a hobby in itself and it gives other people something to give you as a present when they're stuck for ideas of their own.

And you can forget about the sunk cost. Sure, some collections hold their value and even increase but many don't and no-one cares. In fact, it's often considered crass to know, or certainly to talk about, how much your collection cost or how much it might make at auction if you sold it - which of course you never would.. The true value of collections lies in the pure, innocent pleasure that comes from owning and appreciating them.

There! Now don't you feel better about that backlog?

Also, congratulations to me for yet again de-railing one of my own posts. One sentence I got out before it happened! That has to be a record.

Getting back to the point, as Wilhelm thoughtfully reminded us all yesterday, the Steam Summer Sale has just started. I thought I probably at least ought to take a look at how that affected my wishlist, on the basis that if I'm still not willing to commit at two-thirds off, there's probably not much point that game staying on the list.

Definitely Maybe

As it turns out, only five games out of thirty-eight meet that criterion and I have no inclination to buy any of them. Added to that, two games on the list are currently on offer for less than a pound and I still don't feel like paying for them, which strongly  suggests I might not even take them if they were free. 

And yet I haven't de-listed any of them. The counter-argument is why bother? It's not like a Steam wishlist takes up any space. I'm not going to trip over it or have to get the ladder out to shove half of it in the attic so I can make space for more.

It's not even as though having a bunch of games on there you're never going to buy makes it any harder to see the ones you might. The list's sortable eight different ways, including by how big a discount you can get and how long a game's been on there, which seem to me to be about the only two pieces of information I'd be likely to want to know before deciding whether or what to buy.

No, I think I'm more minded to leave everything alone, just on the off-chance that something might eventually catch my eye. It seems a bit ridiculous to try and second-guess future me by taking games off now that I might feel differently about in the future.

And yet, with all that taken fully under consideration, I did take one game off the list. What's more, it was one of the games I almost certainly would have bought at some point, when the discount felt right. I had a good reason. The best.

There are quite a few games on the list I'm always quite close to buying and a lot more I'm not. I could fairly reliably sort them into four  categories:

1. Definitely going to buy on Day One at full price. Just waiting for it to release.
2. Almost certainly will buy one day. Just a question of when and for how much.
3. Probably will buy one day but only when it's a real bargain.
4. Unlikely to buy, no matter how cheap it gets.

The first three categories seem completely legit but the last is iffy. Why even put a game on the list if you're almost certain not to buy it at any price? 

Well, a couple of reasons at least. For one, it supposedly helps the developers to have as many wishlist votes as possible in the run-up to launch. I play a lot of demos in Next Fests for games I think are quite good but aren't for me and I often wishlist those just to be supportive. Costs me nothing and they seem to appreciate it.

The other reason is so I can keep an eye on certain titles I might want to blog about. Having them on the wishlist helps remind me they exist and also occasionally gets me an email from Steam if something changes.

Of course, both of those arguments cease to have much validity once the games launch. At that point, I probably should remove them. I tend not to for one very good reason: I'm too lazy. Doing nothing is always the easier option.

Not at any price.

On my current wishlist there are two games in Category 1: Nighthawks and Nivalis. Nivalis has a 2025 release date but Nighthawks, which I added to the list in 2021, still just says TBA and I suspect it may never arrive.

Category 2 has ten games, Category 3 has seven and everything else is in the last one. That means exactly half of the games on my wishlist are games I am most likely never going to buy. Worse, I'd take them on a free offer but even then I'd be highly unlikely ever to play them.

And I don't care. That's fine. They're not in my way. They can just stay there unless they for some reason start to annoy me. That happens occasionally. I can have moods.

But even with your wishlist split up into categories, you have to be so careful! Can you imagine anything more infuriating than buying a game in Cat 2 for, oh, let's say, 30% off in the Summer Sale, meaning it's actually costing you £17.99, still in my opinion a not-inconsiderable sum for a video game you aren't desperate to play Right Now, only to find - literally five minutes later! - you could have had it FOR FREE on another gaming platform?

Boy, that would suck, wouldn't it? Lucky that never happened!

Relax! It didn't. It was close, though. 

Last night, after I read Wilhelm's post, I went straight to Steam and checked the discounts on my wishlist. The best ones were all on games in Cat 4 but there were a few 50% or even 60% offers in Cat 3 that I was highly tempted by and still am. 

Nothing in Cat 2 had more than 30% off and it wasn't quite enough to get me to pull the trigger, which turned out to be just as well when, on a whim, I also decided to check Prime Gaming this morning. 

Prime Says...

In theory, there shouldn't have been any reason for me to do that. Although the Prime offers roll over, there's supposed to be an announcement at the start of each calendar month telling you what's new. There's a blog about it and they send out an email. I even wrote about the June offer back at the beginning of the month, so I ought to know what's on it, right?

Yeah, like hell I do! Either I can't read or Prime can't keep the record straight. Maybe both.

When I opened the web page today, I saw a bunch of new games had been added that I cannot remember seeing on the blog post. And I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered if something from my fricken' Steam wishlist was on there. Which it was.

Or was it...?

There seems to be some confusion over that. Pay attention, now, because this gets complicated and I'm not going to make it any plainer with my explanation.

Claim says...

The Prime Gaming website very clearly shows Stray Gods: Orpheus Edition, the most expensive version, a compilation of the base game and the DLC but with a label underneath that says "Stray Gods: Orpheus", which is just the DLC on its own. When you click through to claim it, the display changes to the page you see at the head of this post, which only mentions the DLC. 

When you do claim it, though, the confirmation plainly says you just got the twofer. And then you go to Good Old Games to install it and what do you find? 

Yep, you guessed it! Neither! Instead, you appear to have received the original, base game - Stray Gods.

It's clear I'm not going to find out what I've actually got until I install it so talk amongst yourselves while I do just that. I'll go make myself a coffee while it's downloading...

GOG Says...

Well, that's made everything clear as mud. The game I've just acquired is definitely the original Stray Gods, not the DLC or the two-pack... but it apparently comes with a saved game in which Act 1 has already been completed. 

Wasn't me! My "Played" time on GOG shows just one minute, the time it took me to log in just now.

I guess a save might make sense if I'd just acquired Stray Gods on Steam, which is where I played the demo almost exactly two years ago. I think the demo was Act 1 so I can see how progress there might have been saved towards a future purchase of the full game on the same platform.

But I just got this version from Amazon Prime Gaming and they delivered it to me on GOG, and yet somehow it looks like it knows I already played through Act 1 on a Steam demo, so how does that work? I don't even use the same email address for Steam and Prime. Or the same user name.

As they say in the movies, something's not right...

And this post has not gone at all how I expected, either. I'm live-blogging again and it's all falling apart. The plan when I started was to write about the new games that appeared on Prime and the five that I claimed today but I think I'm just going to cut my losses and save that for a separate post. In fact, I'll probably wait until they announce the games for July, because I bet these are some of them.

Just a couple of extra details and thoughts to finish. 

To re-enforce my message about being careful not to buy stuff on one platform that you already own on another, while I was checking GoG for this post I spotted I already own Kerbal Space Program there. That's on deep discount in the Steam Sale right now and I was looking at it last night and thinking about getting it. Good thing I didn't.

Also, does any of this suggest maybe someone at Prime Gaming is using an AI assistant? In my experience they have real trouble picking up fine details like the difference between a game and its expansions or DLC. Or maybe no-one at Amazon really cares about Prime Gaming any more. that tracks.

And finally, what's up with GOG, anyway? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not wrong.) but doesn't it stand for Good Old Games? With the emphasis on Old, I always thought. Stray Gods came out in 2023. That's two years ago. 

Is that what we're calling "old" now?  I have food in my cupboards older than that and it's still in date.