Hey, Stars Reach! It's Been A While! How's It Going?

Bless me Ralph, for I have sinned. It has been ninety-five days since my last Stars Reach post. I think. Something like that, anyway.

Which is actually a lot less than I thought. I completely forgot I logged in at the end of May. I thought I hadn't set foot in the game since before the Kickstarter. 

That's what I told whoever it is that has the fun job of reading all the surveys and collating the data, anyway. I do like a survey but when I got the email a few days ago - well, the three emails, since I'm still signed up for the testing program on multiple accounts - I wasn't going to respond because what could I have said? I have no clue what Stars Reach is like now, it's been so long since I've played.

But then curiosity got the better of me and I opened one of the forms, just to see what they were asking, and it turned out they only wanted to know what people thought of the first hour of the game. 

Don't bother trying to dodge.
They use death as a teaching aid here.

I have been keeping Stars Reach patched up, even though I haven't been logging in and Playable Worlds is now running a series of lengthy tests as they gear up for 24/7 testing. This was on Saturday and I had the feeling a test had just started, which indeed it had. In fact, it started last Thursday and it's still going as I write. 

Why not, then? I could give them an hour of my time and report back on what I thought about it. I mean, I did kind of sign up to test the thing, not to mention be in the creator program (Ironic laughter...) although any responsibility for any of that I ever felt dissipated the moment my credit card got charged for the Kickstarter pledge. I'm a paying customer now.

First, obviously, I had to make a new character. Well, in a manner of speaking. There is now some slight semblance of a character creation process but it's two choices and move on. 

There's a bit of flavor text, which I personally find obnoxious and have already complained about in feedback more than once. Oddly perhaps, I do not find being repeatedly addressed, sneeringly, as "meatbag" endears me to the game or makes me want to come back for more. 

All you really get to choose at this stage, though, is your name and race. Everything else is "To be added" or some such excuse. I guess that does at least tell us we will be able to customize our character, one day.

Most irritatingly of all, the whole "what you look like changes every time you zone" thing is still going. It's disorienting enough to have your character randomized at the start but to have it re-randomized just when you were starting to get used to it is infuriating. If that's actually testing something - still - then fair enough but it seems unlikely. In fact, now I think about it, maybe it's not even intentional. Could be a bug?

How come I was allowed to take this picture, then?

Once that was done, the game let me in and I played through the extremely brief tutorial, which I quite enjoyed. It's new since I was last there, takes place in space, and goes through the basic controls quite effectively, although it took me several goes to get the crawling under the fallen beam part right and the bit where it gives you a fire extinguisher feels redundant when there turns out to be no fire to extinguish.

It does a job, though, and the space station looks quite impressive. It's a much better way to begin than the previous version. 

At the end of the tutorial you have to pick a class. They don't call it that, of course, (They call it a "profession".) because this is a classless game where anyone can be anything but it damn well is a class all the same, or at best an archetype. From memory you can be a crafter, an explorer, a warrior or something I've forgotten. Farmer, maybe?

The game tells you not to worry too much about it because later you can do all the things but that's like your school-teacher telling you not to complain about having to learn the boring stuff now because it'll get interesting when you go to college. Who bloody cares? I want to do something that's interesting now!

Or fun. I'd take fun.

If I hadn't already played about fifteen hours of various stages of pre-alpha, back when you really could do what you liked right from the start, even if there wasn't that much of it to do, I think this time would have been fun. New stuff generally is. Without the novelty factor and by comparison to how it used to be , though, it seemed a bit limited. Dull, even.

Ha bloody ha.

I picked Explorer, which I was well aware would mean running around, listening to an echo-locator pinging as I tried to find sixty-four flashing pyramids. Under the new regime, you only get the tools you need for your designated job, so it was do that or don't do anything at all. Not like the good old days, when you could do a bit of this, a bit of that, switch things up to keep it from getting boring.

The really glaring problem with Exploring as it is now is that it's highly reliant on players both having good hearing and keeping the in-game sound on (Unless there's some alternate, visual setting buried in the controls, somewhere, in which case they should tellyou about it.)

As we all know, most gamers switch the sound off and play either Norwegian death metal at ear-splitting volume or true-crime podcasts instead, so asking them to listen to several hours of pinging just seems rude. And as for those who've already lost most of their hearing from too much Norwegian death metal, well they have no chance at all.

Except they kind of do because you can just run around and wait for the pink pyramids to pop as you get close to them, which is all I did. I did that for about half an hour and found over a dozen, which is more than I expected but fewer that it would have been if I hadn't had to keep stopping to fight and/or run from the extremely aggressive wildlife.

Is this the Down escalator?

I have been complaining about this design choice since pretty much the first time I ever played the game and while it has improved it's still very far from acceptable. EverQuest's infamous Gates of Discord expansion should not be the template for newbie zones in any game. 

They do at least give you a gun - an Omniblaster - no matter what class you pick, so you can try to defend yourself but good luck with that when you get swarmed, as you inevitably will. By the time I gave up, after my second (Or was it third?) death, I'd earned more points in combat-related skills than all the others put together. That seems ridiculous, especially when I thought I'd picked a non-combat class so I wouldn't need to fight anything. Can't say I was surprised about it though. It happens every time. 

All of this was very familiar, as was the terrain, hacked up by players and left full of holes to fall down as it was. The grass does seem to grow over the piles of debris now. It looked more like a huge field full of mature ants' nests than the usual abandoned quarry, so that was an improvement, visually anyway.

A close look at this picture will prove
I have no observational skills whatsoever.
Also wow! Gravity is really slimming!

Speaking of visuals, the one huge leap forward for Stars Reach since I last played has to be what it
looks like. I always thought it was an attractive-looking game but now it's positively gorgeous. The graphics are highly stylized but they really do look beautiful. I took some screenshots and I would have taken more if the camera controls weren't so goddam awful. Seriously, you should surely at least be able to 360 around your motionless character without having to go into the settings to work out how to do it. If it's even possible. I never did work out how but it may be in there, somewhere.

The whole time I was playing (Okay, it was only three-quarters of an hour...) the only other players I saw were afk at the revive spot, presumably where they'd died and wandered off to do something more interesting instead, leaving their characters idling. I'm sure there's something going on somewhere that's more engaging than what was happening where I was and that's presumably where the players are but I know from experience just how much work there is before you get anywhere near anything like that and I have no intention of going through all those steps again, or not until I'm confident whatever progress I make won't be wiped before the next time I log in.

My brief session did gain me enough experience to fill out the survey, so after I logged out that's what I did. I doubt my answers were very helpful, consisting as they did of  a lot of "None of the Aboves" as a long list of options seeemed to have no relevance to anything I'd done or seen. 

I did, however, take the opportunity to write a short essay in the "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?" section. I had the good sense to copy and past it into a local file, so here's what I said, word for word: 

Before today I hadn't played since before the Kickstarter. I'd pretty much decided by then, after the earlier tests I was in, that it's not really my sort of game. No narrative makes it feel directionless and so far there's no real way to build a character in meaningful ways, by which I mean working on appearance and personality. Having what your character looks like keep changing outside of your control is a game-breaker, even in a testing phase. Even in a test I need to feel some attachment to my character or else it's just like a job I'm not being paid to do. As for gameplay, it's too heavily oriented around skill acquisition all of which takes far, FAR too long. Movement is enervating. I feel physically tired after a few minutes because of the way I have to drag the camera to see anything. Not being able to swing the camera 360 degrees with the character remaining still is very frustrating. Also the combat is deeply irritating. Should be able to play a non-combat character and not have to fight at all. Aggressive mobs have absolutely no place in starter areas, let alone in these numbers. Basically, I find most aspects of the game annoying. It has great potential but the mechanics appear to be almost intentionally getting in the way of any of it being fun. Having played for 45 minutes today, I do think it has improved but I still don't feel like playing again. I would recommend it to others because I can see how it would appeal to some people but it doesn't do much for me.

I did kind of bang that out in a bit of a temper because, as often tends to be the way, I ended my Stars Reach session feeling quite irritable and annoyed. It's a weird experience. The game seems like it ought to be fun but somehow it mostly isn't. It's a lot of fuss and bother for not very much  reward let alone entertainment but it feels like it shouldn't be.

In the past I've tended to put that down to it just not being my sort of game but really it's not all that different, mechanically, to any other survival-crafting game and I've had great times in several of those. So what exactly is it about Stars Reach that increasingly seems to rub me up the wrong way?

Partly, I think, it's that this really is still very early in the development process. Most of the time, most of what's there works fairly well, which is great, but also means the game has an unfortunate tendency to feel a lot more finished than it really is. It does say right there on the loading screen that it's "pre-alpha". You don't get much earlier than that. 

Much of what feels like it's missing feels that way because it really is missing and for very good reason: it hasn't been done yet. It will be, one day, and complaining that it's not there now seems silly. Unfortunately, if you're asking me what the game feels like now, as surveys tend to do, then without all the stuff that isn't in yet, well, yes, it probably is going to feel bad. Unavoidable, perhaps, but there it is.

The other thing that puts me off is much more nebulous. Stars Reach just feels like it doesn't really want me to be there. It's a hostile environment with very few amenities and everything is hard work. And there doesn't really seem to be much of a reason why I should be there, anyway. What am I actually supposed to be doing? 

One of those games that looks better when you're there than in screenshots, I think.

The snarky narrative wrapper that currently offers just about all there is for context really doesn't help. Apparently I'm an idiot from a race of idiots who messed everything up, only to survive on charity that's given grudgingly at best. The game wastes no time in making the player feel positively unwelcome which is a big risk that for me very much does not pay off. 

Having the game insult the player, let alone having that be the only way the game communicates, seems like asking for pushback, which in the case of a video game would usually consist of logging out, uninstalling and then bad-mouthing it to anyone who'll listen. I imagine there are people who find the "meatbag" routine hilarious. I am not one of them.

But more than that, there's a fug of earnestness surrounding Stars Reach, as if somehow playing it might be good for you. It reeks of being in the Scouts or some kind of social program, where everything builds character or community or is for your own good. Hard to put my finger on why it feels that way  but for me it's there and it's been there from the start. 

Again, almost certainly a big positive for some people but not me. I don't respond to it well at all and the combination of that sensation with open insults is just weird. And not in a good way.

And yet, as I said in the survey, I would recommend Stars Reach to others. It has the potential to be a solid experience when it's finished and it's not too shabby even now. It runs well and it looks good and there's enough to do to keep you busy for a while, which I'm sure is more than enough for a lot of people, not to mention more than what a lot of games a lot further along in development can offer.

So please don't let me put you off if, unlike me, you don't mind being called a meatbag every five minutes. 

In The Night Cafe

In the "AI Used In This Post" footnote I include with every post that uses any form of generative AI (Well, when I remember...) I almost always mention NightCafe. I can't remember when I first found the website but it must have been at least a couple of years ago and since then I've rarely gone anywhere else for my AI image needs.

AAM XL Anime Mix v1

Until today, when I did a bit of googling in support of this post, I had no idea NightCafe was an Australian operation. I also didn't know it had a mission statement: "to democratise art creation". The site's "About" page is worth a read. I won't paraphrase it here because it's a two-minute read but I recommend a click-through.  

I'm currently reading Supremacy by Parmy Olsen, which tells the story behind the development of the biggest of the Western AI developers, Deep Mind and OpenAI. I'm not far into the book yet (It's my bathroom book so I'm reading it a few pages at a time.) but the most surprising thing to me so far is the extent to which the individuals who started all of this had existential, humanitarian and even altruistic reasons for doing so.

I believe part of Parmy Olsen's purpose in writing the book was to show how those lofty goals became subverted by capitalism but I won't pre-empt the twist ending. I mention it mostly as a corollary to the brief description of Angus Russell's flash of inspiration for NightCafe, which was when a friend came round to his apartment and commented on how bare it looked with no pictures on the wall.

Nightmare Shaper v3

Somehow that led Angus to start a crusade to "allow anyone - regardless of skill level - to experience the satisfaction, the therapy, the rush of creating incredible, unique art." I'll pass over the inevitable argument that kind of statement is bound to start because this - believe it or not - isn't a post about the rights or wrongs of generative AI.

No, this is just another gamer's blog post where someone tells you how they've been grinding and now they've leveled up. Or something. 

Since I started using it, NightCafe has become increasingly gamified. There was always a log-in daily where you got five credits just for visiting the site each day, and there have been competitions running for as long as I can remember, none of which I have paid even the slightest passing attention.

A few weeks ago the administrators (Probably Angus's wife, who's the  Chief Operating Officer.) decided to turn that daily log-in into something a little more active, so now you have to make a picture before you get your free credits. It's a good deal because the minimum payout is still five creds but now there's a dice-roll to see how much more you get on top of that and on a good day you might get ten or fifteen.

DALL-E 3

Better yet, there are streaks. Every five days gets you a bonus ten credits and after a certain number of days you get an extra bonus and a title. I'm an Owl, which comes at thirty days. Next comes Horse at a hundred, then Bear at two hundred and Eagle after a full year.

I'd be further along but I missed a day because for some reason, one day I didn't get the email reminder. Until then, it had never failed to appear in all the time I'd been using the site. Now I take great care to check in every morning, email or no, because the penalty for missing a day is to slide all the way back down the snake to the start.

Not that it matters. The credits keep rolling in just the same and what difference does it make whether you're an Owl or an Eagle? Except it will matter to someone because there's a Leaderboard. 

I didn't know until today there was such a thing. Now I do, I still find it hard to believe. Who makes a leaderboard for a utility website? What would be going in someone's head to do a thing like that? 

Ideogram V3 Turbo

Top of the table today is Amelezz with a "1.2k day" streak, which suggests the streak thing has been going on a lot longer than I thought. If not for that one slip, I might be somewhere on that leaderboard. I doubt I missed many days since I first discovered the site, if any at all, and that has to be at least a couple of years ago..

But even then, my name still wouldn't show up on the board because I have never registered an account under any name. I must have filled in some form long ago or else how would they know where to send the emails but it doesn't seem to have required anything more than the address because my creations are all still accredited to "Anonymous User". 

Unlike Suno, which has a similar pattern of gamification and where I'm unknown as That Darn Cat, no-one is going to find anything I've done by searching Nightcafe. Mind you, they won't find much at Suno either, only the experiments I made when I first found the app, also a couple of years ago. All my recent work there remains resolutely private.

Google Imagen 4.0 Ultra

I am not tempted by leaderboards or likes and I am not a fan of gamification. In fact, I'm against it. When the new system was introduced I was irked. 

I could just have ignored it and stopped collecting the credits. I already had plenty, getting on for three thousand, and since I only use a handful every few weeks, whenever I need something for a post, I was hardly likely to run out.

I wasn't so angry I was going to do myself out of a free supply of credits just on principle, though, so I contented myself with some passive-aggressive push-back. I decided I wouldn't give NightCafe the satisfaction of seeing any new prompts from me to earn those credits. Instead, I'd re-use the exact same prompt every day.

For the first day of the new regime I pulled up one of the images I'd used for this post, which at the time was the most recent use I'd made of the app. I cut and pasted the prompt - "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism" - to generate a new image and that's the prompt I've been using every day since.

Fluently XL

The whole point of NightCafe, as opposed to other AI Image Generation sites, is that it collects together many, many models. The Pro version, for which you have to pay, has the most but even the free version has around sixty. 

At the start of my streak I just used whatever model I'd left in the chamber after the last time I visited but pretty quickly it occurred to me to try a different model each day. Had I been planning it, I'd have started at the top and worked down but as it is I've just been picking one on a whim and trying not to duplicate too much. At some point, I need to go back and note down all the ones I've used so I can make sure to try all the others.

It's been fascinating. The similarity of the images is striking but so are the differences. As of today I have forty-seven images from the same prompt which, you'll notice, does not mention anything about the way the figure should be facing, their ethnicity, the time of day or what exactly I mean by a "corn field".

All of these and many more are details left to the AIs to work out. It's very instructive to watch them doing it. 

Mysterious XL v4

In so far as it's possible to tell, all the women are white, often typically northern-European in appearance. There are one or two where it's slightly ambiguous but there are no dark-skinned faces and most of the clothing is broadly western in style. 

That seems telling because the prompt makes no mention of ethnicity or global location but although I didn't realize it when I came up with the prompt, "dustbowl" is a term apparently quite specific to 1930s America, as made familiar by movies and novels in general and Steinbeck in particular. I always imagined it to be a lot more generic than that.

That goes some way to explaining the clothing, too, which is vaguely appropriate to that setting with a lot of blue jeans, denim jackets, and long canvas dresses. Again, I only specified that it be "old" and "worn", something not all the models seemed to notice.

Neither did I say which way the figure should be facing but only nine feature a figure walking away from the viewer. All the rest are walking towards the camera except for one extreme outlier, apparently crossing the path from the left to the right. 

Juggernaut Flux Lightning

As for age, the various models took a fairly broad interpretation of "young", with the female figures
seeming to vary from mid-teens to mid-thirties. Two of the models ignored the instruction to make the figure "young" altogether and went for a white-haired, much older woman instead. 

All of the models, without exception, interpreted "corn field" to mean maize or sweet-corn., something I suspect shows a very strong North American bias in the data. When I wrote the prompt I wasn't imagining anything like that, as can be seen in the original short story from which the quote was taken. Where I come from, a "corn field" loosely means any arable crop. I was most likely thinking of wheat or barley. Certainly not maize. It also seems to clash somewhat with the aforementioned tight interpretation of "dustbowl".

Only a handful of models added anything significant to the background and when they did it was usually something that gave the image a somewhat post-apocalyptic or sci-fi feel. I'm not really sure where that comes from. Maybe it's just me, seeing things that aren't there.

Animagine XL v3

Another handful gave the figure something to carry, almost always luggage of some kind. There's a single image in which the woman appears to be holding some kind of gun. Most of the women are bare-headed but there's a smattering of hats. One very odd take puts the figure in what looks like a space-suit.

Given that I didn't give any suggestions at all on palette beyond the single word "color",  the collection is remarkably consistent, all shades of yellow and brown. Sepia is a particular favorite. Occasionally there's a pleasant blue sky. The very few images that use a lot of color really stand out. 

Every shot is taken in daylight, too, although a couple look like the sun is about to go down. Again, that was never specified or even mentioned so presumably "daytime" is some kind of default.

This degree of relative consistency is something I've also recently noticed as a feature of Suno, where I've had cause to reuse the exact same prompts multiple times, with just a single word changed, trying to fine-tune something. It's clear that whatever the mysterious black-box processes behind these images and sounds might be, they're far from random.

I'm very pleased with the portfolio I'm building up of these unnamed women, making their way across a somewhat forbidding landscape. I intend to carry on re-using the same prompt at least until I've run it through all the available free models, not so much to prove or test anything but just because I find it really entertaining to see what comes out each time I press the button.. 

When I'm finished, maybe I'll pick a dozen or so of the best ones and have them made into a poster. It could replace my Bojack Horseman by the Pool that faded so badly in the sun I had to take it down. Nightcafe does offer a print-and-frame service but I think I'll be doing this one myself.

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post:

Google Imagen 4.0

The prompt is in the post. All the models are given in the captions except for the four shots in the header image. The upper pair are both by Flux from before I started using a different model each time so it's no surprise they're so similar. The two beneath them are by two versions of the same model, HiDream I1, so again the similarity is explicable, although not so much the congruence of those two with the ones by Flux. The variant models for those two are HiDream I1 Dev on the left and HiDream I1 Full on the right. I notice the "full" model is a lot sharper and clearer.

My favorite, by some margin and not just of the selection you see here but of the entire run so far, is  the fourth from the top: the mid-teen girl in dungarees, carrying a heavy-looking sack and staring down at her feet, looking worried. That's very close to the image I had in my mind of the unnamed girl in the story and the very dusty, red-tinged field she's walking through is very like the setting. Perhaps surprisingly, that one's from a model one of whose whose biggest claims is that it "Excels in typography, producing text that closely resembles human-designed artwork."

I didn't use several of my other favorites because I was trying to give sense of the range and and to illustrate certain points I'd made. Before the event began, I was toying with the idea of posting one image a day throughout Blaugust and I might still do something like it, after it finishes. It just seems a shame not share the good ones.

A Little Appreciation Now And Then Would Be Nice...

Today sees the start of Creator Appreciation Week in Blaugust. This used to be a separate event, back when it was known as Developer Appreciation Week, a name that clearly reflects Blaugust's origins in the gaming community. 

Now the net is cast wide to catch... well, anything. And anyone. Artists, musicians, writers, coders, streamers, social media gurus, the company that makes those cute shoes you really, really like...

And bloggers, I guess. Why not?

One notable thing for me about this year's Blaugust, compared to previous events, has been the number of posts I've bookmarked because they contained factual information or links I thought might come in handy later. We seem to have attracted an above average number of people who make web resources or collect and distribute information about those who do. 

Among this year's Blaugustinians whose posts have caught my attention in this way are a couple I've already mentioned in previous posts - Nick Simson, who put me onto an excellent overview of the current and potential future state of AI/LLM usage posted by Ben Werdmuller and Tara Calishain of Calishat, who created both Attention Junction and MiniGladys, which I immediately bookmarked and then, of course, haven't used. But they look really useful!

I also bookmarked my Favorite Radio Stations, a post by The Virtual Moose. 

There was a time when I listened to the radio a lot while playing MMORPGs. As I've always said, I find the in-game sounds and music an integral part of almost all games (The exceptions being the handful where I find it literally unlistenable but those are vanishingly rare, thankfully.) so I always have both on and turned up loud enough to hear clearly. 

I've always been quite comfortable having two or three sound sources playing simultaneously and though I'm very poor at paying attention to more than one of them at a time, I'm quite good at shifting my attention from one to another as appropriate, whenever something interesting or important crops up. 

They do need to be different kinds of sounds - two pieces of music playing at the same time is a cacophony - but ambient and combat sounds from a video game, music and speech all seem to use different processing channels in my brain so they barely clash at all. 

In the olden days, when few MMORPGs used much in the way of voice acting, I was able to have speech radio on while I played but that ceased to be a viable option a long time ago, now almost everything is voiced. 

As game developers leaned into voice acting, so website developers pulled back from it. Remember the days when you'd go to a website and tinny machine music would start playing immediately? No-one wanted that and now you hardly ever hear it. Which means web-browsing and blog-reading is perfect for having music on in the background.

I used to listen to Canadian and Australian and American ultra-local stations, mostly on Sundays, as they interviewed local "celebrities" , people unknown to anyone fifty miles outside of town, or went through the local events calendar in excruciating detail. I found it very relaxing.

To find them, I used a website (No-one called them "apps" then.) called Radio Garden. I haven't tried  it for a long time but it's still there. It spins a globe and you can travel anywhere and listen to any radio station in the world.

Well, unless you live where I do. It seems that for the last couple of years the UK has become a Radio Walled Garden, with anything from outside the borders of the four nations being blocked for "licensing reasons" related to "copyright and neighboring rights-related matters". Another good reason to use a VPN, I'm sure.

I also used to pick on college radio stations to hear the eclectic and peculiar mix of music they'd program. The Virtual Moose post reminded me how much fun that used to be and made me think of doing it again, and I'm happy to say all their links work just fine, so how that figures with the supposed copyright issues is anyone's guess. 

My appreciation to all the actors involved, from the blogger who reconnected me with my previous self, the creators and maintainers of the app that makes listening to radio from all over the world not just possible but simple, provided you don't happen to live in the UK of course, and to the people at the radio stations themselves, who keep the medium itself alive. 

When I was thinking about what I'd do for CAW, I considered making it an all-AI edition, with links to the numerous sources I now rely on to do pretty much anything here. I might still do that but if I do I'll probably get side-tracked by trying to decide what is and isn't "AI". The label gets slapped onto anything and everything now and I'm pretty sure half the apps I'm using would just have been called "algorithms" five years ago.  

I'll leave that for another post as I stick to my theme of shouting out Blaugustinians, in which context I particularly want to mention ribo.zone, where today's post is all about dithering. I potter and I ramble but I don't often dither but it turns out not being able to make your mind up isn't what the post is about.

Dithering is the term for the pointillist visuals used throughout the Ribo Zone. It's one of the more attractive aesthetics on display in this year's Blaugust and I absolutely will steal some of that look if I can. Luckily, I don't need to resort to burglary because Loren, the person behind the blog, is happy to give it away. 

They linked to an app called Dithermark, which I immediately bookmarked and then started playing around with. You can see some examples in the post and I feel certain there will be more, so my appreciation to both Loren and whoever 's behind the app.

And finally, some music. This Blaugust has been notable for being the first I can remember in which several of the blogs are mainly or wholly about music. I'm not sure whose social media outreach brought them in but they're a very welcome addition.

I've learned a couple of things from following the various musical bloggers these past couple of weeks. Firstly, my fantasy of having a blog where I post a new tune every day is probably viable. One song a day, I mean. More than that is too much. And secondly, if you're going to make your blog a discovery-point for music, you probably ought to supply links to a variety of platforms where readers can hear it.

I am 100% guilty of not doing this myself and I'm probably not going to change but if you only link to, say, YouTube, as I do, you're making an assumption that everyone uses that platform. And they do, don't they? Just like everyone uses Spotify. Except I don't use Spotify, so I never click links that go there. And Spotify is most definitely not being appreciated by me, not today or any at other time.

Soundcloud I very much do appreciate but unfortunately, whenever I click on links to songs hosted there, the volume is earsplitting and there never seems to be any way to change it, so I've learned through operant conditioning not to do it. Bandcamp, which I also appreciate, is fine but fiddly, which means I tend not to bother with them, either. 

Because of all that, most of which is entirely my own fault, the musical blog this Blaugust that I've spent most time on has been the African Music Forum. I know next to nothing about African music. I saw Prince Nico Mbarga play live at the first ever WOMAD festival and later I saw Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba at the Ashton Court Free Festival but that's about the extent of my experience.

It's been fun to be exposed to what feels like a random sampling of a vast warehouse of musical treasure every day. I don't listen to all of the selections but the ones I've cherry-picked have been great. Favorites so far have been Dr. Footswitch and Black Disco. 

AMF is exemplary in including multiple options for listening but it also always leads with a video from YouTube, which is why I've had so much fun with it. I'm so lazy!

And finally, since we're being musical, I just want to shout out a final Blaugust contributor, Wavelengths. I don't generally listen to podcasts and I haven't been listening to this one but I do read podcast blogs and this is a good one. 

I enjoyed the post on the PSP, a device I always wished I'd owned when it was in vogue and which, having read this, I still would like to try, but mostly I would like to thank them for bringing to my attention the existence of a full-length album by Ninajirachi. She turned up on one of my What I've Been Listening To Lately posts not that long ago but I don't believe I'm currently subscribed to her YouTube channel, so the release of her album "I Love My Computer" had passed me by. 

I'm sure I'd have caught up with it sooner or later but thanks to Wavelengths it was sooner. I listened to the whole thing yesterday and it's great. It almost fills that gap left by the unexplained disappearance of Superorganism. Whatever did happen to them, anyway?

That's my round of applause for Blaugust bloggers done for now but it might only be round one. This has been a very good Blaugust for me in terms of finding new voices to listen to, by no means all of which have I mentioned here today. I'm saving that for the final "Lessons Learned" week. 

Normally I find lists of which blogs people liked best in Blaugust a little uncomfortable - you just know everyone who reads them is looking for their own name and feeling at least a little disappointed when they don't find it - but this time I do have several clear favorites, who I will definitely be continuing to follow after the event ends, so it seems a bit ingenuous not to admit it.

I may also do another CAW post on a few non-blogging favorites, too, if only to prove there is a world outside Blaugust. 

Sometimes it's hard to remember. 

Marvel's Midnight Suns - First Impressions

One of the more interesting psychological phenomena surrounding gaming is the way multiple options so often collapse into one. It's common to hear people, myself very much included, complaining of choice overload or even choice paralysis but when it comes to gaming, at least, I find the choices mostly make themselves.

For example, I've been droning on about the number of games I've picked up for free and cheap lately, side-eying the much larger collection of freebies I've claimed and never even installed, yet as soon as I got my claws on Marvel's Midnight Suns I knew I was going to play it right away.

Or that was my plan. It didn't quite come off because the download from Epic Games turned out to be  i  n  c  r  e  d  i  b  l  y  slow. Maybe I've been spoiled by Steam and all those F2P gacha games but ninety minutes for a 57Gb download? That's about three times longer than it normally takes me.

Consequently, by the time the thing had squeezed itself down the pipe and gotten itself settled in, it was time for Beryl's late-evening walk and then for bed. I put off playing until this morning and right after breakfast, there I was... stuck in Epic's super-irritating log-in process.

At this point you should have been enjoying a couple of paragraphs of quality ranting as I complained volubly about having to fill in all the same details I filled in twelve hours ago and complete a Captcha puzzle, just to get to the point where I could see the game in my Epic library. I'd written most of it, too, but before I finished, in a spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I'd better log in again to see if I'd remembered all the steps correctly. And stap me if this time it didn't skip the lot and take me straight into the game!

So I guess all the delay was a first-time log-in check and everything I did yesterday must have been a "We see you haven't been here for a while" security check. Or something. Whatever. I'll give them a grudging pass but if it turns out to be a daily identity check after all I'm gonna be pissed.

Moving on, what abut the game? 

Couldn't tell you. Haven't played it yet. I have, however, played through the Tutorial and the following pre-game introduction. It took me seventy-five minutes, give or take. More than enough for a First Impression post. 

Let's do it old school with sub-sections. 

Graphics And Design 

Hmm. Start with a tough one, why not? Good? Bad? Indifferent? As the wits on YouTube like to say in the comments: "Yes".

The character animations are mediocre at best. Some are downright bad. Iron Man (For it is he...) walks bow-legged, like his armor doesn't fit him properly. I had a more scatological phrase in mind to describe what it looks like but I'll spare you. It's unconvincing as articulation and unbecoming of a super-hero, anyway. None of the others are as bad but few, if any, are good. They all look stiff and awkward.

But then, I find myself having a generic problem with the western game animation Firaxis is offering. It looks clunky and old-fashioned compared to everything I've become used to in the anime-style games I mostly seem to have been playing of late. It falls heavily between cinematic realism and cartoon animation, having weight and solidity but precious little fluidity or grace. I mean, it's not terrible and after a while I found myself getting used to it but it's definitely not something you'd gosh-wow over, which is a bar very many games easily leap over nowadays.

The backgrounds are much better and the character designs are very solid, although given they're virtually all specific looks taken verbatim from licensed characters in a very well-known IP it would be more than a little embarrassing if they weren't.  

The overall design aesthetic I liked a lot more. The UI is absolutely minimal, leaving nearly the entire screen clear for the graphics, which makes it even more of a pity they aren't better, I guess, but which is very welcome all the same. Every time a new major character appears the game pauses and a flash card appears to tell you who they are, along with sarcastic or amusing comment. I found that rather more entertaining than it probably should have been but then I've known most of these characters a very long time.

Character And Plot

Since it's come up... In my long experience of Marvel comics, the writers only really have two settings: portentous and overblown or snarky and flip. Back in the days when I kept up, it was fairly simple to sort the entire roster of heroes - and most of their supporting casts - into one or other of those bins. Of course, one of the company's supposed USPs was always crossing those streams, often in the same story and sometimes with the same character, but almost everyone and everything reverted to one or other as a default.

The MCU, by and large, followed the same formula, back when I was paying attention, from the first Iron Man movie to Avengers: Endgame, which came out in 2019 (God... really? Seems like it was about six months ago...). Marvel's Midnight Suns (The prefix is part of the official name, by the way.) came out in 2022 but it feels like it's cut from the same spandex. If the tone of the movies has changed in the last few years, I wouldn't know but there's no sign of it here.

The movies were characterized by a never-ending torrent of one-liners and this game is the same. Tony Stark is particularly prone to bad dad jokes and Stephen Strange constantly sends himself up with a series of very pretentious pronouncements that neither the rest of the cast nor the player could possibly take at face value. It's all quite meta and post-modern in a way that I thought went out of fashion a decade or more ago but it plays to my sense of humor so I'm fine with it. I imagine it would drive some people to want to throw the monitor out the window, though.

The plot, what little I've seen of it so far, is one of those standard Some Bad Guys Just Summoned An Even Badder Guy And The World Will Come To An End Unless You Do Something About It affairs. In this case the bad guys are HYDRA, which has to be one of the most generic bad guy organizations in the history of comics; the badder guy is Lilith, who I think comes from Ghost Rider/Blade/Morbius continuity and is little more than a name to me. Other than that, not much of a storyline has developed yet, beyond needing to stop things getting worse.

 

The cast is interesting, to me anyway. As a long-time reader, I knew who most of them were immediately. Iron Man and Dr. Strange, obviously, but also The Scarlet Witch, Ms. Marvel, Blade, Magik; all characters I know either very well or well-enough. 

More intriguing were the ones I thought I ought to know but couldn't quite place - Nico Minoru and Robbie Reyes in particular. I had to look them both up and it turns out I was fifty per cent right - I knew one of them, not the other. Nico is a graduate of The Runaways - not the band, sadly, but the teen supergroup, whose TV show I watched and several of whose comic collections I own. Should have been able to peg her.

The other turns out to be an incarnation of Ghost Rider. I have never been a fan of the skull-headed biker and I certainly don't know this alternate version. Even if I did, I might not have realized who he was because the original Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, features prominently in the introductory sequence. Why (And indeed how.) the both of them are in the same reality is, I assume, a plot point yet to be revealed.

All of which tells you a good deal about who this game is meant to appeal to: people already steeped in the mythology and the backstory. Everything refers back to something else. It's all lore and history from the opening scene and I'm betting that won't stop until the closing credits. If you're not at least curious to figure out how it all fits together then I'm guessing it's not the game for you. Obviously, it works for me, even though I'm much more of a DC fan than Marvel.

Character Creation

I was surprised to find there was any. It hadn't even occurred to me I'd be asked to make a character. I assumed I'd be playing the regulars. And indeed I will - there are a dozen playable heroes plus another four in DLC - but you do get to do some minimal cosmetic work on a character I'd never heard of before - The Hunter. 

The rationale for that is quite clever. Dr Strange, The Caretaker (Another new one on me - I had to look her up and among other things she was Agatha Harkness's lover so she might even have been in Wandavision...) and Nico between them manage to resurrect Lilith's daughter (Stop me if you're lost...) but before they really get into the necromantic action The Caretaker suggests it might be a good idea to know what she looks like. 

That's when the game drops you into Character Creation. It was about forty minutes in for me. There's very little to it - Body Type, Skin Tone, Hair Color and Style and I think that's about all. I did manage to get someone I didn't mind looking at so that was fine. It's not as if I get to "play" her in any meaningful sense anyway. She's just another scripted character as far as I can tell, so far, anyway.

Gameplay: Combat

This is where it gets good. Not the rest of it is bad but what I was looking for was a compelling-yet-simple tactical RPG and that looks to be what I'm going to get. It's a card-based system. I keep seeing comparisons to Slay The Spire and similar titles, none of which I've played so I can't comment on whether those are valid. To me, it feels quite similar to Wizard 101 or maybe even more so to Pirate 101.

Everything is turn-based and represented by a bunch of three-dimensional characters, none of whom move or do anything until it's their go, which immediately removes all immersion and turns the whole thing into almost a virtual table-top game. Exactly what I was looking for. 

The tutorial is very good. How refreshing to be able to say that. The interface is intuitive, the controls are obvious and the necessary details on what each action does are there in front of you. It helps that I already know what most of these characters are good at but for those that I don't know, all the information needed is close to hand.

Since it's a superhero game, there needs must be lots of explosions, force rays and people punching other people through walls, all of which there certainly is. One of the generic problems with turn-based games is that you end up having to watch the same animations hundreds of times, so things that seemed spectacular at the start make you want to put your fist through the screen by the end. Where this stands on that spectrum it's far too early to say but I'd already seen more than enough of Iron Man's repulsor blasts by the end of the Tutorial.

Fortunately, with so many playable characters, it should at least be possible to take a break from the most annoying ones. I hope. I'm certainly looking forward to finding out because the combat is pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

Gameplay: Out Of Combat

Can't really say. This was apparently what scuppered the game on release, when a lot of people took quite strongly against whatever it is you have to do to get from one set-piece fight to the next. 

So far, I've watched a lot of cut scenes, most of which were okay but nothing special, and had to pick a handful of dialog options, all of which looked like flavor to me. There's also an element of not-very-open world play, where you walk from one part of a non-combat instance to another to find someone you have to talk to or to go through a portal to somewhere else. Again, that seemed fine, nothing special but nothing awful either.

There's a big castle where everyone either lives or is staying for the duration of the crisis. You can pick your missions there although so far I've had a selection of exactly one so choice didn't really come into it. I believe you can also wander around and do... something. No idea what, yet, although the Wikipedia entry mentions sparring, upgrading cards and other practicalities.

I'm guessing the problematic part comes at night, when "players can interact with other heroes, or participate in a "Hangout" or a "club meeting". Sounds good until you learn it involves finessing how much other characters like you by giving them gifts and talking morality with them. That was literally the mechanic that made me stop playing the original Dragon Age mid-story and never go back to the franchise, so I can see what the problem might be. 

But that's a problem for another day. Haven't even got through the first yet. I'll update my thoughts on the "social elements" when I get to see them. As for the fighting - which is what I came for - looking good so far!

Last First Impressions Of Crystal Of Atlan

When I posted my first impressions of Crystal of Atlan back at the end of May, I certainly didn't think I'd still be posting about it a month later. Let's face it, my record for sticking with new games is abysmal these days. It never was great but at least I used to manage a month or two before running off after the next new fad. 

This year, with my gaming time at what has to be an all-time low since I first started playing PC games somewhere around 1997 or1998, any new game I take a look at can consider itself lucky if I come back for a second session. If I was interested in self-flagellation, I could go back through this year's posts and tally up all the games I've posted about once or twice and never again. It'd be a lot.

Let's not run away with the idea that I've played a lot of Crystal of Atlan, though. This will be the fifth post I've written about the game and that won't be too far off the number of sessions I've played. I haven't been counting but I'd guess it's no more than seven or eight. Still, that's a lot more than I was expecting, when I downloaded the game on a whim.

Given that there are very many better games I could be playing, plenty of them as new and some of them already sitting on my hard drives, why is COA the one that keeps getting the nod? It's a more-than-decent anime-styled action RPG that looks good and tells a good story but there are literally dozens of those. Why this one?

I wish I knew. It's not just "because it's there". As I said, I have plenty of games already installed, just waiting for me to choose them, some even in the exact same genre. And yet somehow, when the mood comes over me to play a video game, something that happens less and less often as the sun keeps on shining and being outdoors seems like a much better plan than sitting in front of a screen, it's Crystal of Atlan that gets the nod.

There's the dopamine hit, of course. My one and only character dinged 42 yesterday. That's quite fast progress and it comes in spurts, often at the end of a dungeon, when all the accumulated xp is dumped on her at once and she jumps a level or two at a stroke. That feels good.

The game also employs my favorite method of gear upgrades, drops from mobs. That's not the only way they come but it's how I've been getting most of mine and it's a significant attraction and another dopamine hit. Why developers ever moved away from gear drops to points systems and quest rewards beats me.

Then there's the look and feel of the thing. In recent years there's been a torrent of very good-looking games, to the point where I feel the baseline for "acceptable" is now somewhere above what would have classed as "outstanding" just a few years ago. COA doesn't stand out as particularly impressive by those standards but it certainly meets them and more by dint of its unfussiness and concentration on making a big, splashy impression.

Where other games of its kind offer a mutiitude of small details to create their worlds, this one sticks with the big picture. Everything is oversized and most of it seems to be built out of slabs. The place feels solid. There's also no shortage of neon and stained glass and everything is brightly colored, often in single tones. It's not subtle but it works.

The game describes the setting as "Magitech" and the style as "anime" but for my money the overarching aesthetic is "children's picture-book". It has that illustrative look to it, designed to appeal to an audience not quite old enough to read all the words yet. I'm not saying COA is a children's game, though. Far from it. It's probably just as well if the little ones can't read the words here, given what those words are saying.

I'm not about to say Crystal of Atlan has a great plot or that the writing is inspired. It definitely doesn't and it certainly is not.  It is often charming, though, and quite often amusing. Most importantly, it's a pleasure to read. Mostly it will be reading, too. There's some voice acting but not that much.

There are also plenty of cut scenes but they're much shorter than in some games I could mention and seem to concentrate mostly on scene-setting and local color. One thing I found interesting was that when I looked at the screenshots I'd taken of a couple of cut scenes, I noticed there was a lot more going on than I'd realised as they played out in front of me. Whether that says more about the game or me is another question. 

The plot as far as I've followed it mostly revolves around drug dealing, corruption and child exploitation, which it has to be said is an unusual approach for a game of this nature. Of course, the drug in question is a magitech performance enhancer with side effects that turn people into monsters and the children are Dickensian street urchins with amazing thieving and combat skills, but still...

Speaking of combat, it's good fun so far. I read an opinion piece over at MMOBomb earlier, where the writer, Mathew D'Onofrio, tried his first gacha action RPG and was impressed with the look of the thing but much less so with the combat. "Looks Good, Plays Bad" was his tl;dr.

That game was yet another new anime-gacha-action RPG I'd never heard of: Mongil: Star Drive. You can't throw a stone without hitting one of the damn things nowadays. 

What he didn't like about the combat was that there wasn't enough to do: "all I was doing was left-clicking, occasionally dodging with the right mouse button, and spamming Q and E for skills and ultimates." He followed that up with another complaint: "It felt like I was brute-forcing my way through every fight."

I quoted that in full because it does a fair job of summing up what I like about combat in Crystal of Atlan. The less I have to do, the better I like it. That said, there's actually quite a bit more to COA's combat than Mathew found in M:SD. I can't quite remember what it is but I know I was hitting more than just two buttons. (1,2,3,4, for skills, 5 for the pet, R for potions, Q and E for specials/ultimates, shift for dodge...)

Whatever it is, it's manageable for the moment. No doubt it will spiral over my skill ceiling at some point but so far it's comfortably below it and I'm enjoying the fights. Just as well because it is pretty much a fighting game, with an inverse ratio of combat to dialog as Wuthering Waves. 

Perhaps the biggest draw so far is the set pieces. Some of those are very impressive. Last session, I had one of those classic fights on top of a moving train. It was visually thrilling, as I would have loved to have taken some screenshots to demonstrate, but it was take photos or don't fall off and I chose to keep my footing.

The current series of dungeons I'm enjoying give a nod to Alice in Wonderland but really seem more like a fairground. It's a big upgrade, visually, from the sewers and back alleys of the previous chapter. It's nicer to be fighting in a clocktower filled with stained glass windows or next to a whirling carousel with prancing painted horses rather than a tunnel filled with sludge, that's for sure.

There's a whole exploration side to the game that I haven't yet... erm... explored, where you can search for collectible cards and take photos in scenic areas. I'm a lot more likely to do that when there are attractive views all around. 

The animations are striking, too. I used not to be much of a one for animations but play enough action RPGs and you start to get a taste for them. I very much enjoy the way my character does leaps and flips and I spend as much time doing it as I can when there's a fight going on. Whether it helps I'm not sure but it feels good and if I could get a screenshot I bet it'd look good, too.

The thing I'm most displeased with is what my character's wearing. It's still that embarassing maid's outfit. I really need to look into how to get something less humiliating. Of course, I could always spend some money and buy an outfit in the cash shop. That'd be a first!

As that last paragraph suggests, I think I'm rapidly approaching the point where I'll need to do some proper research on how the game works, what there is to do and how to get the best out of it all. Otherwise I fear I'll just be funnelled down the main storyline into dungeon after dungeon, which will most likely cease to be fun as soon as the fights start to be in any way challenging.

At Level 42 I really ought to be past the First Impressions stage anyway, so I think this is going to be the final post in that line. Next time - if there is a next time - I might have to start talking about the game as a game, not just a novelty. 

If I ever get that far, I'd call it a win for Crystal of Atlan.