Umm... Did We Already Watch This?

One of the unanticipated artifacts of the streaming era, for me at least, is the way viewing stretches out in unpredictable and usually unwelcome directions. Several times now, I've started watching a show only to find that before I get to the end the rights have moved to another platform.

Since I'm usually subscribed to more than one streaming service at a time, if I'm lucky it's no more trouble than remembering where the show I was in the middle of watching has gone. Lucifer jumped from Amazon Prime to Netflix but since I was subscribing to both at the time, that wasn't much of a problem.

More often, though, the move is to a service I'm not using, which means making a choice between paying a further subscription just to keep watching or dropping the show, at least for the time being, in the hope it might eventually resurface on a service to which I have access. Or, if I really want to carry on watching, as happened in the case of Roswell New Mexico, using a VPN to find it on a platform outside my designated geographical territory.

There is sometimes another possibility, of course. In some ways it's my preferred option. That's to buy the damn thing on DVD. I'd add "Or on Blu-Ray" but I still don't own a Blu-Ray player. Every time I come close I remember I really don't care that much about the supposed visual fidelity and anyway isn't the whole physical format about to drop into the trash-bin of history?

Probably not, as it turns out. Back in the mid-teens, I was telling everyone who'd listen how the future wasn't just digital, it was virtual. No-one growing up in the 21st century would want to tie themselves down to a whole load of physical clutter, not when they could carry the entire history of cinema, literature and music in their pockets. 

Yeah. About that. Turns out I could not have been more wrong. Gen-Z flippin' love physical media. I don't have to read articles about it online. I can see it happening every day I go to work. Teens and twenty-somethings are all over the store, handling everything. They love to touch. 

They're the consumers driving the huge boom in exclusive editions, buying multiple variants of the same book just to have them all. They're the ones buying expensive hardbacks and gosh-wowing over the sprayed edges. 

 

It reminds me a little of the comic-book boom of the nineties, when publishers thought they could sell the same comic many times over just by issuing versions with different covers and packaging them in sealed plastic bags. The thing about that nasty little episode, though, was that most of the interest was fueled by greed. Comic fans believed if they bought all six different covers of the latest issue and never opened the sealed packages, all of them would increase in value as fast as the Flash could run.

Didn't happen. In fact, it didn't happen so much that the entire industry almost collapsed. It certainly drove me away from the hobby and from what I read afterwards, I was very much not the only one. 

This seems different. I hear so many conversations between customers as I move through the shop and not a single one has ever mentioned buying anything as an investment. They're all crazy in love with having something that looks great, that was written by someone whose writing they enjoy or which features characters they adore. There's a big collecting aspect to it, for sure, but mostly the drive seems to revolve around the sheer, physical, tactile, visual pleasure of seeing and touching something gorgeous.

Also, there's the permanence thing. A lot more people today seem to be aware that virtual ownership is ephemeral. A streaming subscription gives you unlimited access to what's on the stream but you have no say over what that is or how long it's going to be there. Even digital purchases only last as long as the service behind them and the hardware on which they run.

And it's a lot easier and more impressive to take a picture of yourself holding a book or a vinyl album to post on Instagram. It's harder to do the same with an eBook or a song you just found on Spotify. You can share your digital discoveries easily enough but bragging requires pictures.

Because, somewhat to my own surprise,  I am not utterly constrained by my previous belief systems, I, too, have modified my expectations concerning the digital future. I was pretty excited by it a decade ago, when the idea of being able to junk all my physical crap and replace it with orders of magnitude more convenient virtual crap seemed like an imminent reality.

Now I prefer to have hard copies of anything I really want to be sure I can come back to whenever I feel  like it. (The uncomfortable truth, that I probably never will come back to any of it, is something I prefer not to think about.) My problem is that, more often than you might expect, there is no physical media available for the stuff I want to keep.

Runaways is a good example. The show, produced by Marvel and originally released as a Hulu-exclusive, has, as far as I can tell, never been released in a physical format. I watched the first season some time ago, although I can't now remember which platform that was on. According to the production history on Wikipedia, it looks like it would have had to have been Disney+, to which I did subscribe for a while, but I thought I saw it earlier than that.

Wherever and wherever it was, I didn't finish the whole thing before it disappeared. Either I stopped subbing or it left the service. I'd be lying if I said I'd been pining to see the rest ever since but I did check if there was a box set I could buy. There was not. 

I hadn't thought about the show for a long while until a few weeks ago I spotted it in my Recommends on Prime. I was unexpectedly excited by the prospect of catching up with the show, most of whose characters I only vaguely remembered as "quite annoying". 

My never-reliable memory told me I'd seen the first two seasons so I started watching from the start of Season 3. I had no idea what the hell was going on. Sure, it'd been a while, but usually things like characters and plot come back to me very quickly, given a nudge. This time, nothing at all.

After half an hour of complete confusion I decided to go back to the start of Season 2 and start from there, which was just as well because I hadn't seen any of it before. It turns out I did not watch two seasons the first time around. I only watched the first. 

This post started out as a review of Season 2 of Runaways. That's not where it's going now. I will say that I think it's a very strong show, thematically absorbing, generally well-written and well-acted. As a superhero show it's a lot less superheroic than many and as a show ostensibly centered on teenagers, it has a lot more adult characters and adult-oriented content than you might expect. 

But I'll save a full review for when I've finished the third and final season. I'll be starting that tonight. It shouldn't take long. Towards the end of Season 2 I was enjoying it so much I was watching two episodes a night. Let's hope the final season is as compelling.

What I'm more interested highlighting just now is a more generalized observation on the increasing instability of my viewing options. 

I grew up in the era of broadcast television, before the general availability of any form of recording or time-shifting for home use. Until I was in my mid-20s, if I wanted to watch a TV show I had to make time to see it when it was shown.

If I missed that window, I might be lucky enough to catch it when it was repeated six months or a year later but you could never rely on something even getting a second showing. Many of them weren't even stored away safely by the broadcasters. They were treated as entirely disposable and taped over or thrown out with the trash.

 

What that meant was that if you really liked a show you made a point of being in when it came on. Barring accidents and emergencies, you would see every episode, in order, in one extended sequence that might take months. There'd usually be a week between episodes but most people could remember what happened a week ago pretty clearly. Continuity of narrative was mostly maintained.

Later came video and then DVD, meaning some shows could be owned like books or albums. If there was no official release, you could at least swipe your own copy and with timers you didn't even have to be there to do it. Now you had the choice, whether to follow along at the pace the broadcaster set or wait until the end and then watch it all at once. Or on any schedule you chose, really. You could also rewind to make sense of any bits you couldn't follow or to look at a particular scene in detail.

Later came the Box Set (Binge) era, which still lingers on in some contexts, although its cultural hegemony is over. Box sets got pushed into the background with the advent of the streaming era, when I and I'm sure many others thought we'd reached Peak Viewing Experience.

Everything would always be there. You'd be able to start and stop at will. It'd be like having the Great Library of Alexandria a fingertip's touch away.

That never happened. It felt a bit like it in the early days, when there were fewer streaming platforms and it seemed as if there might eventually be just one streamer to rule them all but, like the imagined end of physical possessions, that turned out to be a fantasy. 

Instead, not only do streaming platforms proliferate but they're all subdividing like amoebas, splitting into "channels", each of which requires a separate subscription. And as if that wasn't annoying enough, they're reverting to the traditional practices of the networks and broadcasters they were supposed to replace, scheduling shows weekly or at even less convenient intervals, presumably in the hope of constraining customers from exercising their increasingly numerous but decreasingly satisfying options.

All of which is well-known and most of which I've already hashed out here, about as often as Old Television put out repeats of the same damn shows. Except that watching Runaways has alerted me to a new phenomenon, which is that sometimes access to shows can be so disrupted I can't even fricken' remember what I've already watched!

It really was a shock to find I hadn't even watched an entire season of a show I thought I'd enjoyed. I could put that down to my ever-less-reliable memory but really I'm not going senile, not quite yet. I never had a great memory but it hasn't gotten substantially worse. I just never expected to have to follow a single series across multiple platforms, let alone over a period of years, in this counter-intuitive and very irritating fashion. 

At least in the broadcast era there were magazines you could buy with the schedules laid out clearly and unequivocally. And the networks announced entire slates of shows in advance for the whole of the Autumn, Winter and Spring. (Summer was all reruns, of course Who sits inside watching TV when the sun's out?) You had to wait but you knew what was coming and when and where.

 

I'm not saying it was better then, It was not better then. It's better now. But I think it might have been better still five or ten years ago, just for a moment. 

The good news, at least for me, is that it might, just possibly, get a bit better again, soon. I mentioned the other day that we in the UK are finally going to be able to watch HBO Max. That's quite exciting but there's been a further development.

In March, Sky, a service I have always shunned, will be offering a package including not just its own offerings but also HBO Max, Disney+, Hayu and Netflix. Supposedly, all of this will be available for £24 a month, which is not unreasonable. That's the base price, though, and I haven't seen the details. I bet it includes ads.

I have frequently paid more than that for multiple streaming services so it seems reasonable, especially when you compare it with subbing to Netflix and HBO Max separately. It won't do much for most of the issues I've been complaining about, namely scheduling nonsense or shows changing or leaving platforms, but it ought at least to reduce some of the churn.

Whether I'm willing to give money to an organization I've scrupulously avoided until now is another question. Decisions, as they say, have consequences although in this case the only consequence would be another compromise to feel morally uncomfortable about.. 

I guess I'll find out in March, when both the Sky package and the direct HBO Max stream become available. I suspect in the end my distaste for Sky will trump my penny-pinching parsimony but I wouldn't - ironically - put money on it.

Want To Know How It Ends? Me Too!

This is going to be one of those posts about how you can't trust streaming services and how if you want to be sure of the things you value you need to keep them close at hand, not on some server far away. And then again it's not going to be exactly that.

Nothing's ever so simple, is it?

I've been watching Roswell, New Mexico. It's a TV show that's hard to explain. Not the basic premise, which is that the Roswell UFO landing was real and that aliens live among us. Anyone can work that much out from the title alone.

No, where it's hard is in figuring out how this show sits in context with other iterations of the same... franchise? Brand? No, neither of those, exactly. 

Shall we call it an IP? Why not? 

The Roswell IP began as a series of books written by Melinda Metz and published by Pocket Books in America back around the turn of the millennium. There were ten books in the original series, collectively known as Roswell High. They all came out in an astonishing gush between 1998 and 2000, which is some going even for a pulpy YA series. 

They must have been pretty successful because they spawned a TV series almost immediately. Simply known as Roswell, it aired from 1999 to 2002. The show must have done pretty well too because it sloughed off its own series of novelizations, eleven in total, three of which came out while the show was on air and eight more, from a different publisher, after it ended.

You might have thought that after twenty-one novels and three seasons of a TV show the whole thing would have been tapped dry but you would be wrong. In 2019 the IP returned for another run on TV, this time under the name Roswell, New Mexico. It ran for four seasons, ending in 2022. 

I came into this story late. Roswell was streaming on one or other of the services I subscribe to and I watched it maybe five years ago. I was under the impression I'd posted something about it at the time but it seems that while I've mentioned once or twice in passing, I've never actually given it a post of its own.

That was remiss of me. Although I've only watched the series once, I have it pegged in my mind as one of my favorite shows of all time. Without a re-watch, that mostly suggests it made an extremely strong first impression. I'd need at least one more go-through to calibrate and preferably a third for confirmation. Usually my first impressions run true, though, so I think it's safe to say it's pretty good.

Luckily, I certainly felt strongly enough about it at the time to buy the box set on DVD, so any time I feel like refreshing my memory, I have that option. Technically, it also exists to stream on Prime but I've just checked and it suffers from the same problem as the later version, of which more later.

Given how highly I rated Roswell, it's perhaps surprising I took as long as I did before getting around to the sequel. I had my reasons and they weren't just the obvious "too many shows, too little time". The issue I had with watching Roswell, New Mexico is that I wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to be.

I called it a sequel just now but it's not. I thought it was, until I watched it, but it turns out I was wrong. What I knew about it, going in, was that it featured the same characters ten years older, when Liz Ortecho, one of the leads, returned to Roswell after a decade away.

Naturally, I assumed that meant the story would pick up from where it left off. It does not. I hadn't checked but I also figured it would mostly feature the same cast. It doesn't do that, either.

Roswell, New Mexico is a kind of reboot of the original although again, not really. Maybe a re-envisioning? It's not so much that it takes place ten years later, although it probably does. It's more that the characters are ten years older. 

Instead of them being in high school they all graduated long ago. Instead of being adolescents aged from sixteen to eighteen, these people are all genuine young adults, in their mid-to-late twenties, with jobs, responsibilities and pasts. 

Liz is a high-flying microbiologist, Max is a deputy sheriff, Michael is a mechanic and Maria owns and runs a bar. The whole thing takes place against the politicized backdrop of the Trump administration (I almost wrote the first Trump administration...) and the tone is quite different to the original series, much more politicized, with a great deal of play being made between the aliens' situation and that of illegal Mexican immigrants, of whom Liz's father is one.

I honestly don't even remember Liz being hispanic in the first series although Maria definitely was. The new Maria is black. Also half-alien but we won't talk about that for fear of spoilers. We also won't talk about the plot, not at the risk of spoiling anything but because it makes absolutely no sense. I'd need to watch the first series again to be certain but I'm fairly sure that, wild though it was at times, it never thrashed around like a snake in a hot tub the way this one does.

The science also makes absolutely no sense, which wouldn't be an issue if there wasn't so damn much of it. Liz is a professional scientist and so is her ex-fiancee, who turns up in Season 2. One of the new characters is a hacker for the military, another is a surgeon. Even Michael is apparently an untrained but intuitive scientific prodigy. 

The show oozes science, all of which might just as easily be magic, not least for the way it compacts years of development time into hours of frenzied lab-work, but also the plain fact that even the people doing the "science" don't always know how it works. The part where they perform an alien heart transplant in a back-room without anyone knowing about it is particularly fine but every episode seems to feature one of the cast doing two impossible things before breakfast thanks to "science".

Most of the negative comments about the show, of which there are plenty online, revolve around one or other of these flaws. My front-loading them might suggest I didn't much like the show either, especially in comparison with the original but that would be wholly wrong. I fricken' loved it! From the opening episode, when I realized about halfway in that we were starting over, not carrying on, I've been on board all the way. 

To set against the issues with the plot, which even the characters archly liken to a telenovella, we need to stack the dialog (Crackling.) the performances (Compelling.) and the characters (Convincing.) Add to that the stunning New Mexico scenery and it's a great watch. Just don't make the mistake of trying to untangle the plot.

As always, it makes a huge difference to me that I like most of the characters, even if it took me a long time to warm up to the new Maria. She was my favorite in the original and the new one is very much not a grown-up version of that character. She's someone completely different. 

I did come around, though, and anyway I took immediately to the new Michael, who seems much more likeable than the old one, so that was a trade-off. The new Max is also less annoying, while the new Liz is really similar. I can't now remember if Liz's dead sister was alive in the first Roswell or not but Rosa in Roswell, New Mexico is a standout, so I'm glad she came back to life. (Don't ask...)

All the new characters are pretty good - Michael's on-again/off-again love interest Alex, Alex's terrifying father, school bully turned empathic doctor Kyle, Max's friends-with-benefits police partner Jenna  - but my absolute favorite is the third of the alien trio, Isabel, played in an almost indescribably odd manner by Lily Cowles. At first I thought she couldn't act at all. Now I'm convinced she's the reincarnation of Elizabeth Montgomery, which is about the highest praise I can offer.

I was going to wait until I'd seen all four seasons of Roswell, New Mexico before I posted my thoughts, so why are we here, now? 

Because, despite all four seasons being clearly indicated as available in the drop-down menu on Amazon Prime, where I've been watching the show, I was extremely irritated to find, when I came to start on Season Three, only the first two are actually there. In a new wrinkle in the streaming service I've not tripped over until now, it's apparently permissible to promote shows you can't even watch!

I'm used to shows having three seasons of which only two are on a given platform. That's happened to me several times. I've never known a show to list all of the seasons and then refuse to show half of them to you. That's tantamount to taunting!

I did a little research and it seems there are "rights issues" involved, although nothing I've found wants to try to explain what those issues might be. I did also discover there were some ructions during the production of Roswell, New Mexico that led to the unexpected departure of the show-runner around the time of the third Season but whether that factors in I have no clue.

As of this post, I also know that the same situation applies to the original Roswell. I checked just now and while the first season is available to watch on Prime, the second and third, although listed, are similarly flagged "Currently unavailable to watch in your location". 

Sticking to Roswell, New Mexico, I suspect, although I don't know, that it might have something to do with the show having been bought by ITV for terrestrial broadcast in the UK. Then again, it's not available on the ITV Player either, so maybe not. 

Meanwhile, all the various "Where To Watch" sites cheerfully claim all four seasons are available in the UK on just about every service imaginable,  from Prime and Netflix to AppleTV and Google Play. I've checked them all and in every case it's only Seasons One and Two that are available.

I'd happily buy the damn thing, either digitally or preferably on DVD, but that's not an option either. There's no digital version of the full series I can find for sale in this country, nor are the individual seasons three and four for sale, at least not in the U.K. As for a hard copy, I'm pretty sure only Season One was ever issued on DVD, anywhere. 

For now, I seem to be out of viable options. I could try a VPN, of course, but I've never had much success going that route in the past. It's all very well having the right I.P. address but if it's a paid service they usually also want a valid, local payment option and sometimes even an address to go with it. 

I may give it a try anyway. VPNs are very cheap. Certainly a lot cheaper than streaming subscriptions.

There's also an outside chance the problem might just fix itself if I wait. I note from various forums and reddit threads I've lurked in that at times the missing seasons have become available briefly before slipping back behind the veil. Maybe something is happening behind the scenes although I suspect if it ever was it isn't any more. 

Once again, it's the old "everything's available forever online until it isn't". Millennials are coming into the nostalgia zone about now, with Gen-Z due to start arriving a decade or so later. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when they find they can't have their childhoods back on demand.

Until this gets sorted, I recommend a return to physical product, or at least a download on hardware you physically posess. Not that  it helps me with my Roswell, New Mexico problem but then you can't have everything. 

Sometimes you can't even have what you were told you already had.

Fallen London Festival Of Games

Here's a little bauble you may have missed. There's a games festival going on in London right now. It goes by the catchy name of the London Games Festival. Always good to be declarative, I say. (I never say that.)

The LGF (See, if they'd have called it the London Festival of Games they could have acymonized it LFG and how much better would that have been? I used to be in marketing once, you know.) has a tag line: "Making London the games capital of the world." I wonder where it is now, assuming it's not in London?  I'd have guessed Seoul or Beijing.

Anyway, good luck with that, London. I'm sure we're all rooting for you but that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I'm more interested in your "Five amazing game demos. Free to stream now." Why don't you tell us more about those?

"Five game demos are now available to stream from the cloud, entirely for free with no download required, thanks to an exciting partnership between London Games Festival, Microsoft Azure and Gamestream

In a world-first for a global games event, you can sample key games from our festival-wide showcase of new indie games entirely free from home – you don’t have to be in London to be part of London Games Festival

The line-up covers highly anticipated indie games: Silt, Lab Rat, Grimoire Groves, Mask of the Rose and Paper Trail

Demos are available for ten days starting on 1 April to players in the UK, West Europe and USA"

Thanks! That does pretty much cover everything, doesn't it? Although I would have to query the "global games event" claim, given the hefty regional qualifications in the final line. 

I guess we'd better have a link to the website where you can join in.

 PRESS PLAY HERE!

There you go!

I pressed play yesterday afternoon, right after I ran across the NME news report that let me know I could. I get so much of my gaming news from the NME now. Who'd have imagined? They've even been covering bugs in Guild Wars 2, which either tells you something about the depth of the NME's gaming coverage or the sudden uptick of interest in GW2 since End of Dragons dropped.

The demos are each limited to sixty minutes (Or an hour as we call it here.) and your progress, always assuming you make any, will not be saved. They put that in bold on the website and now so have I, so don't say you weren't warned. 

All five of the demos look interesting. They all lean towards puzzles or adventures which is tilting in my direction. I only found that out after I finished sampling the first one, though. Employing my usual analytical skills, I just picked the one with the most interesting picture and clicked on that.

About thirty seconds into Mask of the Rose I realised what I'd done. I was playing Fallen London! Again! Seriously, how many times have I played this game in different iterations now? The first time was so long ago it wasn't even called "Fallen London" yet. It was called Echo Bazaar and I had to make a Twitter account just to play it because it was a Twitter game. Do those still even exist?

Failbetter Games is one of those companies that has a thing they do and they just keep doing it, which is admirable and understandable when the thing they have is as good as this. Fallen London has always been a great setting and I guess by now it's a great I.P. 

Is Mask of the Rose going to be a great Fallen London game? That's the question!

I'm not sure an hour-long demo can give us the answer but after my sixty minutes yesterday I'd have to say the signs are good. It's possible this could be the best Fallen London game yet.

It's cetainly the most visually appealing. The series has always enjoyed excellent design and impressive aesthetics but the nature of the gameplay has sometimes led to iconography that felt more suited to tabletop or even card deck than screen. MotR isn't exactly slam-bang action graphics but at least the pictures are bigger.

Failbetter Game's website describes Mask of the Rose as a "Visual Novel, Dating Sim, Detective Story." The Steam page uses the same tags, plus "Romance". I guess that's what it is, then.

The demo (And by implication the game) opens with character creation, something I'm not sure usually happens in visual novels, where you're mostly going to be guiding a premade character through a series of pre-determined choices There's still a sniff of the RPG about this one. 

Also, I haven't played many Dating Sims (None at all, in fact, unless you count Doki Doki Literature Club, which you would have to borderline crazy to do.) but I'm guessing it's probably not genre-typical to play a character who only wants to be friends, if they're even prepared to go that far.

(I just know someone's going to drop into the comments now and give me chapter and verse on how modern dating sims cover all shades of the spectrum of human sexuality and I really hope that's true but if it is, it must make the games hell on wheels to code. How many conversation trees would you need? You'd need a conversation forest!)

Other than that, to me it felt very much of a piece with all the other Fallen London/FBG titles, just with the pieces swapped around and the pack shuffled. There's the same arch humor, the same existential dread, the same fin de siecle, pre-post-apocalyptic ennui. The writing feels almost identical, which, since the writing is probably the franchise's strongest suit, is a good thing.

The setting and the vibe may be familiar but the mechanics feel significantly different, this being very much a visual novel not a "browser based story adventure". Fallen London's mechanics were "rather pedestrian" according to Alexis Kennedy, writer of the follow-up, Sunless Sea and he should know, since he wrote Fallen London as well. 

According to his Wikipedia page, Kennedy, who founded Failbetter Games in 2010 and remained "chief narrative officer and creative lead", left to go solo in 2016. Well, that's what we'd call it if this was a band we were talking about. From what I saw and read as I played yesterday, whoever took over is still very much working from the framework he established, narratively speaking.

If the ambience and the atmosphere felt much the same, the new mechanics felt fresh. One thing you could never accuse Failbetter Games titles of doing is tripping merrily along. They play slowly and get feel slower the longer you go on. Mask of the Rose bucks that trend.

It may be rash to judge from just an hour (No maybe about it.) but I certainly found the visual novel format much more sprightly, a skip rather than a trudge. Even though the structure still involves a great deal of repetition and the gameplay seems to come down to little more than asking a series of impertinent questions, I found the hour just flew by. 

It was also notable how strongly the narrative seemed to want to interrogate the concept. I've never made my way far enough into any of the games to find out if the storylines ever reveal how London came to fall ("Carried away by bats" isn't much of an explanation.) but it always seemed to me that it wasn't really a question one asked. 

Even more so, no-one ever explained how people were surviving underground, where the food and the light and the heat came from, how everyone wasn't going mad with fear, claustrophobia and hopelessness. (Okay, going mad with fear, claustrophobia and hopelessness is pretty much the USP of Sunless Sea but you get my drift.)

In Mask of the Rose, all these concerns are front and center. In just the small section I played we were treated to conversations about the number of Londoners missing or killed in the fall, the instability of the buildings that survived, the shortage of drugs, medicines and doctors to treat the sick and injured, the inability to grow fresh food and the consequent reliance on handouts from the mysterious and sinister Ministry of Accounting and Recounting. 

Questions were raised concerning the impact of the event on organized religion, there were references to social pressures around transgender identity and ethnicity and I had the opportunity to quiz two people who may or may not have been citizens of Hell about their romantic inclinations. It's a lot for a demo and it augurs well for the full game.

I've wishlisted it on Steam, for what that's worth. Mask of the Rose might be the Fallen London game I've been waiting for. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to have to go on waiting a while. Release date is "To be announced" and we all know that means "Not this year."

Four more demos to play, then, and eight days left to play them. With the clock ticking at an hour per game, that shouldn't be too hard to manage. I hope they're all as good as the first one. 

If you happen to miss the window of opportunity opened by the LGF, Mask of the Rose, Silt and Grimoire Groves all have downloadable demos on Steam. Lab Rat doesn't and Paper Trail doesn't even seem to be on Steam at all, despite the "Wishlist" button on the game's website that takes you straight to Steam's homepage.

More reviews as and when I play them, if they feel worth the trouble. And maybe I'll review the streaming aspect, too. I didn't even mention that, did I?

The Full Half Hour: Tera

I've never had much interest in Tera. I couldn't even summon up the enthusiasm to download the client to try the open beta. There does come a point, however, when the barrier to entry is lowered so far it's almost perverse not to take a peek. En Masse found that point with their Instant Demo. Although even then I was more interested to see how Gaikai's streaming technology held up than I was in playing the game.

My first attempt wasn't impressive. It wouldn't run at all. I left it a day to settle and tried again and second time round it worked just fine. The demo allows you thirty minutes. I used all of that last night and tonight I went back for ten minutes to take some photos. Here are my largely unconsidered observations from those brief visits.

• Thirty minutes is more than enough Tera.

• Gaikai's technology works. It takes about two or three minutes to load up on their servers and then the window appears and you're in. Everything was eminently stable while I was playing. I didn't notice any lag or hitching whatsoever. The demo runs either in a window or full screen and feels just like playing any MMO from your own machine.

Strategically-placed hotbar

• Visually it looked very muddy indeed. Blurred. I can't believe that's what the same zone would look like playing from an installed version. Granted they've chosen a zone in which it's perpetually raining and it appears to be night-time, but still...

• Come to think of it, if one of the strongest selling-points of your game was the lush, gorgeous visuals, why would you choose a zone in which it's perpetually raining and it appears to be night-time for your shop window?

None more blue

•  And while we're on the subject, if another of the strongest selling-points of your game was its fast action combat which "takes the fight beyond whack-a-mole monotony with enhanced aiming, dodging, and tactical timing", why would you pick a zone for your thirty-minute demo that starts on a beach that has nothing you can fight? And that's locked behind a gate you can't get past until you complete several non-combat quests? Which use up the best part of half the time you've been given?

• It's one thing to read about the well-known issues regarding the presentation of female characters in Tera but it really doesn't prepare you for the awful experience. For my full run-through I played the big guy and he was completely inoffensive. I made the mistake of picking one of the females for the screenshot run, which is why I have very few screenshots and I feel like I need to take my eyeballs out and wash them.

My reaction exactly, Ahdun.

• If you're going to limit your trial to thirty minutes and set it somewhere that uses up half the time with busy-work and getting from one place to another, maybe also starting off with a level 20 character with a populated skill bar which you then tell the player to read and learn  before fighting anything might just obscure some of the actiony fun you were trying so hard to put across.

• It won't surprise anyone reading this to hear that I hated the combat. Just horrible. Give me whack-a-mole monotony any day. 

In summation, I was impressed with Gaikai's contribution and, erm.. no, that's it.