Blaugust - It's Back For Another Glorious Year!

Oh, look! Another "Blaugust is Coming!" post! Wow! How many is that now? Must be - wait, let me see... yeah! It's a lot!

Even MassivelyOP got in on the act, running a very nice news item to let their readers know those funny blog folks were up to their annual hi-jinks once again. It's probably the only time news of the Famous Festival of Blogging is likely to appear in front of an audience not already fully committed and signed up to join in with the fun.

Or maybe I'm being too cynical. Let's be honest. I have no idea who reads this blog. I stopped paying attention to the statistics Google supply years ago, mostly because they make no sense but also because I just lost interest.

Inventory Full has always been first and foremost a personal journal and occasional soapbox, which is how I conceived it when I started out, but over the years it's also turned into my version of a social media platform. A half-assed one, to be sure, but one where no-one has to send friend requests or follow me or in any way indicate their comings and goings beyond leaving the occasional comment, something which probably fewer than a couple of per cent of the people who've ever visited the blog have done.

It works for me, though. There's a loose, fuzzy, comfortable community feel around this part of the blogosphere that I fancy most of the people participating in Blaugust this and other years would recognize and acknowledge.  

To draw on an exceedingly obvious and over-used analogy, it's a bit like Cheers: a place where everyone knows your name. Well, okay, the name of your blog and the pretend name you post under. It doesn't say Bhagpuss on my passport. More's the pity.

And, if I may extend the analogy a little, like a bar, you don't need an invite to come inside and make yourself at home. If you've been here before but you've been gone a while, everyone will remember your name and be very happy to welcome you back. If it's your first time, don't worry, it's not going to be like the pub in American Werewolf in London.  

Actually, let's be real about this, it might be - if it wasn't Blaugust. One of the most disheartening things about starting a blog can be the sound of crickets chirping as the tumbleweed rolls past. Waiting in vain for your first comment, a sign that someone, anyone, has not only read but thought about what you wrote. Soul destroying.

That, among many other things, is what Blaugust is about: making sure that it doesn't happen. Instead, there's support, advice, help, acknowledgment and above all readers who will let you know they're there with a comment or several. This year there's even a Blaugchievement for doing it!

If you're one of the hundreds of people who supposedly reads this blog every day, according to Google, but who never leaves a sign or a mark to say you've passed by, maybe you, too, wistfully imagine what it would be like to have a blog of your own, only to falter at the thought of pouring out your well-crafted words before an invisible, imperceptible audience, to receive only silence in return.

Well, can that thought! This is Blaugust, baby! The blogosphere, this bubble of it anyway, has your back!

Sign up to whatever blogging platform you fancy, write that first post and hit Publish. If you're not sure how to get started, join the Blaugust Discord and ask. There are mentors aplenty just waiting to help you get started. We none of us know everything but we all know something and it'll be enough. Probably. No, it will, I'm sure of it...

For once I'm going to keep it short (Well, short for me, anyway.). Everything you need to get started is in Bel's Introducing Blaugust 2022 Post. Whether you end up doing nothing more than coming up with a name and posting "Hello World" before vanishing back into the void or whether it turns out to be the beginning of a years-long habit you can't and don't want to break, there's no better time to dip your toes in the warm, welcoming waters of the Blogosphere than Blaugust.

What are you waiting for? Oh, yes, I forgot. It doesn't start until August.

See you in ten days!

If You Can't Stand The Heat, Get Into In The Kitchen

At the weekend, the Meteorological Office issued the UK's first ever Red Warning for extreme heat, covering London and much of central England. Today, for the first time since records began, the recorded temperature exceeded forty degrees Celsius, which I'm sure sounds like a balmy spring day to someone reading this but is quite literally unheard of here.

Over in the west of the country, where I live, we're only under an Amber Warning. Yesterday was our really hot day. I measured the temperature in the shade in our back garden at thirty-seven Celsius or 98.6 in the old money. Ironically, today feels hotter, even though it's not. 

When I was growing up I lived with my grandparents and my grandfather was very interested in metereology. He had a barometer and also one of those dual thermometers that not only tells you what the temperature is when you look at it, like all thermometers do, but also records the highest and lowest temperatures it reached when you weren't watching.

I have a very clear memory of that thermometer telling us the temperature had hit one hundred degrees Fahrenheit one summer but of course a) memory is fiction b) who knows if the thermometer was accurate and c) was that temperature shade or sun? 

As far as c) goes, I also have a memory of the same thermometer going to the very top of its scale, which I recall being around 115F, when I put it in direct sunlight on a hot summer's day. That suggests the 100F reading probably wasn't due to being it being baked in the heat of the open sun.   

If it did ever hit 100F, though, that would have been higher than the UK record at the time so I think we can discount my childhood memory, other than to say we did sometimes have hot days in the summer back then. Now it seems we're going to get them all the time. 

But you didn't come here to read about the weather. I imagine you came here to read about mmorpgs. Luckily, the two are connected.

Like almost all British homes, the house in which Mrs Bhagpuss and I live with our dog, Beryl, is not designed for prolonged spells of hot, sunny weather. We don't have air conditioning and although it takes a fair old while for the inside of the house to heat up, once it does, it takes even longer to cool down again. That's why, as I said, it feels hotter today than it did yesterday, even though the mercury has actually fallen.

Beryl, being a wooly kind of dog, does not do well in the heat. She's been flat out in a stupor from just after breakfast until just before dusk. Mrs Bhagpuss bought her a couple of gel-filled cool mats and a dog paddling pool, all of which have been very well-used.

I generally do better in the heat than Beryl, but these last couple of days it's been so hot inside the house, particularly in my upstairs study, which, with it's south-easterly exposure, gets the full glare of the sun for much of the day, that I've had to spend considerable time either in the kitchen, ironically the coolest room in the house, or outside in the back garden, where we have an enormous, shady apple tree.

Beryl also likes, if not needs, to sleep on her cool mat in the corner of the kitchen but she's not happy being downstairs on her own, which is somewhat problematic given our normal pattern of spending almost all our time upstairs, where both computers, my study and Mrs Bhagpuss's craft room are.

That's two reasons for me to spend more time in the kitchen and the back garden than usual and since I am normally attached to my PC by a virtual umbilical cord, I've found myself making full use of my Splashtop account. I've had it for a very long time, over a decade I believe. I downloaded the free trial out of curiosity and was so impressed I paid the one-time license fee as soon as the trial ended, imagining I'd use it all the time but until now I've logged in so infrequently that a couple of years ago I got an email asking if they could delete my account since I clearly had no use for it. Luckily I had the foresight to ask them not to do that and now I'm reaping the rewards.

I have an ancient Dell XPS laptop, probably getting on for fifteen years old, which still works perfectly well, at least after I replaced the HDD, but which isn't capable of running anything much made in the last five to ten years. It is, however, perfectly comfortable running the Splashtop app, which means I can use it just as though I was sitting at my desktop.

Consequently I've been able to sit in the relatively cooler part of the house and play games through Steam, play EverQuest II, play whatever I want. There's no appreciable extra lag or latency and everything looks and plays great. I haven't yet tried playing New World via GeForce Now via Splahstop to see what happens at two degrees of separation but now I've thought of it you can bet I'm going to.

Even so, there's another problem. I may be downstairs in the cool but my desktop, which is doing all the work, is still up there in the hottest room in the house. I'm slightly concerned that I might be downstairs, happily fragging some boss, while upstairs my PC is melting.

If this hot weather's going to last  - and according to predictions it probably is, if not at quite the same intensity - it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a couple of games I could play directly through the laptop itself. Older games would probably work but I'd have to download and install them, something I'm not all that keen to do. The laptop has a single, small HDD that's currently admirably clean due to the re-install and I'd really like to keep it that way.

There's an obvious solution: browser games. If a game plays in a browser it will presumably play on any machine that the browser will support. My laptop has both Firefox and Chrome installed so that's the first hurdle cleared.

Are there any good browser mmorpgs, though? Well, yes, there are. I can immediately think of two that I've played: Villagers and Heroes and AdventureQuest 3D, although both need a client download so maybe they aren't pure browser games after all. Others I've tried in the past include Drakensang, Eldevin and of course Runescape but I don't see myself going back to any of those. 

I certainly never imagined I go back to Flyff, either. Flyff launched all the way back in 2005 and since I seem to remember participating in some kind of open beta or trial it may well have been the first free to play title I ever played. I remember having a tough time with it due to lag but generally quite enjoying it.

I do know I didn't stick around long enough to take advantage of the game's signature feature, flight. Flyff is short for Fly For Fun, it being one of the first mmorpgs to offer players a freeform flight option. I've always wished I'd gotten at least that far. 

As luck would have it, MassivelyOP posted an item this morning, retailing the news that Flyff Universe,"the browser-based relaunch of the 2005 MMORPG that arrived this past June", currently has over 800,000 players worldwide. As of a few hours ago, they can add one more to that total.

It took me a matter of moments to get into the game and start playing. I didn't even need to make an account. You can begin playing as a guest and then either trust to your cache to remind the servers who you are or, if that feels too much like high-wire walking without a net after you've gotten a few levels under your belt, convert your guest account to a registered one so you can sleep easy in your bed at night.

I converted at level three. It only took a matter of seconds. Accessibility is the major selling point for browser mmos so there's no percentage in them making it any harder than it needs to be. 

When I logged out after about an hour I was level four and still in the tutorial, albeit thankfully also out in the open world, which was positively heaving with players. I'd had a good time, albeit mostly for reasons of nostalgia. Flyff World may be a remake but it's unabashedly old school. If you want a reminder of what F2P mmorpgs used to be like fifteen years ago, look no further.

It seems unlikely I'll make much progress beyond a few screenshots and maybe a post or two but it's an option for hot days when I'd rather not run the PC. Also, I'd at least like to be able to say I know what it's like to fly in a game called Fly For Fun...

Everything Doesn't Always Have To Make Sense

I'm not sure when the term "High Concept" first appeared as a descriptor for single idea shows and movies. Wikipedia isn't much help, merely observing (In an entry flagged "This article has multiple issues") that "The origin of the term is disputed".

I seem to remember first coming across it in the nineties but clearly the concept of the concept goes back to the dawn of time. Well, to the dawn of the broadcast media era, at least, as exemplified by James Thurber's excellent series of articles on the invention and subsequent explosion of soap opera on American radio, published in the New Yorker in the late 'forties and reprinted in the collection "The Beast in Me and Other Animals", which I just happen to be re-reading for the third time.

Whenever and however it began, it's useful shorthand for those shows (and games) that can easily be summarized in a single sentence without leaving out anything that matters, a practice sometimes referred to as the Elevator Pitch, for reasons that should be self-explanatory. The Wikipedia entry for that is solid, leaving no issues to be resolved by future editors, something I find curiously appropriate, highlighting, as it does, the subtle but important differences between the two ideas. 

I was brought to musing on these topics by two Netflix half-hour comedy series I've just finished watching. I started both around a week or so ago, working my way steadily through the pair of them, one episode of each per evening and seeing them so close together I couldn't but be struck by certain structural and conceptual similarities.

The first, God's Favorite Idiot, I finished a couple of days ago and last night I watched the final episode of Boo, Bitch! I enjoyed them about equally but I still haven't quite come to terms with the sheer lack of concern both show towards any semblance of compromise with an audience, not just in terms of the unabashedly self-serving premises but with their complete disregard for any sense of internal logic. 

To use another frayed cinematic cliche, both shows really cut to the chase. These days, I'm more used to watching TV series where the entire first season seems to have been conceived as some kind of extended pilot, taking eight or ten hours to get to the point any networked show of the previous century would have reached in the first episode. 

The most extreme example of the trend I can remember would probably be Cloak and Dagger, a show I really liked. It ran for two seasons, twenty episodes in total. The final episode ends with the two leads having finally settled on their names and destiny as a super-hero duo, at which point the show was cancelled. That's what happens when you plan a slow burn intended to catch fire across a hundred-episode arc, then get canned after twenty.

The elevator pitch for God's Favorite Idiot, starring Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, would appear to be "Good Omens meets The Office". For nebulous reasons, God gives ill-defined powers to Falcone's character, Clark, a klutzy cubicle worker, who is then supposed to use them in unexplained ways to bring about indeterminate results. 

Everyone shows up, from God to Satan, both of whom take on a female-looking appearance. There are angels and archangels and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and I forget what-all else.

The season begins with a shot of Melissa McCarthy riding what looks like the kind of mobility scooter a geriatric Hell's Angel might rig up and ends with her character, Amily and Clark, the eponymous hero and idiot, fleeing the Four Horsemen in a beat-up car, while a cloud of beetles of biblical proportion, presumably sent by Satan's boss, Beelzebub, boils out of the sky behind them.

In between those bookends, most of what we get is an endless round of bickering and office romance, much of which I found quite amusing. Melissa McCarthy is on good form and there's good chemistry between Amily, and Clark, whose longstanding worship-from-afar is brought into close focus by his sudden selection for divine attention. I guess there should be, since the two leads are real-life married.

 

Because the ensemble cast is uniformly strong and the jokes frequently land, I had a good time. I was a little disappointed to see Amily's prodigious drug and alcohol consumption slowly drop out of the picture as we went along. Her character also becomes less snarky and more soft-edged, presumably in response not so much to the literally apocalyptic situation in which she finds herself as her growing realization she might actually have fallen in love with Clark.

As for the plot, not only was there was no moment when I ever felt it made the slightest sense whatsoever, I didn't even get the feeling the writers knew or cared where things were going from one scene to the next. The whole farrago careens along like an over-confident goat falling down a mountain but so what? Everyone laughs at a pratfall. 

If nothing else, God's Favorite Idiot is worth it for the scenes with Melissa McCarthy as an extremely unlikely LARPer. Like a lot of the show, there seems to be little reasonable explanation for that to be a thing that happens but it does, several times, and I'm glad.

Boo, Bitch, which I found less funny but more emotionally engaging, is arguably also more coherent, although that's really not saying a lot. The premise is that one of two best friends, high school seniors about to graduate, is killed in a freak accident and comes back as an "embodied ghost" to complete some as-yet unknown "unfinished business" before "ascending".

The series stars Lana Condor and Zoe Margaret Colletti, each of whom, in the tradition of high school movies and TV shows, is old enough to have graduated college. I'd never heard of either of them and based on the first episode I was entirely willing to believe they were actual high school seniors in their first major acting roles. That's not necessarily a compliment.

Looking up their resumes on IMDB for this post, I realize I should have been at least passingly familiar with Condor. She played Jubilee in X-Men Apocalypse, a movie I bought on DVD about three years ago but haven't gotten around to watching yet.

After a somewhat stagey first episode, both leads quickly become more convincing. It's just as well. The entire (High) concept relies on them having excellent chemistry together. Fortunately, they really do. 

Of course, the exuberant, effervescent, emotionally-overcharged personalities of the characters, as personified by the punchy performances of both actors, make absolute nonsense of the secondary premise of the show, which is that these are two absolute non-entities in the rigid hierarchy of high school. Even in their toned-down, pre-party scenes, it's clear they have a spark that wouldn't easily be extinguished by the day-to-day dreariness of school life.

It somehow has to have been, all the same. Otherwise the plot, such as it is, just wouldn't work. 

We do get a partial parse on how it happened, for once. Thanks to an unfortunate incident on her first day, Lana's character, Erika Vu, hasn't even been called by her own name for her entire high school career. She's known, if at all, as Helen Who? Coletti's character, Gia, fares even worse. No-one seems to register her existence at all, although why that should be is far from clear. Hold that thought...

The plot develops along typical high-school movie lines with the the usual cast of mean girls, jocks, geeks and nerds all taking on the exact roles you'd expect. It won't surprise anyone to hear that the "unfinished business" ends up involving and being resolved by Prom. There's also a major plot twist towards the end of the run that I'd be amazed if anyone hadn't seen coming from Episode Two. No spoilers but I've already dropped a hint or two.

The sparkle that makes this familiar scenario zing to the extent it does comes from the aforementioned leads but also from another strong supporting cast, particularly Aparna Brielle, playing queen bitch Riley, who often threatens to walk away with the show. I also liked Mason Versaw, whose mostly laid-back take on being Riley's ex and Erika's current slips from dazed and confused to world-weary and accepting. His IMDB credits barely go back twelve months so maybe he really is a fresh talent. Erika's on-trend, hip parents also deserve a nod for bucking the expected Useless Adult trope.

The writing, which is solid enough, except when it veers towards the occult, leans heavily into some gentle social satire focused on Gen-Z mores. I'd be very curious to find out how actual teens and twenty-somethings react to it. It didn't seem to me to have as much of the usual, dismissive attitude self-identifying Grown-Ups all-too-often direct at any behavior they don't themselves exhibit, but I suspect that, for the target audience, even that benign acknowledgment might itself arrive tainted by an uncomfortable tinge of cringe.

While the high-school elements chug along nicely enough and the comedy, for the most part, sticks the landing, the ghostly plot makes not one whit of sense from beginning to end. It's still clever, all the same, to the point that, having watched the whole thing, I'm quite keen to watch it again in the light of what I now know. Just because you see a plot twist coming doesn't mean you pick up all the nuances as it unfolds.

The last episode ratchets up the emotional pressure with a barrage of on-the-nose musical choices. I can't say I even noticed the music in the rest of the series. They must have saved up the whole audio budget for the finale. 

The ending verges on the satisfying, as you'd hope, not least since this is a one-season Limited Series with no more to come. The coda does potentially leave the door the tiniest bit ajar for some kind of follow-on, although frankly by then I'd forgotten exactly how the key scene to which it calls back went, so I was left more confused than ever. 

Confusion is the key factor that connects both these series. If you insist on stories that make sense and plots that follow some kind of consistent, internal logic, neither of these shows is for you. If you're willing to switch off the "Wait! What?" switch at the back of your mind and just go along with whatever's put in front of you, though, there's plenty here to enjoy.

Now, what am I going to wach next?

No Labels

As is usually the way of things in this hobby, after a period of calm, everything seems to be happening at once. Or maybe it's not. I think I need to clarify what I mean by "this hobby".

Until now, when I've tossed that term around, it's been with the understanding that everyone reading would pretty much know what I meant, without having to think about it all that much. It was a fair assumption; Inventory Full began quite specifically as an mmorpg blog, arising out of my already decade-long involvement, loose though as it was, with the mmo blogosphere.

We all knew what we meant by mmos back then - persistent worlds in which we met and adventured with friends and strangers. As time went on, though, some of us began to feel the need to differentiate between "MMOs" and "MMORPGs" because there seemed to be an increasing tendency to gather all kinds of games and experiences under the mmo umbrella, some of which didn't always seem to belong there.

A few years back, I took to using the acronym "mmorpg" exclusively to describe the games I was interested in, sometimes appending qualifiers like "DIKU-MUD" or "EQ/WoW style" to make things even clearer.

It was a losing battle, for reasons explained in two posts I read yesterday, one by Azuriel, the other by Wilhelm. Azuriel is talking specifically about his growing appreciation of what makes a game compelling to him, personally, while Wilhelm is focused more on the state of the genre per se, but both of them place their observations in a historical context from which it's clear the old certainties no longer apply.

It seems to me that there's no longer much agreement anywhere about what either of the acronyms, MMO or MMORPG, mean. Taking each, letter by letter, it's hard to argue in favor of any of the component parts any more, other than the O for "Online". 

We never did really agree on what we meant by "Massively". Now, with so many games enjoying truly massive populations, all online in the same game at the same time, receiving updates and seeing their worlds change, yet playing on dedicated, personal servers, the word means less than it ever did. When you combine that with "Multiple", the proliferation of small, separate servers all running Valheim or Minecraft simultaneously could easily be interpreted as having moved the meaning of the phrase closer to its linguistic value than further away.

As for "RPG", that's a concept as malleable as any poppet-maker's wax. For a very long time it's been increasingly hard to find any games that don't use mechanics rooted in old-school table-top role-playing - except for the actual pretending to be someone other than yourself part, of course. No-one does that any more.

For a good, long while I struggled against all of this, trying to hold the line even as the line became increasingly hard to see, let alone define. Hence all the maneuvering around terminology mentioned above. Something about the mmorpg genre and my relationship with it felt so connected to my sense of self, it seemed vitally important to preserve its integrity, in language and discussion at least, if not in my actual playstyle.

But now, guess what? I don't think I care any more. The strange, gnawing need I felt to be in a shared environment along with hundreds or thousands of strangers and the concommitant hollowness I felt when exploring imaginary worlds in which I was the only living being has been dissipating for a while now. I think perhaps it may finally have evaporated.

I don't even feel the lack of the handful of other players Wilhelm still considers necessary to bring a virtual world alive. While I agree their presence would add much to the experience, I no longer feel their absence invalidates or even diminishes the value of exploring or home-making alone. 

And, yes, I think I have Valheim to thank - or blame - for changing my mind. Not because it was the first to offer the possibility but because, for me, it was the first to reveal it. Or maybe that's post hoc rationalization. I could trawl back through my own gaming history as represented on this blog to try and establish a timeline but, y'know, I don't think I will. 

This isn't about what happened to make me feel this way. It's about how I feel. And I feel good. 

I feel liberated. I feel really not all that different to how I felt all those years ago, when I discovered EverQuest and with it a whole, new way of playing video games. It was a wonderful discovery that became a beautiful obsession but like all obsessions it ran the risk of blinding me to other possibilities. I'm happy to have that blindfold lifted.

All of which brings me back to where I began: this hobby. As Azuriel and Wilhelm suggest, in their varying fashion, it's changing, growing, spreading. Mutating, perhaps we should say.

This morning I downloaded a new version of Chimeraland, through Steam this time. I've already played for over an hour and absolutely loved it. No doubt posts will follow. 

Chimeraland describes itself on Steam as "an open-world sandbox RPG". It's clearly an mmorpg under the old definition and also clearly a survival game under the tenets of that genre. I wonder why it doesn't want us to know?

Ikonei Island is definitely not an mmo. Maybe. Probably. I don't know! 

I like it, whatever it is. I was annoyed when I had to stop playing because of the game-breaking bug I encountered after half an hour's play. 

I liked it enough to buy an XBox-style controller for my PC just to play it.  Even though, as I said, I got on well enough with the keyboard controls, everyone else seemed to think it was a different experience entirely with a controller. A much better one.

Okay, that wasn't the only reason I bought the controller. I wanted to buy something from the Prime sale so it was an excuse to indulge myself. And it seemed like the right time to give the controller a go. I have never used one before, nor wanted to, but increasingly I'm finding the games I want to play are optimized for that means of control, with keyboard/mouse a second-rate afterthought.

The controller worked, perfectly and instantly, straight out of the box. It's comfortable and intuitive to use and Ikonei Island, already fun, now feels even more compelling to play. It's not an mmo, let alone an mmorpg, but given the way I've been playing those kinds of games this last decade, I'm not sure that makes much difference. Subjectively, it feels like more of the same, which is what I've been saying I wanted for years.

As if two new games in two days wasn't enough, I had to have a third. Well, almost. 

Yesterday I saw this news item on MassivelyOP. I registered for Noah's Heart a few weeks back so I would have thought I'd have gotten an email, since I'm in one of the eight Early Access territories. 

I didn't, though, so I went to the website instead and tried to download the game, only to find I couldn't. It took me awhile but eventually Twitter told me the soft launch is for IOS and Android only. PC players have to wait another couple of weeks for the full, global reveal.

Is Noah's Heart an mmo? An mmorpg? A survival game? All of the above? 

Pass. Whatever it is, I was interested enough to try and download it for my Kindle Fire. Naturally, that aging dinosaur doesn't meet the specs. Neither does my phone, which I couldn't have used anyway, thanks to the flickering screen. 

And so time marches on. The games change, the genres change and apparently I'm fine with that, now, but the operating systems and platforms change too, about which I'm a little less sanguine. More and more often I'm beginning to run up against technical specifications my devices, including the PC, can't meet. 

It used only to be games and genres that didn't much interest me. Mmos and mmorpgs seemed bulletproof. By definition, they needed to make themselves available to the broadest range of players, else how could they be truly "massive"? Average gear was good enough, out of game as well as inside.

Those days are over, it seems. I guess I'd better get some new kit if I want to keep up with the pace. I'd really hate to be locked out of Nightingale when it soft launches later this year...

... and no, I don't know how to label that one, either!

That's A Wrap! Oh, Wait...

Just a brief update to my recent post about the adventurer's Signature Questline for EverQuest II's latest expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, which launched in December 2021. I finally finished it!

Compared to the pesky Vorrigan Mistmoore, the actual boss, Vorrigan's master (Sire? Father?) Mayong Mistmoore, was very easy. Scarcely, as they say, an inconvenience.  

Of course, I didn't actually have to kill Mayong Mistmoore. That would be ridiculous. He's made at least one run at godhood and stands not far off the pantheon even now. No, all I had to do was kill a priest he'd turned into an unwilling vassal and keep some werewolves from bringing him snacks.

But wait... why don't I let my bruiser tell you himself?

It's an odd trope of EQII, the post-match summary characters give to... well, themselves I guess. Ostensibly my Bruiser's writing this in his quest journal but it appears overhead in huge, blue letters, hangs there for all of half a second, then vanishes. Usually I miss it entirely but this time I was quick enough to snatch a screenshot. 

Also, props to my mercenary for trying to verdict Mayong! Can't fault her for nerve. Let's just hope he didn't notice.

Unlike every other instance in the Sig line, the finale takes place in a special quest version of the zone, not the regular mission. None of the bosses drop any loot, which I take as proof that this is intended to be a nice, comfortable, easy-mode finish. I'll have to go back and do the repeatable version to see if I'm right - and to get the loot I missed.

The reason for the soft finish is that it isn't the end of the story. Visions of Vetrovia returns to the old school wrap-up for an expansion, namely a raid. At the hand-in with Tavien Faust and later at the debrief  with Antonia Bayle, it's made absolutely clear that if Mayong is to be stopped it's going to take a gathering of heroes to do it, which is fair enough. He is almost a demi-god, after all.

I'm out, though. Or rather, I'm out for now. Give it a few expansions and another couple of level cap increases and I'll be able to solo that raid. And I probably will. I did eventually get to see the conclusion of the decade-long Ages End storyline that way and it was worth the wait.

For now, though, I still have plenty to do. Mayong may have escaped but the evil he brought to Vetrovia lives on. Or unlives, I guess, what with him being a vampire and all...

Finishing the Sig line opens several further questlines, including the zone and dropped item quests. It also allows you to see a new type of shinies for collections. Best of all, the flag you get for having completed the Sig qualifies you for the Merchant's Den instance and questline. Those were added in the April update and I was miffed not to be able to see the content at the time (Through no-one's fault but my own tardiness.)

325 Resolve. Noice!

I'm not sure whether the drops from that will be upgrades for my bruiser now, although two of the final rewards from the Sig line were, so it's likely. Upgrading is such a fast-moving target in EQII it hardly matters. It'll all be out of date by the autumn anyway. I just want to see the new zone and enjoy the story.

Now I have to decide whether to take anyone else through the Sig line. All the unlocks and flags are account-wide, so it's not necessary but I'm curious to see if it would be easier with my Necromancer. I keep saying I'm going to swap to her as my lead character for expansions and new at-cap content but somehow I've ended up benching my Berserker in favor of the Bruiser, which was never the plan.

Ah well, I'm sure it'll all work out in the end. It usually does.

Ikonei Island: Open Beta. Very First Impressions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear my mighty leaf. Sword! I mean sword!

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

Otherwise I'd still be playing.

Sometimes It Feels Like Every Day Is Prime Day

Today is Amazon Prime Day, or as Amazon would have it "Prime Day" because obviously "Prime" is, itself, now a brand everyone recognizes equally well.  To anyone who doesn't really give a toss who's behind it and just wants the cheap stuff I guess "The Sale" covers it.

Actually, I doubt there is anyone like that. People seem to feel about certain companies the way they used to feel about religion or politics. Can't say I'm able get that emotional about it myself but then I'm old. All my receptors are worn down to nubs.

I had a quick look through some of the offers but as usual there are so fricken' many of them I soon lost the will to go on. Sometimes I wonder if companies wouldn't do better with smaller, more focused sales but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

As I mentioned yesterday, I might be in the market for a new phone, so I was looking to see if there was anything in that line going cheap, which led me to start thinking about the specs and whether in fact it made any difference whether a particular phone could or could not play games well, which in turn led me to muse over the whole concept of playing games on a phone and whether I would ever want to do it any more than I have up to now, which is really not very much at all, even though I first posted about doing it over a decade ago. All of that linked "Amazon" and "Games" together in my mind, which is how I came to log in to Amazon Games to see if there was anything new I should know about...

...and there was. I can't keep up any more. I mean, it's less than two weeks since I last posted about a new tranche of freebies over at AG and that was the second time that month. Should I be logging in every week just to check I'm not missing something?

Some of it was there already, I think, but I chose not to claim it then. Those Star Wars games, for example. Did I mention those last time? Let me check... nope, can't see anything so maybe they are new. The offer expires in two days so if they are they can only have been on offer for a couple of weeks. 

There's no time to dither. That's how I missed the Steam sale on Solasta. I'll almost certainly never play them but they're big titles. It seems rude to refuse. CLAIMED.

 Then there's a bunch that expire at the beginning of August. Those are definitely new since last time I looked. And guess what? There's a Lucasarts point & click adventure!  It's not Monkey Island but still! What's more, it's Manic Mansion, a game I have often thought about playing, not that I've ever done anything to make it happen. Well, now I have! CLAIMED.

Of the other three, only one drew my attention, the pretentiously and portentously named Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. I have no idea what it is other than what it says in the description: "a tactical RPG much in the vein of great classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre." I have no clear idea what those are, either, other than what I've read on Tipa's blog. She makes these sorts of games sound very interesting but then she makes everything sound very interesting so that's not much help. Worth a click, at least. CLAIMED.

The two I chose not to choose were the self-explanatory Fishing: North Atlantic, a trawler sim and Suzerain, a text-based strategy sim about running a newly-independent Scotland. No prizes for guessing why I turned either of those down. (Clue: life would still be too short even if I was fifty years younger.)

Having cleared my plate of free games I thought I'd better cast another glance towards the in-game freebies Amazon packages under their Twitch imprint. Those definitely have a faster turnaround so I thought there might be something...

I wasn't expecting more, free big name games but that's what I got. At first I was a little confused. Didn't I already claim one of them before? And turn down another because of some convoluted account-linking prereq?

No, I don't think I did. I'm probably thinking of Bio-Shock, which was free on Epic a while back and Far Cry, which was free on Prime if you linked to Ubisoft. This time around it's Mass Effect and Need For Speed: Heat, for both of which you need to link Prime to your EA account. 

Those are two games I very well might want to play at some point and as it happens I already have an EA account (For reasons long forgotten.) Amazingly, the login details still work and the process is very quick and simple. CLAIMED and CLAIMED.

Throw in yet another set of weapon skins for New World and I think we're done. I wonder how long I should leave it before I check again? A couple of weeks? I guess. They're bound to be giving away new stuff in August.

While we're on the subject, remember that Void Sheep Shoulder Pet I claimed for Roblox last time? No? Really? Well, I did. And now it looks like I'll get the chance to wear it. Throw it. Whatever you do with it.

According to a report on Pitchfork I read earlier today, from tomorrow until Friday, the excellent Soccer Mommy (aka Sophie Allison) will be hosting "a Metaverse listening party for her new album Sometimes Forever on the Roblox platform." 

Her own Roblox page doesn't invoke the dreaded "M" word, explaining "I’m hosting a Listening Party for my new album Sometimes, Forever July 13th-15th in select Roblox experiences! You’ll be able to hear the album and hang out with me in the below participating experiences. Check the dates and times to see where you can find me and be on the lookout for a private server link to be shouted out! "

All of which sounds quite complicated and daunting but I'm beginning to get the hang of how it works now, after the Pink Pantheress and Charli XCX appearances, so I think I can cope. Look forward to a report if I go and get ready to tell me just how terrible Roblox is in the comments, as usual!

Regardless of the widely-reported ethical issues, Roblox, together with Fortnite, does seem to be staking a claim to being the virtual concert hall of record for the 2020s. Maybe someone will come up with a more acceptable platform. How about... PUBG Mobile?

You what, now? PUBG? Where did that come from?

Well, from here, as it happens. The story, which I read in the NME, inevitably, since we're talking about KPop, involves legendary icons Blackpink, who "have announced they will perform a virtual concert within PUBG Mobile‘s in-game world later this month."

PUBG Mobile is not a game I currently have installed. It's not a game I've ever thought about installing and I don't believe I'm going to reconsider as a result of this news. I don't mind Blackpink. I 've heard a few of their tunes over the years and not really thought much about them one way or another. I wouldn't make the effort (and from the NME article it looks like there might be some effort involved, beyond just downloading the game.) just to watch their avatars dance while a few of their songs play.

Then again... I might. I do find this stuff fascinating and this is someone new entering the growing field. Maybe I should check it out.

What I'm really looking forward to is the day someone I really like announces a virtual gig in a game I already play. Regularly. As a game. Not just log into to watch and listen. Unfortunately, given my musical tastes and the kind of games I spend my time in, that's still a bit of a long shot.

Fortnite, Roblox and PUBG Mobile it is then! For now.