I was going to skip posting today but then I read Paeroka on her first experience of Guild Wars in response to the Promptapalooza prompt Syp was given:
“What is your earliest memory related to one of your core fandoms?”
And I thought "Hey, I can knock that out in a hot minute" so here I am, knocking it out.
I began reading American comic books before I could read, if that makes sense. Comics famously have a lot of pictures to help carry the narative, after all. It's always been kind of their USP, even if no-one had learned to call it a "USP" back then. Happy times!
Pictures were all very well, but even at five years old I knew those funny marks in the bubbles told you what the heroes were saying, so I made my mother read them out loud for me. She loved that, as you might imagine.
It would certainly have been easier for her to teach me to read them for myself and I was keen enough to learn but she was equally keen that I shouldn't. She had a theory that it would cause me problems if I arrived at school already knowing how to do the main thing the rest of the class would be spending much of their time on for the rest of the year.
She may even have been right. Hard to tell. No-one in my class could read when I started school, so there wasn't a sucker subject available to test the theory. Maybe it was how every parent thought back then. Anyway, since she was determined to make me wait, she was hardly in a position to complain.
My funds at the age of five were limited to absolutely nothing, naturally, so she also had to buy the comics for me. Sometimes my grandad would buy me a few but mostly the responsibilty fell to my mother. She must have bought me quite a few because I had a fair stack of them before I was old enough to start buying my own, but the first one I remember was Challengers of the Unknown #35: War Against the Moonbeast.
I remember it for two reasons. Firstly, where I was when she gave it to me and secondly what happened when I read it.
We'd gone away for the weekend, which was something we almost never did. We'd driven down to Devon, which was somewhere we never went. It was me, my mother and my Auntie Mary, who wasn't an aunt at all but my mother's best friend.
We were in a room in a hotel (or more probably a guest house or a bed and breakfast, I imagine) in Ilfracombe (possibly) when my mother produced that comic from her case and handed it to me.
I have a strangely vivid memory of her giving me the comic but no real memory of reading it immediately or on the holiday. I don't remember anything much about the holiday itself, either.
Like most memories, it all starts to fall apart when you look at it closely. The only things I'm certain of are that it was that specific comic - I still have it - and that I got it on that trip.
I'm also positive it gave me nightmares. That's the other reason I remember it.
I was an imaginative child. Over-imaginative. Quite a lot of things gave me vivid dreams, most of them the traditional kind of entertainments about which grandparents loved to say, with relish, "He shouldn't be reading/watching/doing that. It'll give him nightmares".
I don't recall the comic giving me any bad dreams on that holiday but it certainly gave me a few when I got home. At one point I seem to remember having to get out of bed, find it and turn it over so the cover wasn't showing, because just knowing the Moon Beast might be watching me was enough to keep me awake.
It was the cover that did it, of course. I mean, just look at it. That bizarre creature with the gaping maw and that evil, knowing glare in its eye. Bob Brown, the regular Challengers artist of the time, knew perfectly well that cover would give kids nightmares. He clearly meant it to
We weren't far past the horror comics scare of the fifties at that point. The industry was still recovering from the panic that had taken comics as far as a televised U.S.Senate hearing. The Comics Code was extant and in force. Comics were, supposedly, safe for kids to read once again.
Yeah, right. Like it takes a full-on EC Comics barrage of injury-to-eye motifs, hypodermic needles and zombies to scare a five-year old. You don't think a bloody great flying monster with jagged fangs and a lolling, red tongue is going to do it? Thanks Bob!
Did it put me off comics? The hell it did! No sooner had I stopped annoying adults around me by begging them to read the speech bubbles than they had to get used to bodily dragging me out of newsagents when they found me sitting on the floor, reading them for myself.
I could happily spend all afternoon spinning the display, looking at every comic in turn, over and over, as I tried to decide which one would best reward the shilling in my grubby paw. The older I got, the more comics I bought and the more time I spent reading them.
I took a brief break in my teens, when I crazily believed for a handful of years that I was "too old for comics" but that insane notion soon proved itself to be the nonsense I always secretly knew it was.
If I had any lingering doubts, they were crushed to oblivion when my new girlfriend (later to become my first wife), visiting my room for the first time, spotted a large stack of Superman comics I'd failed to hide as well as I thought I had. Rather than pointing, laughing and leaving, as anyone might reasonably have predicted, instead she asked if she could borrow the whole lot. No wonder we got married, I guess, although sadly a mutual love of comics isn't always enough to guarantee a happy lifetime together.
Time for a quick update on how I'm getting on in EverQuest, I think. The old warhorse has unquestionably replaced the slightly less elderly EverQuest II as my current most-played MMORPG. This has been an odd year by any standards but even if it had been unremarkable in every other way it would still have stood out for me as peculiar just for the fact that I seem to have fallen through a gaming time-warp to land somewhere around a decade ago. I think that was the last time I found myself shuttling back and forth between the two ages of Norrath this way.
The mage is still mostly living on Overseer xp. It's slowed down some but it's still better by far than anything else around. She is starting to get out more, though.
She no longer spends the entire day idling in the Guild Lobby. Even Franklin Teek's shark-obsessed quests are old news. When the mobs he was sending her to hunt in the final Hot Zone started turning green, she took to exploring the world in search of better opportunities.
She dinged 108 a couple of days ago and since, as I was saying the other day, she already seemed quite capable of handling herself in the deeper recesses of the Veil of Alaris expansion, I started to wonder if she oughtn't to be pushing herself a little harder.
I didn't take any screenshots in the HA. This is a different tunnel altogether.
For years I've been hearing people talk about Heroic Adventures as the way to level. I was never entirely sure what they were but I was pretty certain you needed a group for them. Fanra's guide, which I read a while ago, gives the minimum number of players as two. That's why I'd never done one.
A few weeks back I poked my nose inside one, just to see what they looked like. I took the Daily Adventure from Franklin Teek's brother, Clayton. He gave me the task and teleported me there but when I tried to go inside I got an error message telling me "mysterious forces" had prevented me from entering.
I took that to mean my mercenary and I didn't qualify as a duo but I was wrong. It turns out that message is just the generic notice you get when something isn't working properly. I ought to have known that. We used to get the same warning, now and then, when we were running Lost Dungeons of Norrath every evening. It just means the zone you're trying to enter is unavailable for some reason.
As I was looking into the possibilities on where to take the Mage, I happened on a couple of different threads talking about soloing HAs. People seemed pretty certain you could. So I tried again.
Yep, still in the wrong tunnel.
This time Clayton Teek sent me to Dead Hills, a zone in the Call of the Forsaken expansion, two along from VoA and the highest-level hunting ground (or at least the most recently-added) I've visited.
I was understandably apprehensive but I pressed on. I spoke to the NPC to get the quests and have them port me inside. At first I got the same "mysterious forces" message but this time I followed the advice I'd read and just kept trying.
After about three or four attempts the mists seemed to clear so in I went. I had a walkthrough up and it warned me to be careful at the start because the first set of mobs was the toughest to pull safely. I was careful. The first two came nicely, one at a time. They were light blue and very manageable. Things were looking good.
I set the pet on the third and got five. Five! I froze for a couple of seconds, the worst thing you can do on a bad pull, and the merc went down. Fortunately that gave me enough of a jolt to stop dithering and decide to bail.
Do I even need to say it?
Due to the odd means of entering the zone - you have to speak to the questgiver, who ports you in - I couldn't find a zoneline to run across. So I gated.
That put me back in the level 95 Hot Zone where I'd bound myself a couple of weeks back. Chastened, I revived my merc and spent the rest of the session beating up greens.
Still, I had proof of concept. Just had to prepare myself better. I left it 'til the next day, by which time my HA had expired. They have a fixed duration somewhere around five hours. I re-took it and got the NPC to take me in again.
Before I started I made a macro to target and hail the questgiver and say "Leave", the keyword for him to port me out again. I put that on a hot key so I could bail without ending up on the far side of the world. Then I started over, pulling even more cautiously than before.
Oh, I forgot to mention. EQ has collections now, just like EQII! And shinies! Probably going to do a post about that, sometime.
And this time everything went swimmingly. I worked my way through the linear zone, killing all the required mobs, clicking on all the necessary objects, getting every update needed to progress the quest. The estimate for HAs is supposedly 30-90 minutes. Mine took about an hour.
The xp was far from amazing but it wasn't terrible. I'd also forgotten to retake the Teek daily so I don't get the boost from that. The loot was good. The whole thing was enjoyable and very definitely doable. I mean, I'd just done it, so it pretty much had to be.
At that point I probably could have decided to replace my daily Franklin Teek task, now sadly not really worth the trip, with the daily adventure provided by his brother, who at least has the decency to provide transport. Only I had a better idea.
I was too high to get much more out of the Veil of Alaris expansion and I'd just successfully soloed some almost level-appropriate content in Call of Forsaken but I'd never even tried the one inbetween - Rain of Fear. So I did some more research and had a lightbulb moment. I could start at the beginning of the expansion and do the main questline!
Hey! Shoon! I know your brother. And your other brother. And your other, other brother...
Yes, radical, I know! But so far it's working out nicely. I've spent several sessions in the entry zone , Ethernere Tainted West Karana, which is West Karana only on fire. I'm a bit vague on the details but I think the Plane of Fear exploded and some the bits hit Norrath. Plus there was some kind of breach that let the Ethernere, Norrath's afterlife, leak through. It's kind of like World of Warcraft''s Cataclysm and Shadowlands had a baby.
I just finished the first leg of the tripartite opening questline last night. I also knocked off a bunch of "prove you're not just going to get yourself killed" quests for one of those guards you find in every fantasy game, the kind who talk a lot about how dangerous it is out there even though they plainly have no personal experience to go by, since they never leave the frickin' compound!
What you gonna do, Shoon? Call your big brother? Oh, wait, you're the big one!
More significantly, I also killed my first dark blue mob since the low 90s. Under EQ's arcane color-code, light blue mobs are standard solo targets but dark blues are better. I've been grubbing around at the bottom of my level range for so long it must be the best part of fifteen levels since I last saw a dark blue, much less killed one. I got quite excited.
If I'd known what was coming next I'd have saved myself. I was killing some lions for guard points when a very familiar-looking, green-shirted behemoth lumbered into view.
Well, you know what they say about the big ones. Eh, Shoon? Eh?
The Karanas have long been the stomping grounds (quite literally) of an extended family of cyclopses (is that the correct plural?).They're easily identified by their names, all of which end in "...oon". There's Broon, Proon, Droon, Mroon, Froon and Choon. And now, I discover, there's yet another brother, called Shoon. So I killed him. In fact, I've killed him three times, so far, just because I can.
He even dropped an item that was an upgrade. A cloak with slightly better hit points, mana and armor class than the one my Magician wears. Stats aren't ideal for her class, though. But it's the first time in a very long while I've killed a mob that drops stuff better than I've bought for myself in the Bazaar.
Okay, it was a weak slot that I hadn't upgraded in my current buying spree, I'll give you that. But it's the principle of the thing. It shows that, in theory, I could dress myself.
The most important thing, though, is that I'm having fun adventuring, in a somewhat-normal fashion. Granted I'm still seven years behind but it's progress.
Apparently the Stolen Traveler's Cloak is "most beneficial to Berserkers". I may still wear it, anyway.
My short-term plan is to carry on questing and exploring in Rain of Fear. Medium-term, I'm aiming on dinging 110, which is a gear threshold, then 111, which will get me the current, top-level air pet. At that point I should be technically capable grouping in current content, something I have no intention of doing.
Instead, I'd like to see some of the next three expansions after RoF, all of which held the cap at 105. That's a lot of content and all of it level-appropriate, near enough.
Along with most bloggers in this part of the 'sphere, yesterday I learned of the sudden, extremely unexpected death of Brian "Psychochild" Green. The first I knew of it was from Tipa at Chasing Dings, who wrote "Brian was an amazing game developer who helped define MMOs when nobody was quite sure what MMOs were... He was also extremely active in the blogging community..."
That's about as much as I knew of Brian. His blog, simply titled Psychochild's Blog, has been in my blog roll for years although the last time he posted there was at the end of last Blaugust in 2019. He'd posted every day during the event but finished with a lot of questions about the process and whether it was worth carrying on, asking his readers "Is it time to retire?"
From blogging is what he meant. He was a long, long way from retirement in any other sense.
In fact, he was, as I discovered yesterday, only forty-six. I'd always thought he must be older. He'd been the driving force behind one of the first 3D MMORPGs, Meridian Online, which predated EverQuest, so I'd always figured he'd be well into his fifties by now, like everyone else who was breaking ground back then.
Brian was also one of the key players in the development of the ill-fated Storybricks, the AI system Sony Online Entertainment grabbed to use inthe ill-fated EQNext. He wrote at length and with great gusto about that ambitious and fascinating project, as he did about so many aspects of the hobby that was both his job and his joy.
In answer to his question about whether he should continue blogging, I replied "I’d say the same as I say to everyone – you should blog because you enjoy it." It seems he wasn't enjoying it all that much. He never posted again and mine turned out to be the last comment on the last blog post he ever wrote. If I'd have know what was coming maybe I'd have been a bit more encouraging, but as always I believed there was plenty of time and he'd get back to blogging when the mood took him.
I only knew Brian, as I "only" know so many people, from interactions like that, in the comment threads on his blog and others.There are those in the blogosphere who knew him much better than that.
The lights flickered briefly back on at Kill Ten Rats as Epic posted to say goodbye. Wilhelm at TAGN, who'd met Brian several times, posted a lovely remembrance, with photographs. Aywren mentions her time with Brian as part of the same Free Company in Final Fantasy XIV, the game he was playing right up until his death.
I don't have much to add other than to thank Brian, belatedly, for his warmth and enthusiasm and patience. He'll be missed far more by those who knew and loved him in real life, of course, as well as those who knew him, virtually, in the guilds and games he played. Still, his absence here in the blogosphere will be felt for a long, long time to come.
I'm running a few days behind the pack with the Promptapalooza posts. I'm beginning to think August may not be the best month for this. It's a great month for the regular Blaugust because, as is painfully obvious right now, game companies see the dog days of summer as a fine opportunity to grab the attention of bored gamers.
Under normal Blaugust rules that's perfect. If you're trying to bang out a post a day it really helps to have lots going on so you can mine it for ideas. I have getting on for half a dozen posts in mind based just on things I read about yesterday. But when someone's already feeding you an idea a day, maybe it's too much of a good thing.
It would be fine if Belghast hadn't come up with so many really intriguing questions. I could happily write something for just about all of them. Even with work on hold and the whole day to myself, though, I haven't got time to cover that and all the non-Prompt posts I want to write as well.
There are a few I don''t want to miss, though, and this is one of them:
Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation.
Krikket at Nerd Girl Thoughts fielded this one with a brave and thoughtful examination of her own
less than ideal circumstances. I'm going to be a little more upbeat than that, although my own "creative space" certainly leaves something to be desired.
The negatives, briefly listed: smallest room in the house (maybe 9' by 7' at a stretch) ; no heating ( there is a radiator but it leaks so I duct-taped it shut a decade ago and it's never been used since); very limited ventilation (there's a window but it faces a busy main road and there's one of those air vents high on the wall beside me but I've had to tape gauze over it because spiders have been known to drop through it onto my desk).
All of that means it's too hot in the summer (as in right this minute as I write this) and too cold in the winter. I've been observed wearing a scarf and hat at the keyboard. I'd have worn gloves if I could type in them. In the coldest times, and almost always from November to March, I keep a furry throw over my legs.
The thing, is, though, I don't have to be in this room at all. We have a much more suitable room downstairs. It's three times the size, has a fully functional gas fire, large windows that open and is generally much more comfortable than the one I'm in. I know that for a fact because I left it to move up here, years ago.
Why it was that I moved into this box room, I no longer remember. I'm sure I must have had a good reason at the time. The other room is still available, just as it was. I could swap back any time. But I don't want to.
For whatever reason, even though I live in a large house (far too large for just the two of us, really, now the three children have long left home) I spend most of my time in this small, confined, limited space. It's comfortable. Cosy, even.
It's cluttered but not nearly as cluttered as it was. I spent a day or two last month sorting things out and this is the neatest and tidiest it's been for years. Draw what conclusions you will from that, given what the pictures show.
The second part of Bel's question is the zinger: how does this space influence my content creation? I've honestly never thought about it but I guess it must.
I do know that I sometimes scan around the room abstractedly when I'm lost for inspiration and my gaze will fall on something that will trigger an idea or, more likely, a memory. More commonly, I'll be deep in a post and realize I need to research something and I'll find the details of what I need on a shelf somewhere close to hand.
Having the window in line of sight when I look up is significant, too. There's not much of a view - the top of a hedge, the main road, the barely-used green space opposite, some more trees and houses - but there's green and a lot of sky and weather. In the supposedly more suitable space downstairs all I could really see was the room. It has big windows but at ground level they don't reveal much. Being upstairs and looking out makes me feel at least a little like I'm in the world.
The big, swivel chair I sit in used to belong to my stepfather, a man I had little affection for although we were polite enough to each other. My mother asked me if I wanted it after he died, which was many years ago and I said yes because I knew he would have bought a good chair. He didn't have great taste but he was an engineer and he knew how to choose things that would do a job and do it well.
In the time I've had this chair Mrs Bhagpuss has physically worn out three. They've actually fallen apart. Mine is still pretty much the same as when I got it and it was far from new even then.
The desk my monitor stands on is another story. I bought it for cheap and it looks like it. It's very
small and the sliding shelf the keyboard sits on has broken sliders that no longer slide. At the beginning of the lockdown that shelf fell off entirely, the screws having sheared. I fixed it with elephant tape and it's been sturdy enough ever since. It just slopes to the right. If I take my hand off the mouse it drifts slowly sideways. Not a problem. I almost never take my hand off the mouse.
Under the chair is a completely unsuitable furry rug that continually rucks up when I push the chair back on its castors. It makes me swear quite volubly sometimes. I need the rug because the movement of castors on exposed wooden floorboards is erosive. Mrs. Bhagpuss has worn quite a hole in her floor and I'm keen not to do the same to mine.
From where I can sit I can see so many things that, in the incredibly irritating, yet even more irritatingly useful, phrase made popular by Marie Kondo, "spark joy".
There's the chorus-line of foxes atop the radiator, all gifted me by Mrs. Bhagpuss, as were the more miscellaneous fuzzed-up wildlifes, scrunched together on top of the bookcase.
Above them there's a poster promoting a children's picture-book. I brought it home from work many years ago. I don't even know what the book is called. I just loved the image of the three creatures, a duck, a squirrel and a cat, looking bemused and apprehensive on what must be their first trip to the big city. That poster tells a story that, I suspect, is darker and more disturbing than the book itself. At least, I hope it is.
Beside the foxes is a DVD-Rom I bought mail order from the Phillipines last year. It has scans of every comic featuring The Legion of Superheroes published between the start of the 1960s and the mid-90s. The seller claimed it was legal but I can't see how it can be. It cost £6 including postage. The comics would cost thousands. And fill the room. I'd like to have all my comics stored this way.
On the wall above, next to a weird, framed collage-cum-painting, made and given to Mrs. Bhagpuss by someone she once knew, hangs a portrait of a character from the first of two unfinished atempts at long-form fiction I essayed in the nineties. Or maybe it was the eighties.
My friend Steve Whitaker, an excellent artist, very sadly no longer with us, who worked for some years as a freelance colorist, drew it, ironically in black and white, after reading the first instalment in an apazine we both contributed to at the time. It's his visualization of my character, Cado Babe Harley, but since the moment I saw it it's always been how I see her, too. I have that story on 3.5" floppy disc somewhere. I just need to buy a floppy drive and maybe I can finish it...
Behind me, on the top of a packed and stacked set of shelves, filled with everything from computer components to film magazines from the nineteen-nineties, you can just about see the EverQuest and EverQuest II RPG hardbacks I've slowly been collecting. I have almost all of them now. Don't imagine I'll ever use them but they're settling to own.
Less settling are the reminders of our current situation. A bottle of Vitamin D tablets. Some anti-bacterial, 70% alchohol hand wash. A fox hand-puppet wearing a mask. The mask is printed with foxes. Mrs. Bhagpuss bought it for me. Hers has sheep.
And so it goes. Everything contributes to the whole. The space around us and that which fills it. Always, there's room for more.
Today saw the arrival of two more of the items on my list of "things to look forward to in August". By most measures the more significant would be FFXIV's Patch 5.3: Reflections in Crystal, stretching the free trial to Level 60 and giving all players, paying or not, access to the first expansion, Heavensward.
I'll set that one aside for now, though. It's here to stay so there's no rush. And anyway, I'm more interested in finding out how Valiance Online is getting along. There's a short open beta up right now but only for a few days.
Of the several super-hero MMORPGs that sprang up in the aftermath of City of Heroes' sunset, the one I've always been the most drawn to is Valiance Online. I'm pretty sure that's becasue it has the best name but the fact that it was the first to put up an open alpha didn't hurt.
It was really a tech demo, I guess, but as the guy from Crowfall said, "these terms are almost meaningless anyway and mean different things from company to company." Strictly speaking, it was MassivelyOP said that. For some reason they like to serve up interviews in reported speech rather than using proper quotes.
I've got my TV eye on you, Crowfall.
Oh, and I guess I should mention that Crowfall went into beta today. There's another thing to do in August, providing you signed up and assuming you get an invite. Or you could just pay, of course. $39.99 for the basic Starter Pack gets you immediate access to beta and the Live game, when it arrives, in what ArtCraft calls "Play Now and Forever".
Catchy. Sounds like quite a good deal, too. Especially since the game's supposed to be going with a Buy To Play model and every estimate of the "box" price I've seen is around $50.00. Something to think about.
Meanwhile, though, there's Valiance Online to be getting on with. I'd love to give some first impressions but... oh, heck, I'll just go with what I've got.
In an effort not to bury the lede, let's start with by far the most interesting thing that happened during the hour or so I "played" VO this afternoon. It was so unusual I went to the trouble of making a video.
It's kind of self-explanatory but here's the background. I'd been running around for about an hour without finding anything to do and I'd about had enough. I'd taken a bunch of screenshots already (about which more later) but just before I finished I had an idea for one more.
The beta takes place in a large city called San Cielo. It's all futuristic skyscrapers and highways. There are fast-moving vehicles and a lot of zebra crossings.
And I do I mean a lot. There are stripes across what seems like every junction and plenty more besides, all glowing neon blue. My first thought was to do an Abbey Road shot. Let's face it, it would be everyone's first thought. Hard to pull it off when there's just the one of you, though.
Stike that. Here's a better idea. I thought I might be able to work up an amusing paragraph, taking the mickey out of the game for having all those pedestrian crossings and then letting the cars run you over. I had this plan to stand on the crossing and take a shot of the car going straight through me. I hadn't yet tried it but I was willing to bet there was no collision detection. And if there was and the car just plowed into me and tossed me in the air, well, that would work even better.
Bagsy I be Paul.
So I stood in the path of a moving vehicle with my finger on the screenshot key and waited for a car to appear. I watched it come over the hill and speed straight at me and then... it stopped! I was more stunned than my character would have been if the thing had hit her. Someone had actually programmed the cars to recognize when someone was crossing. Can you believe it?
Well, the proof's up there. And it's the most action I saw in an hour. The only action.
I have to praise the set-up for beta. The download was easy to find and fast to install. The whole thing, from me deciding on a whim to try it to logging in, took maybe ten minutes. It would have been less but I wasted a little while finding my old log-in details from last time. I found them but they didn't work - hardly surprising, it was 2016 - so I created a new account instead. That was easy.
No hoops to jump through to get in, then. Full marks for that. Character creation was okay, too, although I found quite a lot about it slightly confusing. Maybe confusing is too strong. Unintuitive.
A lot of the options are greyed-out, presumably not yet implemented, which is entirely reasonable in a beta but I found the rotating selection process awkward to navigate and some of the options that were supposedly available didn't seem to do anything. Hard to tell if that's because they're unfinished or if I was bugged in some way.
Now that's some serious bad posture.
Once I'd gotten rid of the slump-shouldered, goose-necked Billy Idol wannabe who inexplicably acts as the default option I did, eventually, manage to make a character I was reasonably happy with. Superhero games live and die by their character creators, of course, so this one clearly has a long way to go, but the basics seem to be there.
I gave her the most obvious fire-based powers and named her Flashburn, which is the kind of name I would never dream of using for a character I was planning to play. Okay, full disclosure: I called her that because I'm watching the incredibly violent Titans series on Netflix at the moment and I had the image of Kory Anders flash-burning anyone who looks at her sideways into charcoal fresh in my mind. Probably gonna post about Titans at some point but I have to watch the whole run first. Also about the fact I finally caved and subbed to a second streaming service...
That was about the limit for things going smoothly. When I went to enter the game the whole thing hung and I had to close it and start again. Lucklily my character was fine and the second login worked.
It was night-time because of course it was. I know I complain that it's always night-time when I log into a game, especially a new game where I really want to see what I'm looking at, but that's because it always is!
You can have any color shirt you like so long as it's blue. Oh, wait, those are shoes... I said the UI was confusing.
I couldn't see my character's face at all, it was that dark. I looked around and couldn't see any NPCs, either. No tutorial prompts popped. There was a chat box but it was empty and anyway I already knew there was a known issue with chat in the beta so it was never going to work.
With nothing else suggesting itself I started jogging around the streets of San Cielo looking for trouble. Usually a sound move in a super-hero game. You can call it "patrolling" if you like. (Back in the '80s I can remember sitting around several pub tables engaging in heated debate over the concept of superheroes "patrolling". People had some very polarized views on it. It was a strange time. People took stuff like that very seriously. Well, the kind of people I knew...).
Sadly, San Cielo seems to be an astonishingly law-abiding city. I didn't find a single miscreant. More accurately, I didn't find a single person. No villains, no civillians, no ambient wildlife, no other players. Nothing but the driverless hovercars cruising the wide, empty boulevards.
I tried visiting the various landmarks I could see in case something was happening anywhere. It wasn't. There were huge blinking eyes and giant gold statues all over but no-one to talk to. Or flash fry.
Excuse me. Can you direct me to the Radiohead terminal?
On one corner I came across a large machine. It had an acronym hovering above it: M.U.S.E. Promising. A mission terminal, I bet. I clicked on it. Nothing. Maybe it was bugged. Maybe it doesn't work yet. No way to tell.
After a lot of running around I found myself on the edge of town. I could see the sea in the distance. It occured to me to wonder whther the game would allow me to swim. Always an indicator of how far along things are.
It was a mighty long run but I got there in the end and yes, you can swim in Valiance Online. I took some screenshots to prove it. By the time I came out of the water the sun was coming up. Glory be! Daylight!
The lighting effects in VO are quite striking. I spent a few minutes posing in the bright sweeps of sunlight that splashed the sidewalks between the vast buildings. If I stood at a certain angle the light glowed all through my character's body, lighting her up as though she was on fire inside. Given the nature of her powers it seemed both felicitous and appropriate. I took a whole load of pictures. So where are they? You may well ask.
Last thing I remember I was running towards the sea... I'm sorry, Officer, after that's it's all just a blank...
Finally, just as I was about to give up, I saw something move. Something that wasn't a car. It ran past me over the grass and off into the distance but I managed to target it before it diappeared. Another player! The first and only one I saw.
I ran after them in the forlorn hope they might know of somewhere worth going but before I could find out I spotted four humanoid figures. I veered off to see what they were and that was the last I saw of the Running Player.
The four were NPCs. One was a vendor, selling "Enhancements". Another was an "Advancement Trainer". The third was... I have no idea. The last was a Training Dummy.
I tried to communicate with all of them. Well, not the dummy. The dummy I used to try out my powers and take some screenshots. The effects were very good. I was impressed. Took some great shots. (Sensing a theme, here?).
The vendor worked but of course I had no money to spend on whatever she was selling. The Trainer and the other guy responded with blank speech bubbles. As the bubbles faded, just for a moment I could see words. They faded too fast to read the whole thing but I caught the gist: "Not yet implemented".
Don't concern yourself, Citizen. There's a lot of that going around.
That was enough for me. I had all the pictures I needed. I thought I'd log out, write up a fairly unimpressed, mildly sarcastic First Impressions piece and leave it at that. Only, when I checked my FRAPS folder, for some inexplicable reason only the shots I'd taken at night had recorded.
More precisely, only the shots I took before I went into the sea. The swimming shots aren't there, either. I don't know if that's a co-incidence or whether something the game does when you enter the water causes FRAPS to stop working. I've never seen anything like it before. That's betas for you, I guess.
I was minded to just go with what I had but I looked at the night shots and they were a bit samey so I logged back in to take a few daylight scenes. I did that and then I ran into the whole self-driving car scenario we covered at the start, which just goes to show you should never leave on a sour note.
The whole thing, from deciding to give the beta a try to making the video to writing this post has taken most of my afternoon but it's not like I had anything much else to do.
The streets look empty, yet I get the strangest feeling someone's here...
All in all I had a fun time. It's been too long since I made a video. I ought to do more of those. And it's always good to have something different to blog about.
If I wasn't making my own content, though, I'm not sure I'd have been so happy. If you play a super-hero MMORPG you do kind of expect to get to fight some villains. Or at least see some.
Another day, another Promptapalooza post. It's the gift that keeps on giving, which, if you think about it, makes absolutely no sense. I mean, it's the gift-giver who'd have to keep on giving. The gift would keep on being given. Does no-one know the difference between the active and the passive voice any more?
Anyhoo...
If you had a mascot to represent you, what would it be?
Interesting hypothetical. It assumes I don't already have one. I kind of do, though, in the context of this blog. It's that cat, right up there in the masthead.
I believe I've told the origin story of the cat on the red velvet bedspread before but no-one's going to remember even if I have, so let's go round again.
I've said that the picture's a detail from a screenshot I took during the EverQuest II beta back in 2004. Not too many of the screenshots I took in my first five years of playing MMORPGs have survived. I have a selection of shots from EverQuest that go back to when Lost Dungeons of Norrath was the current expansion, so sometime around late 2003, early 2004. That's about the earliest I can find.
I know for certain sure I took shots of the insanely overcrowded starting areas when Frogloks were introduced as a playable race in the mini-expansion Legacy of Ykesha six months earlier but those and everything before are dust in the wind. As for other games I was playing back then, there's no evidence at all to prove I was ever there.
All of my shots from the EQII beta in the late summer and fall of '04, though, those I still have. I didn't take that many, not by the standards I'd go on to set for myself. Just forty or so. And almost all of those are from the final few days.
The earliest I can find is dated October 26, just a couple of weeks before launch. It may well be that there was no screenshot function available before then. Maybe I was testing it. I can't remember now.
Most of my shots were taken on the very last day, when I was documenting the end of a world. More so than most betas I've been in, the EQII beta felt very much like a "Live" game. Not because it was polished or finished. Far from it. It was buggy as hell right until the last day when, as I've written before, the one and only genuine "miracle patch" I've ever seen fixed most of the issues we'd been complaining about for weeks.
No, the reason that beta felt so real was that it was all any of us played for months. A bunch of us left EQ in September to try it out and most of us never went back. I did, eventually, but not for almost a year. From the day I made my first character in EQII I was hooked, just as I had been five years earlier in EverQuest itself.
One of the main reasons I stayed was that EQII gave me something I'd been missing the whole five years I'd been playing EQ: a home. Somewhere my character could come back to after a hard day's adventuring. Where he could settle down on a comfortable bed. With his cat.
OMG! Seriously! My character had a cat! Can you believe it?
Yes, well, of course you can, now. Everyone has imaginary pets these days. In some games even the pets have pets. But then? Well, if I'd ever had an in-game, non-combat pet before, I don't remember it now.
But, half a dozen years later, when I came to create this blog, I remembered that cat, then.
Yeah, no I didn't. I'm lying. I might have remembered the cat. I just can't can't remember if I remembered. More likely I was trawling through old screenshot files, looking for something that would work. But you can bet I remembered that cat when I saw them.
I spent so much time with that cat back in beta. Having an actual in-game home with furniture and pets was such a buzz. I know EQII was far from the first game to have housing but it was the first game I'd played that had housing that felt like somewhere I could imagine wanting to live.
Every session ended with me heading back to my room, feeding the cat, sitting on the bed and logging out. Every session began with me logging in to see the same room and that cat, stretching, purring, demanding to be fed and entertained. Happy to see me.
When the world ended and we all gathered next to the Claymore in Antonica to watch the sky burn, in the last few minutes I couldn't stay with everyone else. I broke and ran, back to my room and my cat. We met the end together.
If the cat had a name I don't know what it was. I can't even recall
whether you could name pets back in beta. I can't say if it was
male or female or both or neither. I do know you shouldn't feed it pepper. I never did.
And now, there they are, up there at the top of the post. The top of every post. My mascot.
Which would be a sweet story if it was true. Only it's not.
I do still have all my screens from beta, that part is true. I probably did look at them for inspiration when I was trying to decide on a look and feel for this blog. I might have wanted to use an image from beta because I'm pretty sure I'd have thought that would be cool.
Thing is, I can't remember. All I can say for sure is that I ended up using a picture of the cat I made after launch instead. The cat that was the spiritual successor of the one I had in beta. When EQII went live I recreated my exact character from beta, a gnome Templar, got him the same inn room and the same cat.
Only as time went on he got better furniture than the beta cleric ever had. Like that red-quilted bed and the picture you can vaguely see in the background. It obviously felt like a better match for the color scheme here. Beta was pretty colorless. So that's what I went with.
What happened to the screenshot I cropped to get just the cat on the bed, I have no idea. I was going to show the full, unedited screen here but I can't find it. I can't find any shots from any period of EQII between the end of beta and about five years ago.
That's today's Promptapalooza post. Paerokaset the ball rolling with a focused and approachable take on what can be a notoriously difficult subject to handle.
Interviews often go awry when actors and writers try to explain how it is they do that thing they do. Don't you just love it when they talk about their "process"? Doesn't it give you just the most amazing insight into their magical world of make-believe? It's like you're being gently guided past the velvet rope and through the curtains to the wonders that lie beyond. Isn't it? Isn't it, though?
No, it bloody well is not! It feels more like being dragged along on a tedious, alienating, self-important tour around someone else's workplace. Would you take time out of your day to listen to quantity surveyors or limousine valeters (is that a thing or did I just make it up?) talk you through the intracacies and subtleties of their metier? No, I thought not.
Isn't a shame, then, that it's so much fun to do? Reading about how someone writes may be tedious as hell but writing about how someone writes is hella fun - for that someone. And today that someone is me!
I can't get enough of writing about how I write. It's kind of a semi-subtle way of talking about myself and god knows there's nothing I like better than that. You know those scenes in police procedurals, where the cop starts in on the questions and the suspect moans "I told the other cop everything already"? I see one of those and I hear myself saying "Oh come on!" I mean, it's a chance to talk about yourself all over again. And someone's asking you to do it! What are you whining about?
Yeah, well, that sets the tone. Don't say you weren't warned. Feel free to skip the rest of the post.
Oh, you already do that? Whenever I start banging on about things that don't interest you, which is most of the time? You just scan the first paragraph and check what the pictures are showing, then bail if it's bloody EQ or Lana sodding del Rey again? Yeah, well, me too, if I see Warframe or Destiny. Providing I can hit the X before I fall into a coma.
So, for the couple of people who were too slow to click away, here's my process:
Decide if I'm going to post today.
Does the day have a "Y" in it? If so, yes I am.
Have a think about whether I already have any ideas. Did I think of something while I was playing yesterday? If so, can I still remember what it was. because you know I didn't bother to write it down. Did someone else post something I can steal? Did I start writing a comment somewhere then realise I could get a post out of it? If so, we're set.
If not, start typing. Something will come.
If something doesn't come, look at all the little icons on my desktop. Anything? No? Try opening a few screenshot folders and looking at the pictures. Anything?
Okay, so somehow or other something clicked and I'm up and running. Now for the very, very easy part.
Write the post.
Seriously, that's the super-fast, super-easy bit. Just sit there, bash out 1500-2000 words. Done.
Just try not to think too much about what I'm writing as I'm writing it. It's like all motor skills. If you think about how you're doing it you'll wobble and fall off. Or, in the case of writing a post, end up spending two hours doing "research" that turns out to be way more interesting than writing the post. And then have to write a different post altogether, one of the tough ones with lots of facts and references that you have to get right. The ones that take all day and no-one comments on. So don't do that. It's not worth it.
When it's written, read it back.
Doesn't make sense, does it? Doesn't flow, either. What happened to that idea you were developing in para three? Just forgot about it, didn't you? And this bit here. Does it have anything to do with anything? I thought not.
Then there's that convoluted, twisted piece of "wordplay"? Is it funny? Did you think it was funny when you wrote it? Of course you didn't. You just thought it was clever. Thought it made you look smart. Well it doesn't. Can you even follow what it means, now? No, you can't, so who else do you think is going to get it? No-one, that's who.
Kill your favorites. It hurts but it has to be done. I was going to say "Kill your babies", which is funnier but also really gross. Had to kill that one.
Okay, that's the first edit done. Now for the pictures...
... an hour passes.... ....talk among yourselves...
Okay, that just about works. I'll just drag this one up to here...
FFS Blogger! What the..? Geez. Can't you just move a fricken picture without screwing up the entire layout? Mumble mumble gripe cuss...
Time to re-read the whole thing, check for typos and cut-and-paste screw-ups, any miscellaneous weirdness...
Aaaand we're done! Now, what to call it?
Hmm. No, seriously, what? Gotta have a title that works.
Here's one. Oh yeah, that'd be... no, wait, didn't I use that one already? Blast! Yes, back in 2014. And again in 2017.
Okay, let's run a bunch of relevant keywords through Lyrics.com. Only take a minute...
Hmm. Nope. That's not gonna work. Geez! You'd think every post I wrote was about Livin' tha Life.
Let's flick through the music folder... oh, hey, I haven't heard that one in forever...
An hour later...
OMG! Is that the time? Where'd the day go? Sod it... just pick one. Okay, that'll have to do. Just check there's a bearable cover I can link to when the monthly music post comes around...
Two hours later...
God, if I don't stop right now I'll never get my dailies done. Okay, just bang in the tags... try to stay awake... seriously, this bit takes like thirty seconds but it feels like thirty days. I hate tagging posts.
Hit Publish and that's it. Finished!
I'll just read it once more, now it's really real.
What the hell?! How did I miss that? And that! And this paragraph makes no frickin' sense at all! Gimme a moment to fix that...
Oh sod it. It'll have to do.
Read it through one last time...
Okay, that's pretty good. I'll put my name to that.
And there we go. That's My Process. Okay, there's the odd post that doesn't come off (and this might be one of them) but it pretty much always works.
At least, it works for me. For the readers, assuming there are any, maybe not so much. But that's not really the point, is it? I write to please myself and mostly I succeed because, yes, I am that much of a narcissist.
But, hey, be your own fan and you'll never let yourself down. Amirite?
She may even have been right. Hard to tell. No-one in my class could read when I started school, so there wasn't a 
I don't recall the comic giving me any bad dreams on that holiday but it certainly gave me a few when I got home. At one point I seem to remember having to get out of bed, find it and turn it over so the cover wasn't showing, because just knowing the Moon Beast might be watching me was enough to keep me awake.
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