Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Baby!

 

With the Steam Game Festival due to end in a couple of days I thought I'd better get on and check out the remaining demos I downloaded back at the start. That meant finishing up Nine Noir Lives and playing through Ring of Fire: Search for a Killer and Kathy Rain: Director's Cut. 

I also said I'd re-download the Frozen Flame demo and give it another try. It surely couldn't be that short on purpose, could it? I must have been bugged, right?

This afternoon I did all of that and it took me... well, it's hard to say, exactly. I can say for sure it wasn't long. Probably about an hour, all told.

In theory I ought to be able to come up with an exact figure. Steam keeps tabs on how long you spend playing, after all. According to the records on my account I spent ten minutes playing Ring of Fire, twenty on Kathy Rain and eleven minutes taking a second run at Frozen Flame. 

That all seems clear enough. The problem comes when I look at the time Steam has down for my full playthrough of Nine Noir Lives. 

When I first posted about the game I mentioned my opening session had lasted seventy minutes. I can clearly remember seeing that number on Steam when I logged out. What's more, it's about how long I would have guessed I'd been playing. I know roughly what time it was when I started and when I stopped.

Coming back to it today, there turned out not to be so much distance left in the demo as I'd thought. It ends when you manage to talk your way into the first real crime scene, the Knitty Kitty Club. 

Before you can do that, though, there's quite a lot of banter between your character, Cuddles Nutterbutter P.I. and Officer Krakowski, the by-the-book cop guarding the door. Before he'll let you in you have to show him your Private Investigator badge and a form from police headquarters authorizing you to work on the case. 

Since Nutterbutter would clearly forget his tail if it wasn't glued on, this means a trip back to the office to find the missing credentials. This in turn leads to yet more banter, this time with Tabby, Nutterbutter's long-suffering assistant and so the dance goes on.

A little light gameplay comes next , in the shape of a search for the badge (Spoiler: it's under the cushion on the sofa. Took me a little while to find it) and finally a phone call to the gravel-voiced form-faxer down at the cop shop. All of this takes quite a while. I'd guess it took me at least twenty minutes.

In fact, I think I can prove it. You can follow most of the action in the second half of this twenty-eight minute playthrough on YouTube. The player who posted it, Cryptic Hybrid, must already have made the phone call because he just gets a copy from Tabby. It took me an extra four or five minutes to learn how to use the phone (cats don't use numbers) and to sweet talk the gorgon on the other end of the line.

And yet somehow Steam now shows my total time spent in the Nine Noir Lives demo as... sixty-five minutes. I somehow lost five minutes getting from where I left off to the end!

Okay, alright, never mind about that. The point is, however long it took me, the Nine Noir Lives demo is a solid, entertaining introduction to what looks like it should be a very enjoyable game. I was quite disappointed when it ended abruptly, just as I saw the first dead body on the floor. I would definitely have gone on playing if I could. I've added it to my wishlist. 

Nine Noir Lives: Recommended!

The demo for Kathy Rain: Director's Cut almost had the opposite effect. Not because it doesn't show the game off to good effect. It starts at the scene at the graveside during Kathy's grandfather's burial, where Kathy meets her grandmother for the first time since she was a child, and carries on from there just as it does in the full game.

And that was my problem with it. It's a while since I played but as far as I could tell what I was seeing and hearing was identical to what I saw and heard on my original playthrough. The graphics looked the same, the voiceover was as I remembered it, the mechanics, puzzles and dialogs appeared to be unchanged in any way. 

Since I already own Kathy Rain and this is a demo for the Director's Cut edition, I was hoping to see what was different about it, not just to be reminded of what I already knew. I kept on for twenty minutes but eventually I felt as though there were better things I could be doing with my time so I stopped.

I still have the Director's Cut on my wishlist but the main effect of partially playing through the demo has been to convince me I need to see some evidence of the extent and value of the new content before I pay again for what might end up being pretty much the same game I already have. Not quite the result I imagine they were hoping for.

Kathy Rain: Director's Cut: Recommended for anyone who doesn't already have Kathy Rain. Otherwise, maybe wait for the reviews when it comes out to see if it's really worth paying twice.

Next I took a look at the demo for Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer. Did not take me long. I hated it.

About the only thing I didn't actively dislike was the visual aesthetic. It sets a striking, minimalist tone that seems to nod towards pop art and abstract expressionism. I am something of a soft target for stuff like that as some of my previous choices probably suggest. 

It was mostly the look of the the game that made me pick it out of the pack in the first place but I do also like a good police procedural, particularly one that takes place in a near-future Dickian dystopia. Probably haven't been hiding that any too well, either.

What I don't like are supposedly adult characters who cuss and banter like fourteen-year old boys. Neither do I see any point in crowing about game mechanics designed to make the player copy down text from the screen in longhand, just so they can type it back into the game five seconds later. 

If I wanted to make notes with pen and paper I'd get in my time machine and go back twenty years. Or possibly thirty. Either let the game keep track or at least give me an in-game notebook I can record information in, ffs!

What I actually did, of course, was screenshot each piece of text as it appeared and tab back and forth. Arguably more awkward and annoying than writing it down with a pen and paper, I can't deny it. Also probably what made the demo glitch to the point where I couldn't read the dialog any more and had to close it and start over. That's on me. 

Including the restart I lasted ten minutes. If I hadn't known I was going to have to write something about it it would have been five. If even that.

Ring of Fire: Search For a Killer : Not Recommended. 

Last and definitely least in terms of what there is to see and do in the demo, Frozen Flame. I was replaying this because I was convinced I'd done something wrong the first time. As I mentioned, a commenter on Massively:OP had explained there was more to it than the ten minutes I'd spent running across a bridge and watching a gate open. 

And I'm sure there is... in the game. I'm guessing that person had tried the early access version, not the demo. The demo is just the bridge and the gate and that's it. I googled to see if anyone else was confused and found this Reddit thread. 

Well, if you can call it a thread. It's a couple of comments but they both describe the exact same experience I had. And no-one comes on to contradict them, so I'm taking it that's all there is to the demo after all.

The tiny sliver I saw did look interesting. I will certainly give it another look if ever goes into some kind of open beta or free trial. I don't think it's enough of my kind of thing to pay money for but honestly on the little I saw it's hard to be entirely sure.

Frozen Flame: Insufficient Data.

And there we have it. One thing I will say, demos are fun. Too many can leave me feeling a little queasy, like I've filled up on snacks, but somehow there always seems to be room for just one more.

Two days left. Maybe I'll take my plate and go round one more time.

The Longest Road

 

Surprising though it seems (to me, at least) informed comments by XyzzSqrl and Paeroka on yesterday's post suggest at least some of the demos in the Steam Game Festival will only be available for a week. Make that three days if you're starting from now. 

I was going to spend this evening playing through a couple more but given the urgency, I thought I'd better get this up right away. I would strongly recommend taking a look at The Longest Road On Earth while you have the chance. It'll only take you twenty minutes but it'll be a good twenty.

The Longest Road is a difficult game to describe. For a start, it's not a game. I know I say that about a lot of things but in this instance it's the plain fact. The full version, when it appears later this year, may or may not be a game; the demo certainly is not.

To be scrupulously fair to the publisher, Raw Fury, they don't claim that it is. They describe it as "An emotive interactive visual and auditory experience". A bit fancy for my taste but accurate nonetheless. 

Raw Fury are quite fancy, though. They describe themselves as an "(Un)publisher": We don’t care about genres or mechanics. We care about experiences and emotions." There's quite a lot more like that. You can read it here if you like.

I don't particularly care how they describe themselves, not if they're going to (un)publish "games" like this. Not to mention Kathy Rain and Backbone, both of which they also have in their stable. 

If pushed, I'd say the Longest Road demo is the closest thing I've seen to a true adaptation of the classic indie graphic novel style for interactive media. Everything from the choice of black and white to the animals-as-people characters to the focus on small, personal slice-of-life storytelling suggests it. 

If that sounds appealing then you'll love this demo. It's elegaic, evocative and open to interpretation as the best small press comic-shop favorite. Just don't expect a story.

As the Steam notes say, "There’s no context given in these chapters, you won’t know these characters or their stories, but you can experience moments of time with them and create your interpretations." What I'm not so clear about is whether that applies just to the demo or to the full game. It seems to be lifted verbatim from the game's entry on the Raw Fury website, which doesn't mention the demo at all. 

I hope the finished product will be very much the same. I found the complete lack of exposition to be one of the most compelling aspects of what was, for me, an exceptionally immersive experience. I don't feel any narrative is necessary. Context, though... well, I felt it had plenty. 

The mechanics deserve a mention. There aren't any. Oh, alright, there are a few. Here are the keys I had to press: A, D, Space. And here's how much say I had about when to press them: none.

The "game" (seriously, it's not a game) prompts you at every possible interaction. Those actions are sequential. You either press the correct key and the next thing happens or you don't and you sit and watch a static image. Your choice. 

It's compelling. Despite having no agency you feel you have agency. The exact same agency you have reading a graphic novel. You can turn the page or not. Sometimes you want to turn the page. Sometimes you want to linger. That's your choice.

The best part I've left 'til last. Yes, the pixel art is beautiful. Yes, the non-mechanical mechanics are a joy. The real reason the whole thing feels so magical, though, is the music. 

 

The Longest Road On Earth demo has what may well be the best soundtrack I've ever heard in a video game, bar none, although it's hardly a fair competition. I've never played a video game before that simply uses a succession of songs as its soundtrack in the exact same way you'd hear them if you'd put on an album. 

The Steam page acknowledges how crucial the music is to the experience: "The Longest Road on Earth includes the soundtrack so you can take the experience with you on your journey". If the aural experience of the demo is replicated throughout the full game when it appears, it might be hard to tell whether it's the music soundtracking the visuals or the visuals providing video in support of the songs.

The first thing I did when the demo ended was to trawl the web to find out who I'd just been listening to. It wasn't hard. The songs are the work of one person, Beicoli. She's a Spanish indie-type with a very low-key presence on the usual platforms: Bandcamp and YouTube,. I found only one video of her performing live:

The bulk of her available material seems to be on Soundcloud. I'm listening to it as I write this. It could scarcely be more in my wheelhouse but that doesn't explain the superb synergy between her music and Mohammed Bakir's pixel art.

While I'm handing out praise I ought to mention the other members of the  team, Ed Verz, in charge of the game's aesthetics, graphic development and programming and Arturo Monadero, who handles production and narrative design.

Together, the four of them have brought something quite special into the world. Why all the characters have to be anthropomorphic animals yet again is a question for another day.

Try It, You Might Like It

There's a promotional event going on right now over on Steam. It's called the Steam Game Festival. Makes it sound substantial. It's a bunch of demos and some devs livestreaming. 

If it was a bigger deal it wouldn't be third banner down on the home page, I guess. Those pinks, purples, oranges put me in mind of the kind of flyer you get handed in the center of some down-at-heel market town on a Wednesday evening. Student Night in a basement club under a second-rate hotel. First drink half price. Maybe it's meant to be retro. Or ironic. Is irony in again?

Garish as it is, there's a better-than-even chance I still wouldn't have noticed if a couple of blogs on my watchlist hadn't weighed in with commentary and suggestions. Several of the titles on both lists looked interesting so I thought I'd take a few minutes to pick through the possibilities.

It was hard work. I find Steam a pain to navigate at the best of times. It's cluttered and chaotic and not in a good way. In common with almost every virtual storefront the designers seem to live in terror of someone discovering a way to see only those things that already interest them so no matter how carefully you set the options it makes next to no difference. Everything eventually shows up everywhere.

Wow! Dymotape lettering! Not seen that in a while.

I flipped and clicked and scrolled through the jumble, trying to avoid anything my mouse touched popping out a video to tempt me. It felt like walking through a seaside town after dark, two blocks back from the promenade, signs on every corner, waiters calling out from every bar and restaurant, all trying to get you to come inside. 

If I hadn't already clicked through some of the links on Nerdy Bookahs, visited those games' individual pages, I would never have guessed they existed. Couldn't find their stalls in the festival even when I knew what I was looking for. 

It didn't help that Steam seems to categorize games very diferently from the way I'd do it. Titles I was looking for under "Adventure" turned up most prominently in "Puzzles" or "Visual Novels although, as I suggested earlier, scroll deep enough and everything turns up eventually. Just not where you expect.

In the end I had to type the names of the specific games I wanted to look at into the search field. I gave up completely on browsing for anything Paeroka or Magiwastaken hadn't mentioned. I went back to  Paeroka's links, checked them all to see if any of them caught my fancy, then cross-refered back to Steam.

I wonder how much of the city we get to see?

 

I did find a couple of things that weren't on either of the blog lists. The five demos I ended up downloading were:

Ring of Fire

The Longest Road on Earth

Frozen Flame

Nine Noir Lives

Kathy Rain : Director's Cut

I also took a look at Cats and Other Lives and Detective from the Crypt. I might download those later, depending how far I get with the ones I've already chosen.

Of all of them, the one I was by far the most intertested to try was Kathy Rain. I've already played and written about the original edition, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The prospect of an expanded version featuring "extended storyline with a prolonged ending, hundreds of lines of additional dialogue, and multiple new areas to explore" and "several new major puzzle chains." is enticing. I hadn't realized that Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye was involved. He directed the English-language voice acting, apparently. No wonder it's so good.

This is a pun that makes no sense. The customer is here to server the bartender? I still laughed, though.

The only problem I have with playing the demo is that I've already added the full game to my wishlist. I'm not sure I want to spoil my eventual fun with a teaser.

A teaser was all I got from Frozen Flame. Steam has it as it tagged as an "mmorpg", for what that's worth. Steam tags, hmmmph. Massively OP has also covered it, as a "multiplayer survival rpg". It's a fellow-traveller at least, then. I'd have a better idea if the demo had lasted more than ten minutes.

Officially, I played for twelve minutes according to Steam, but that included at least two minutes staring at the EULA with the screen frozen. I got in eventually. I was a big guy with a two-handed sword. The game told me to go to a bridge. I couldn't see it but there were things to kill so I killed them.

That part ended. The big guy vanished. I found myself at character creation so I made a character. She arrived in a very pretty snow scene. There was an NPC. He wouldn't speak. Then he woke up and some very pretty lights appeared. I made my way towards some NPCs who were waiting for me next to a huge gate. When I got there I just had time to watch it open. I had a brief vision of an open world beyond and then the demo closed down.

There's being smart and there's being a smartass. And then there's this tutorial.

 

Figuring that was it, I was annoyed enough to uninstall. A short while later I spotted a news item about the demo on Massively:OP. I commented there about my experience and a reader by the name of Solaris was kind enough to let me know there was meant to be more: "After the cinematic with the dragon you should get dropped into the game world. The game is beautiful. It’s a little tough to get started but once you do, lots to explore and discover".

I'll re-install it and try again. It did look very pretty. I'd prove it with screenshots only I was in and out so fast I didn't have time to take any.

I had a much better experience with the next demo: Nine Noir Lives. This, as the overworked and awkward title tries to sign, is a detective game with cats. Yes, another one. 

I am the target market for these, it seems. I keep playing them, anyway. I played this one for over an hour. Seventy minutes, Steam says. It was an enjoyable and entertaining hour. Seventy minutes. Whatever. Almost all of it was spent sitting back, hands off, listening to voiceover. Not so much a visual novel as a radio play with pictures.

You should try listening to yourself sometime. It's very much the same thing.

If your "game" consists almost entirely of voice acting, your actors and director need to be solid and so does your script. Nine Noir Lives isn't Kathy Rain, let alone Neo Cab, but it's professional and entertaining enough. The main character, the unfortunately-named Cuddles Nutterbutter, is nicely voiced, comfortable to listen to for long periods of time. His assistant is a little harder to take but she grew on me after a while.

The visuals are unsettling. Noir detectives usually have down-at-heel offices with shabby carpets and dinged desks. If they have a view it's of the trash cans in a back alley or the flashing neon sign on the bar across the street. Nutterbutter seems to operate out of a corner penthouse suite with floor to ceiling windows and enough polished parquet flooring for a dance hall. His lighting bill alone must come to more than most private dicks earn in a calendar year. 

As for the plot, after an hour I've only just arrived at what I assume is the opening act. I logged out when I reached the third location, the Knitty Kitty Club, just as it looked like the action might finally be about to start. 

My eyes! My eyes!

I won't say any more just yet. There's probably enough in this demo for a proper First Impressions post. It would be a shame to pre-empt it.

The event runs until February 9th. I'm unclear whether that means the demos will become unavailable to download after that or whether any demos Steam punters have already installed will stop working. I suspect it just means the promotions and the livestreams will end. You'd imagine, having taken the trouble to make a demo, most developers would want to keep it in play at the very least until the game comes out and probably a lot longer than that.

We'll find out next week, I guess. By which time I hope to have at least taken a look at my five picks and maybe posted about them as well.

I Go Shopping

In what could all too easily be seen as some kind of excercise in wilful self-parody following this recent post, touching heavily as it did on my inability or unwillingness either to make or follow plans, this morning I sat down at my PC fully intending to play Black Desert, only to find myself spending nearly three hours shopping for clothes in EverQuest instead. 

All I meant to do was pick up the Overseer rewards I'd failed to collect the evening before because I got wrapped up in Guild Wars 2's Lunar Festival. First doing it then writing about it. All I meant to do in EQ was grab the loot, set the new missions and log out. Five minutes, tops.

Only it just so happened that when I logged in I spotted there were well over two hundred people trading in the Bazaar. Of late, numbers have been down, sometimes as low as a hundred and fifty. I haven't seen the count go over two hundred since well before Christmas. 

I don't really know why it's been quiet on the trading floor but I suspect it may be because when a new expansion comes out people have better things to do than afk in the Bazaar. Not everyone has an alternate account set up just to trade and people want to get out there and play the new content. Also expansions create shake-ups and the market takes a while to adjust. Maybe some people just prefer to let prices settle before jumping in. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, it seemed like a good time to go shopping. The ever-growing pile of platinum I've been adding to since autumn has been burning a hole in my pocket for weeks and there's always the prospect of bargains when an expansion starts to shake out.

In EverQuest, of course, nothing's ever that simple. What might have been a few minutes' browsing and buying turned into a full morning of research. It very nearly turned into an epic excursion into the frozen wastes of Velious, the new, high-level one where a solo player even at the level cap most likely has a life expectancy measured in microseconds.

I wouldn't know from experience just how dangerous it might have been. I have, as yet, managed to avoid finding out for myself. The furthest I've ventured is the safe camp at the entrance to 2019's Torment of Velious. For a while there this morning it seemed like there was a chance I might be making the trek across Eastern Wastes to Crystal Caverns but fortunately sanity prevailed. 

To cut a very long and convoluted story short, after about an hour or so of research I was able to establish that:

1. My unsubscribed Magician can wear Torment of Velious Tier One armor
2. ToV T1 armor patterns are tradeable
3. They're cheap to buy in the Bazaar right now
4. The items you need to combine inside them to make the finished armor can be bought from NPCs
5. One of the items is for sale in Plane of Knowledge
6. The other is for sale in Crystal Caverns
7. That item is also tradeable
   
8. A couple of enterprising players have thought to buy up a bunch of said vendor-sold items in Crystal Caverns and put them up for sale in the Bazaar
9. And they haven't gouged the price much at all.

I'm aware that some players in every game see the re-selling of vendor-sold items via the broker or auction house as tantamount to explotation. I've even know developers to try to put a stop to it. I have always found that to be a very short-sighted view. 

Yes, it can be a scam or a rip-off, paricularly when the price is jacked up by orders of magnitude or the items are extremely easy to find on vendors. In many games, though, the saving in time, effort and especially risk that re-selling provides fully justifies the practice. Far from being vilified as exploitation it ought to be welcomed as a form of community service.

 

In this case one of the vendors was re-selling the 25k item for 30k, a mark-up I was more than willing to pay for the convenience of not having to run half-way across Norrath. Not to mention the inevitable painful and humiliating series of deaths that often come with breaking trail in any new high-level zone.

I scooped up enough to make a full set of visible armor. Or I would have if I could have counted up to eight. Then I made the armor. Or I would have if I'd had a spare inventory space for the conatainer. What with having to go back to the first trader three times, then to five different traders for the best-priced patterns, then to yet another because one guy actually repriced the pattern I was going to buy as I was standing in front of him, then having to log in my own trader to swap out all the trade goods and materals my Mage was carrying to make space for the combines, the whole thing took quite a while.

It was worth it. When I was done not only had the Magician's stats taken a significant step up but for the first time in as long as I can remember she was looking pretty much how I wanted her to look. For years she was stuck with a sickly green outfit that looked like a mildewed bathrobe. This last year she's been looking a lot better in red and I've been happy with that but I prefer the appearance of the Flameweaver set. It's deliciously ironic to look icy cool when you're setting the world on fire.

I didn't stop there, either. I went through every non-visible slot and checked to see if there was anything better available. I found upgrades for several slots including possibly the most important and hardest to come by of all for a Magician, an earring with the Enhanced Minion focus.

 

That alone set me back half a million platinum but it was very well worth it. The Mage's existing earring had Enhanced Minion XVIII, too low to affect the pets she can summon at 115. The new one, the only tradeable, non-prestige upgrade currently available (I checked) is EM XXI. It'll work on her current pets and also, with diminishing effects, on the first few she gets in the next expansion that comes with a level cap increase. I sincerely hope whoever's in charge of itemization will throw her another bone after that.

The only problem is the pet she has right now is so ludicrously overpowered from dozens of raid-level buffs it received when we were sitting in the Guild Lobby for weeks soaking up MGBs that any new pet she summons will be feeble by comparison, even if it's higher level. Before she goes hunting with it she'll need to spend a couple of days afk in the Pile to buff it up.

Which isn't going to be a problem because she's not going hunting any time soon. It's entirely possible she might not go hunting at all until the level cap changes because why would she? She's not going to get any upgrades that way and she certainly can't make money any faster than she's making it right now by standing around, doing nothing.

And money's just rolling in right now. By the time I'd finished shopping I'd spent around a million platinum but I'll have it all back in a couple of weeks. She already picked up a quarter of a million in takings today, when she swapped mats onto her trading partner. 

You might wonder what the point of it all is. I would, myself, if it wasn't for the simple fact that I get as much involvement and satisfaction out of upgrading her gear the way I've just described as I ever got from hunting for it. Quite possibly more.

It's not all about the killing, after all. Sometimes it's just about the dressing-up.

Push The Envelope

 

As has been mentioned many, many times before, I'm very fond of anniversary and holiday events in mmorpgs. They vary a lot but on the whole they tend to be strong on knockabout fun and light on player skill. Light-hearted quests, races, fairground-style games and lots of fireworks are the usual package. 

And of course you get presents. Really, what kind of celebration would it be without presents? And who doesn't like getting presents?

I hear you. Depends what sort of presents. Yes, it does, doesn't it? Sometimes you tear open the paper and when you see what's inside you wish they hadn't bothered. Maybe you even wish they'd just given you the money instead.

That's why the Lunar New Year Festival might be my favorite GW2 holiday. Might be. I'm not really sure. They all have something going for them but several also have quite a lot against. I can barely drag myself around the tedium of Wintersday even for a day or two and Halloween is basically Mad King's Lab until my fingers bleed.

Lunar Festival is solid entertainment. There's Dragon Ball, which I've always enjoyed, although it generally gives me neck-ache. (I have a tendency to lean sideways when I play as though that would let me see around the edge of the screen). Then there's the firecracker-lighting, which I find kind of addictive because of the crackling sounds. And then there's the race, one of the best of the holiday ones.

As an aside, it's peculiar how much I love the set-piece races in GW2 even though I despise the use of mounts in open play. I wish they'd just implemented mounts purely for racing and left it that. Or made a stand-alone racing game. I'd play it.

I thought Lunar New Year had a pretty full dance card but last year ANet added a major new attraction, the Celestial Challenge. I barely noticed it at the time. Not sure why. 

I did try it in 2020. Today, when I zoned into the instanced version of Divinty's Reach where it takes place, the memory came back to me, faintly. I'm fairly sure I only went in once or twice last time and I'm sure I didn't think much of it.

This time I stayed for three cycles of events and enjoyed almost all of them. One was bugged and two I didn't work out how to do until they were about over but other than that it was fast, furious fun. 

Even so, I'm not sure how often I'd be back if it wasn't for those rewards, becasue, you see, the best thing about Lunar Festival compared to all the others is it gives you cash money up front. All the festivals in GW2 offer great potential for making money but it usually involves selling things you get to other players. In this one you can make money selling to NPCs.

I won't go into the full details but the short version is you buy envelopes from an NPC, you open them, then you sell the "trash" items you get, back to the same NPC if you like. If you're very, very unlucky you might lose about 10% of your stake, although you'll always easily make that back on selling the other stuff you got to other players on the Trading Post, so there's really no risk at all. It's definitely not gambling.

To make it even safer, the envelopes are tradeable. If you want, you can sell them to other players. You can probably make more money that way in the early days of the festival than you can by opening them. After the feeding frenzy dies down, it's the other way around. I used to sell the envelopes for the first few days then open the rest but I have more gold than I need these days and opening them is a lot more fun.

Almost always I'll make a small profit. Sometimes I might make lot more. Over the course of the whole event I generally make at least a couple of hundred gold, a significant windfall in GW2's economy.

The amount you can make is limited by a daily limit on how many envelopes you can buy: eight. Eight is the magic number. Literally. It's considered lucky in China and Tyria's Lunar New Year is really nothing but Chinese New Year with a fancy hat on.

You can increase the yield by doing various events, dailies and so on. That gives you tokens which allow you to buy extra envelopes, and at a cheaper price too, although there's a daily limit to how many of those you can buy as well. 

Every year I buy my permitted eight envelopes on all three of my accounts but in the past I've never bothered trying to earn enough tokens to buy the extras. This year that might be about to change. I discovered the Celestial Challenge hands tokens out like candy. 

That's why I did the full cycle three times this afternoon and it's why I'll most likely do quite a few more rounds before the holiday ends. I wouldn't do it if the events were a pain but since they're both easy and fun it seems silly to snub the event altogether.

Even so, I imagine the novelty will wear off quite fast. The Celestial Challenge is a decent addition to the program but it's no Mad King's Lab. 

Probably just as well.

Donkey Ride

It very much looks as though I'm playing Black Desert again. That wasn't in any plan I'd made. Not that I make plans. Okay, I sort of do, a little. In my head. I don't go so far as to write them down or make blog posts out of them like February Goals: 2021 or February 2021 Gaming Goals or February Goals: Shaking Things Up. 

I could link to a whole lot more like those, not to mention all the ones where people review how things went last month, like Time To Loot Journal: January  or January In Review And Raiding. (Funny how no-one ever does "Gaming Goals: My Quarterly Report" posts. It's always either by month or by year. I wonder why that is?). 

Apologies to all the many blogs I could have linked to in these opening paragraphs but didn't. Thing is, there are a lot. We'd be here all day.

Sometimes I do knock together a post along the lines of Games I've Been Playing - January 2021 where I ramble about... well, about the games I've been playing. I don't usually name a month, though, And let's be honest, most of my posts are me rambling on about games I've been playing so it wouldn't serve much purpose to draw attention to the fact.

 

There have been a few times when I've put up something like Games For 2021. When I've actually had specific games I've been looking forward to, that is. Most of the potential candidates that come to mind right now have been pending for so long there hardly seems much point mentioning them again. Remind me: how many years has Camelot: Unchained been in development now? 

Dragging myself bodily back to somewhere within spitting distance of the point, as I said at the top of the post, Black Desert is once again a game I can say that I'm playing. I played yesterday. For several hours. 

I played two mmorpgs for several hours each yesterday, in fact, and Black Desert was the second. The first was Guild Wars 2. Specifically, World vs World. 

Oi! Put that mini away, noob!

 

I don't mention it much because there's not a lot to say about it and almost nothing that's of any interest to anyone outside the game. Certainly nothing I post about it here is ever going to get picked up by the gaming press as happened to Wilhelm recently.   

Even so, GW2's World vs World is undergoing what seems like a major resurgence. It might have something to do with half the planet being under a form of house arrest. Possibly it's because ArenaNet have been so busy with behind-the-scenes work on the upcoming expansion they haven't found time to mess about with the rules for months, meaning players have finally been able to settle into a rhythm. Who knows?

On a personal level it definitely has a lot to do with the links the servers I play on have pulled these last couple of rounds. Mrs Bhagpuss and I have both been very impressed with what we've seen of the Sea of Sorrows WvW community. If there's one thing the whole server linking system has proved beyond a doubt it's that, at least in large-scale PvPvE environments, server culture is very real. 

About as far as I usually get in a week.

Playing with SoS is like going back in time. The game feels almost like it did five years ago. Scouts are valued, everyone cares about the match score, Commanders respond to calls. All the stuff that made playing worthwhile, which endless tinkering with the form by ANet, along with their apparent policy of creative neglect, did its best to destroy; that's back. 

Also, having hordes of battle-crazed Aussies rampaging around the maps every day from my breakfast-time until well after lunch as I'm sat here at home with not much of any importance to do has been a real boon. And their rivalry with other Aussies on different servers is always hilarious. I can't help but wonder how many of them know each other out of game.

I've played so much WvW the last few days that by the time I logged out on Monday I was already into the gold rewards for the week. Usually it's as much as I can do to make it to the end of bronze over the full match. I might get as far as platinum this week, something that can't have happened for a year or more.

When I was done with that I had a think about what I wanted to play next and it turned out be Black Desert. I felt a bit guilty for dropping all the other mmorpgs I thought I was going to be concentrating on but no plan survives contact with a passing fancy, as the saying goes. Well, that's how it goes around our house at any rate. Not to mention I didn't have a plan in the first place.

So I played BDO for about three hours, which these days counts as a long session for me. I don't really do those all-day marathons any more. And by played I mostly mean "rode around on my donkey taking screenshots".  That wasn't planned, either, although it sure as eggs was predictable.

You've heard the expression "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it"?

 

Here's how it happened. I was reading and replying to the comments on my last post about Black Desert when I noticed the screenshot I'd used at the top showed my Shai sitting on a donkey. As the very helpful comments by Seanas and Mailvaltar reminded me, there was a lot about the game I didn't know, but it also occurred to me there was a lot I'd forgotten and one of those things was that I used to own a donkey. Maybe I still did?

I spent a good while checking my skills and looking through my bags in the hope of finding an ability or an item to call my faithful steed to my side. Nothing. I did a bit of googling and that didn't help much, either. Finally it occurred to me that maybe Black Desert might be something like Fallen Earth, where mounts either have to stay in the world or be stabled. 

I'd passed some stable or other on the way into town. I went to check in with the stable hand and there was my good old donkey. I'd even named him, although why I'd chosen to call him Cardew is beyond my capacity to imagine, let alone recall. 

Old Card was still level one but the three other mounts I could see were stabled in other towns and I couldn't figure out how to fetch them to me, if that's even possible. But things were slowly coming back to me. Didn't mounts level up just from being ridden around? Maybe I should just get Card out, trot him up and down the road for a while, see what happened.

Literally the only thing on the road slower than me - another donkey.

 

So I did. Well, once I'd managed to point him in the right direction. Turning a donkey in BDO is like turning a supertanker. The inertia is off the scale. God knows what that stable guy's been feeding him all these years but he seems to have put on several tons in weight.

Once I'd gotten him moving I started putting some more recovered knowledge into practice. I'd been reading up on how to take screenshots and I'd been going through all of the keyboard settings and options, trying to figure out this and that. Particularly how to switch on autorun.

The upshot was that I spent what felt like an hour or so cantering cross country on roads and dirt tracks with the UI switched off. All I had to do was twitch the mouse to the left or right once in a while. Other than that I just sat back and watched as though I was at the movies.

With the donkey going at a fair clip it seemed nothing could react fast enough to do me much damage. I got shot at by undead archers and a few orcs tried to chase me but by the time most things had registered my presence I was already vanishing over the horizon.

If this was Fallen Earth there'd be ants eating that parked horse.

 

I took a lot of screenshots and veered off the road into the bushes many times as I tried to figure out how to swing the camera around so I could get shots of something other than my Shai's boomerang and bouncing backside. Never did figure that out.

Eventually I ended up in Heidel, having taken the extremely very long and exceptionally scenic route. It took me about a twentieth of the time to ride back to Velia where I'd started, this time sticking to the main road. 

Along the way I was passed by just about everything other than another heavily laden donkey and few people on foot. Twice someone overtook me at speed on what looked like a grounded pegasus, a horse with wings that remained solidly earthbound. Once, some other creature flashed by so quickly it vanished in a blur before I could tell what it was. Another time, I saw someone riding a small elephant.

The most surprising thing to me was how clearly I remembered so much of the landscape. Even though it must be years since I passed through most of these places, not only did I remember what I'd done when I was there last but more often than not I found myself correctly anticipating where I would arrive next. Couldn't recall the names of any of them but I had a fair idea what sort of places they were, what creatures roamed or hunted there, whether it was safe to stop or better to ride hard and keep my head down, things like that.

Hey, Dopey! Where's the rest of your dumb crew?

When I eventually logged out Cardew was well into level eight. I went back and read most of the posts I wrote about Black Desert, when I first played it five years ago. Several things struck me, not least just how much I'd written about the game back then. Also how much time I must have spent playing it. 

I'd forgotten but it seems I played it almost exclusively for a solid month before dropping back to sporadic visits and then stopping for a couple of years. There's mention of having put in more than a hundred hours in that first month alone, although it is in the context of discussing just how much of that time I spent afk, fishing or riding, with the game minimized while I played GW2.

I also made quite a lot of how great a game it was for pure exploration and how the game parts almost got in the way of the worldliness of it all. It's no wonder that even after all those hours the highest any of my characters reached was the mid-twenties. Clearly I spent most of my time sightseeing.

It's too early to say if that will happen again. I do know that a vast amount of new territory has been added since I played before. There must be an astonishing amount to see out there. I'm guessing that most of it will be desperately dangerous for a low-level character to visit, so unless I plan on seeing everything from the back of a speeding donkey, I'm guessing I probably will have to concentrate a little more on typical character progression, at least for a while.

Maybe I'll see how many of those xp bonuses I can stack. Make a stab at getting into the fifties so I can go exploring farther afield. Possibly try to do it on one of the PvP-disabled seasonal servers so I don't have to think about being ganked as I lollygag. 

Hmm. That's begining to sound dangerously like a plan. 

Probably better just wing it.

January Songs

 

Hey, ho! Another month. 

Here at home, the days all blur. If it wasn't for the weather we could be on Mars. 

We had snow. Just a couple of hours but it lay for days. We went walking in the woods. Sun on the white powder glittered and sparked. Pale winter blues and greys. It was good.

But mostly it rains. It rains and the fog comes in. Nothing to do, nothing to say.

It's fine. Time passes.

As I write January, has five days left to run. Most of the tale's been told but there could yet be a twist. Let's set to. We'll block in the ending, fill when it comes.

December Song - George Michael - Because who doesn't love a schmaltzy Christmas song in February? It has a charming video. Maybe that'll carry.

Cheers, Then - Bananarama - George Michael followed by Bananarama? What is this? The Simon Bates show? Oh, let's not be cynical. Let's just gaze through the glass at another time, another world. I never paid Bananarama much mind when they were around. Maybe I could have. Those harmonies remind me of the best band ever, Dolly Mixture. A little. Makes me wistful for another timeline, one where my favorite band received the success and recognition they deserved. Can I go there, just for a while?

Disco Potential - Pet Shop Boys - Here's a B-Side (remember those?). I'd never heard it before. Much harder than the A-Sides. Right kind of drugs, this must have been a real floor-filler. Then, life's all about the right kind of drugs, isn't it?

Forever Looping - Toyen Airport - Enough with the big names. About time we had someone no-one's ever heard of, least of all me. The rest of their stuff, the little I could find, is deliciously glam-stompy but this is a fine slice of dreampop, set against a backdrop of rivers and rails somewhere in Portugal. I think I may have been there. I could have absolutely sworn I once set a very similar holiday video to Stereolab's legendary roof-raiser French Disko and posted it on my YouTube channel but there's no sign of it now. Damn these timeline shifts! I'm almost sure I'm on the wrong one.

Gotta Get My Disco Shoes On - Disco Shoes - Meta-Cassette - The band formerly-known as Jipsy Magic, apparently. Can't imagine what made them change it.

Cat Class - Stray Cat Strut - Stray Cats - Brian Setzer and the lads, looking all of twelve years old on their breakout hit from before the dawn of time. 1981. Same thing. "I got cat class, and I got cat style". Don't we all?

Sunrise  - Pulp - The band channel the Velvets while Jarvis channels Ian Curtis. Mesmeric. Of course, with a  generic title like "Sunrise" there were plenty of contenders. Could have had UNKLE's dreamy, trancey Sunrise (Always Comes Around) or my mother's old favorites, Uriah Heep, whose histrionic prog still sounds embarrassingly good to me. Jarvis just edges it with his "dancing".

A Little Backbone - Danger - Rowlene -Something new for a change. I have nothing to say about it. Other than I like it.

Sing Me A Song - T. Rex - I guess there's nothing by Marc I don't at least like and I'm a pretty committed fan of his later work, the stuff no-one really rated at the time, but even I'd be stretching a point to claim this one was much more than filler. Someone thought it was strong enough to make a theme tune for the boppin' elf's stab at becoming a children's television favorite, though. Curious as to how that went? Here's the first episode in full. You'll need to hold your nerve to get through. Different times, different world. Can't say I'd want it back.

Last Days of Disco - Yo La Tengo - One of those bands whose name keeps coming up in the suggestions next to other things I watch but whose links I never click. I'm guessing they're from New York. They certainly sound like they are. (Cue FX: man looking something up on the internet...) Oh, New Jersey. Close. Looking at their extensive Wikipedia entry it appears there may be a considerable gap in my musical education. Yes, another one.

Amateur Cartography - Aside - The Weakerthans - "The navel-gaze of twenty-somethings everywhere. A song about change, growth, and reluctant acceptance" or so it says on Genius.com. Accurate, although it's a better song than that suggests, or a better lyric, anyway. The tune's a bit by the yard, it's true. Old people go on and on about how terrible it is to be a teenager but the teens are filled with optimism (and anger). It's the twenties that come steeped in existential angst and self-loathing. I'd rather be fifteen again than twenty-five, although obviously I'd take whatever I was offered.

I Talk About Sleeper - Sleeper Town - The Sleepwalkerz - A post about Sleeper with their name in the title, only it's a line from a song by a band with a similar name and they're singing about themselves. Yeah, probably shouldn't have done that.

We Appreciate Power /s - We Appreciate Power - Grimes - And I shouldn't have appended that /s, either. But, oh, this is good! I played it a bunch of times after I found it for this post. I have not been paying enough attention to Grimes, it seems.

Maybe We'll Love It - Chemtrails Over The Country Club - Lana del Rey - Of course we'll love it. It's Lana. The original post has the official version and the lyrics so let's have something different. And, boy, are there plenty to choose from! Hundreds and hundreds, take your pick. Lyrics in a dozen languages, metalhead reactions, hour-long loops, acoustic covers, psychoanalysis and, inevitably, a conspiracy theorist explaining the hidden illuminati symbolism in the video. What, guys? Moved on from Poppy now she's gone metal?

This one's in something called 8D Audio which apparently "uses the principles of binaural recording to trick our brains into thinking that sounds are coming from different places in three-dimensional space". And, um, it does, too. Try it with headphones.

Into The Light - SNOG - Sounds like the guy from the Tindersticks reading some of his teenage poetry in an end of the pier amusement arcade, while Ken Hensley tries out some runs for the next Heep album on the crazy-house organ in the background. I kinda liked it...

A Hero Comes Along - Hero - Camp Claude - "These days are getting weirder". Yeah, and that was 2016, guys. How little you knew.

The Way We Were - so many choices. I went with Beyoncé but it could have been Barbra in the movie.  I guess that's the original although the Gladys Knight version is the one I remember. Stylistically, they all tend to blend into one. I was hoping for some disco from Donna but she plays it disappointingly straight. It takes Vic and Bob to bring the disrespect. Doesn't it always? 

Cruel Garrison - Pit Viper - 10,000 Maniacs - Oh, god. Yet another of those bands I ought to have been listening to all these years but somehow never have. It's starting to get embarrassing now. I actually wanted to use FX by Pedicab, which has the line "Malapit lang sa Garrison Buong taon kitang iniisip" ("Just near Garrison I've been thinking about you all year") but I couldn't make it work.

I Run Missions - The Sleeper - Prime Minister Pete Nice & Daddy Rich - January was Sleeper month here at Inventory Full, in case you hadn't noticed. Also, contender for best band name ever.

Cab It Up - The Fall - (Live) - That keyboard riff! From the mindbending I Am Curious Orange/ I Am Kurious Oranj collab with dance legend Michael Clark. Michael! Michael! The world is stranger than it can be.

Who Has The Choice? - Smarty - Lana del Rey - Or Lizzy Grant, if you prefer. Let me tell you, it took some doing to find a video for this that I felt was both visually arresting and that I was willing to draw attention to on this blog. Even the wonderful Mermaid Motel, I was like, nuh uh, don't think so. This one's inspired, though.

Learn From Experience - Half Life - Swans - Oh, so it's "Swans" now,  is it? With no definite article. Very grown-up. Did anyone ever call them that? I saw them, back when they were transitioning from their brain-damaging illegal subsonics period to the folky stuff and we definitely called them The Swans. But then we called Ramones "The Ramones", too. Did anyone ever call the Ramones just "Ramones"? I don't think so.

I Think I'm Gonna Let My Subscription Slide -  Eleutheria - Jason Webley - What are the chances, eh? People will write songs about anything. And then you listen to it and it's a perfectly pleasant if somewhat miserabalist piece of country-folk until halfway through, when the insanity arrives.

Walkin' With The Beast - The Gun Club - Here I am again, being too clever for my own good. I could just have used a line from one of the countless songs Phil Spector produced or even wrote but no, I have to get fancy. Phil had an obsession with guns, people were scared of working with him but he could get you places, it felt like dancing with the devil...dancing with the devil, walking with the... oh, wait! The Gun Club!  Jeffrey Lee Pierce comes across so scary yet he was actually a really nice guy, so everyone says. A real teddy bear to work with. And Spector... wasn't. I don't just throw this stuff together, y'know. Shame the good stuff all just happens in my head.

Around And Around - Spin Around - Josie and the Pussycats - Okay, you got me. I was thinking of the Chuck Berry classic. Well, the Stones' cover. But who wants to be listening to genuine rock and roll when you could be listening to ersatz pop music? Not me, that's for frickin' sure! It is slightly weird seeing these Pussycats when I'm used to seeing the ones in Riverdale but there's no such thing as the wrong pussycat.

Dancing By The Pool - It's a Rave-Up - Reverend Horton Heat - I had the title before I went looking and I was about certain I remembered a song of just that name. Only there weren't any. It's worryingly possible I might have been thinking of Dire Straits' Twistin' By The Pool, in which case I'd need to hand myself in to the authorities for a brisk spell of cultural re-education. Fortunately I managed to scrabble this one together although I can't say I give it much credence either.

Climb Higher - Moshi Moshi - Poppy - I find Poppy problematic now in a way I never did before. When she was freaking out the internet and half-convincing even quite rational people she might be a new form of android, every odd nuance seemed easily explained either by the role she was playing or her alien/robotic heritage, depending on your stance. Now we know something of the true nature of the That Poppy project it's all too easy to read something darker in those blank stares to camera, those deadened, repetitive movements. Equally, are we really seeing true freedom's glow in Poppy as metal bondage dominatrix?  Is that who she wants to be or is she playing us? She was always playing us. Even when she was being played. If she was. Oh, I don't know. 

The modern world is hard. Musically, though, I prefer the old stuff to the new. I think that's just a matter of taste. Are we still owning that?

Let's Play Musical Chairs (Black Desert Edition) - Sofi Needs A Ladder - Deadmau5 - I just think "Sofi Needs A Ladder" is a magnificent name for a song. I couldn't figure out why the hell it was called that, though, so I did some reading and sadly it turns out Deadmau5 had an instrumental called "You Need A Ladder" (Because why? Who cares? Instrumental.). The story is, vocals had to be added to get past some copyright infingement issue and Deadmau5's pal Tommy Lee (him from Mötley Crüe) just happened to be around with his girlfriend, Sofi, who also just happens to be a singer of considerable experience so she stepped up. I'm guessing the lyrics are hers but who knows. There's nothing in them about a ladder, I can tell you that much. Sometimes knowing stuff doesn't make things better, it makes them worse. Poppy said that.

Just Play That Music - Just Play Music - Big Audio Dynamite -Strangely undervalued band, B.A.D. Even at the time they never seemed to get the attention you'd imagine they might but then the legend of the Clash didn't really start to pick up traction until the '90s. These days it would be easy to be fooled into believing Mick, Joe and the boys were always second only to the Rolling Stones in the Greatest Rock & Roll Band Of All Time stakes but I remember it very differently. And Big Audio Dynamite? Not taken seriously at all. A bit of a joke, even. Well, they've aged better than the Clash to my ears.

Back In The Desert - Decadence - The Church - If we're talking about undervalued, underrated, unappreciated bands, the Church are A-listers. They have everything and it never gets them anywhere. Thirty years, twenty-five albums and as their Wikipedia entry puts it "mainstream success has proved elusive". I keep forgetting they exist and have to be reminded. This is a cover, by the way, Kevin Ayers tribute to Nico, written long before she died and yet still managing to sound like an elegy. His original is great. This is better.

And that's it for another month. Back in March with more top pop faves. Just have to write some posts first.