If I Had A Hammer

It's relatively rare for me to crave any specific item in an mmorpg. As a rule, I'm usually content to make do with whatever comes to hand. It makes me largely immune, or at least strongly resistant, to those kinds of temptations and obsessions that lead players to spend more time or money than they feel comfortable with as they try to get that one specific object of desire.

Back when the genre was young, camping rare spawns for rarer drops was something people both did and complained about doing with equal fervor. I was mostly happy to leave them to it. I had a rough rule of three, meaning if I was interested in something I'd give it three tries before crossing it off my list. And that was only if it was reasonably easy to camp to begin with.

Similarly, I've never been much of a one for long drawn-out quests. If you can't get it finished in one session, two or three hours tops, is it really a good use of your time? If it's entertaining or amusing or fun, then yes, of course, carry on as long as that stays true, but if it's a chore and a pain then why bother? Gaming is supposed to be a pleasure not a punishment, after all.

The advent of token systems, whereby you do more routine, regular activities, such as killing mobs or completing tasks in order to earn credit with NPC vendors willing to sell you the kind of thing boss mobs might drop, did little to change my mind. I first came across such a mechanism in Dark Age of Camelot's Darkness Falls dungeon, where it was widely recieved with rapture and wonder. I was very sniffy about it. If I'd wanted to go shopping, well I'd be down at the mall, wouldn't I, not sitting at home playing an mmorpg.

In time, of course, the mall came to me. Cash shops became an established part of almost every game, whether or not you had to buy a subscription. Are there any mmorpgs left, Free to Play, Buy to Play, Freemium or Sub, that don't have any kind of cash shop at all? I can't immediately think of any.

The advent of real money stores inside games removed one of my two main objections: time. I couldn't say any longer that I wasn't prepared to spend hours and hours doing something I didn't really want to do just to get a pretty bauble or a useful tool. It only takes a few seconds to get a credit card out of your wallet and any time spent doing things I'd rather not have been doing had already long since been accounted for. I call it "going to work".

One of the biggest impacts of the introduction of cash shops to the hobby was to make it clear to me just how very low a value I put on imaginary objects. I routinely spend the same small amounts of money in real life on pointless, trivial, transitory pleasures that I would never contemplate spending in games. 

It turns out I don't want most virtual stuff at virtually any price... unless it's being given away "free", of course, at which point, apparently, I'll jump through as many hoops as you care to hold in front of me. But that's a different post altogether and anyway, I'm not here to psycho-analyze myself, attractive a proposition as that may be.

No, I'm here to say that for all my professed lack of interest, motivation and enthusiasm for both the methods and the rewards, there are exceptions. Sometimes I do see something I absolutely must have. To be clear, even then it also needs to be something I feel I can get without doing anything I positively dislike doing or spending money I feel is disproportionate to the enjoyment I'm likely to receive. But there are things I'm prepared to make more of an effort than usual to lay my hands on.

A few days ago, pretty much by chance, I happened across one such in Guild Wars 2 and it was in the most unlikely place: Super Adventure Box.

 

I'm not much of a fan of SAB. Belghast posted about the 8-bit emulation embedded in a 3D mmorpg the other day, saying "as much as I thought I would enjoy it… I am not really feeling it", which is not too far from how the event affects me, when it rolls around each year. It's extremely impressive that someone was able to build this other game inside GW2 and I have had some fun playing around with it but it's not really what I came to mmorpgs in general or GW2 in particular to do.

There was a fair chance I might not have gone to Rata Sum to see what was happening at all this year. Not much changes in SAB year to year and even if it does I can't usually see it. In all the time the event's been running I've never got further than the end of World One, Zone Three and I've never beaten the final World One boss, King Toad. I Gave up trying long ago.

I can look at the stock on the vendors, though. That's something I can manage. And as I said, although I usually give most things a pass, once in a while I'll spot something that really makes me feel the quickening of desire.

Nothing like that happened when I scrolled through the goods on the regular vendors. I'm not all that keen on the look of most Super Adventure Box gear and anyway I have a bunch of unopened SAB weapons boxes in the bank from the World vs World SAB Reward track. 

I did want the boom box when it appeared years ago, enough to make a considerable effort to get the necessary baubles to buy it, but even then I've always been happy with the basic model. It's not like I want to be able to play the tunes for the pleasure of listening to them. So long as I can see my character running around like an extra in a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, I'm good.

This year, though, there was a new vendor. A kodan, no less. Why a seven foot tall talking bear would be in Rata Sum at all, let alone hanging out next to Moto and his magic box, beats me and the spurious rationale the bear offers is scarcely convincing. Nevertheless, there he is, selling three weapons he claims to have crafted.

How a kodan came to craft weapons that look like rejected prototypes from some illegal, underground lab staffed by renegade Canthan bot-makers and Inquest weaponsmiths is something we'd probably best leave to the official reports. I suspect the bear is either lying or deranged, more likely the latter since derangement seems to be an ethnic Kodan trait.

Whatever the provenance, all three weapons are above average in terms of aesthetic desirability and one, the Hammer, is among the best I've seen in the game, ever. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it, even though I don't have a single character that regularly uses a hammer. Always providing it wasn't going to feel too much like hard work to get it, obviously.

The simple way to get the weapons is to buy them from the bear. They cost thirty Bauble Bubbles and four gold each. Someone who's good at SAB could get thirty BBs in a couple of days just by running the event as normal. Even I can get five or six a day at minimal effort. I already had seven in the bank from last year and just a couple of sessions after I decided to get the hammer I have sixteen.

I also have the hammer. 

 

I didn't buy it. I got it as a drop. If you talk to the kodan he explains that's a possibility but I learned it from Mrs Bhagpuss. I linked her the hammer in guild chat when I discovered it and she said "Oh, yes, I've got that one". 

After a bit of to and fro about how she'd come by it, during which she first thought it had been from the WvW SAB track and then corrected herself to say it was a drop in WvW, from a tower boss, we finally worked out it came from a Super Loot Bag, the reward for doing one of the new SAB achievements. It's all in the patch notes, which, unusually, I had neglected to read in full.

That achievement gives three bags per day, one for each of the first three Champion mobs you kill anywhere in Tyria. All tower and keep supervisors in WvW are Champions, which is how Mrs Bhagpuss came to get hers. Some World Bosses also count. I got one from the Shaman at the Maw and three from the pre-event at Jungle Wurm, for example.

Regular champions, of which there are probably hundreds, work just as well. I've been soloing the Champion Troll in Frostgorge for one of my daily drops, when I haven't had the patience to wait for the Wurm.

The Retro-Forged Weapon Chest is a rare drop from the bags but not that rare. I got one on my third day of trying. Of course it was on the wrong account but still. 

And I do have a character on that account who can and quite possibly should use it. He's one of my Engineers and I took the trouble to spend the points to make him into a Scrapper back in Heart of Thorns, meaning he can wield a hammer. He never goes anywhere or does anything but he could always start.

He also has a well-defined, pirate-themed look that I designed for him many years ago. A glitching, technicolor magitech hammer doesn't entirely go with it. I may have to give him a full makeover because the hammer is that good. It really is.

The character I want it for is my Elementalist. The new End of Dragons elite specialization for her class is the Catalyst and the new weapon that goes with that class is the hammer. 

I'm not proposing to play her as a catalyst, heavens no! She's a staff Tempest and that's the way she's staying. The thing is, Elementalists got a second weapon slot a few years back, having been a class that didn't have one, and I have never used it. The universe is just conspiring to put a hammer in her hand. That hammer.

I'll keep killing the champions because I would anyway. If the box drops from the achievement, all well and good. If not, a couple of SAB runs each day for a few days should see me right with the bear.

My Ele will have that hammer. And when she does she will smite the daylights out of every creature that looks at her funny. Just to make the colors fly.

Coffers, Coffins, Confidence

It's been a while since I did very much in EverQuest II. So much has happened in the first quarter of the year, what with several brand-new mmorpgs, a torrent of free single-player games and the long-awaited third expansion for Guild Wars 2, there's hardly been time. 

Before all that, I'd been playig the game pretty consistently. Through December and into January, after the last expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, arrived, I took three characters to the new level cap of 125 and completed the Tradeskill signature line three times as well. Not necessarily on the same characters.

As my posts about VoV suggested, I was very happy with the way things were going. It felt like a very solid entry in the canon, possibly even a step up - not that I'd had many complaints about any of the recent expansions. I was quite content to carry on playing. I had plans to level up three more characters and I wanted to finish the Adventure Signature line on at least one of them.

The only reasons it never happened were the aforementioned distractions that pulled me away in other directions, since when I've barely been back. I still haven't completed that Adventure questline, something which irks me a little. It's not the first time I've taken a break before getting to the end of the storyline but it's not my usual pattern.

Just because I let my attention drift doesn't mean to say nothing's been happening in Norrath. Very much the opposite, in fact. Virtual life goes on whether you're there to see it or not. 

In mid-January, Daybreak surprised everyone by publishing a detailed roadmap for the entire year. Then they surprised everyone even more by sticking to it.

Yesterday, Head of Studio, Jenn Chan, issued a Producer's Letter filling out some more detail on what EQII players can expect in the second quarter of 2022. Among other things, Jenn gave us the skinny on this month's Game Update 119, EQII's first major post-expansion content drop of the year. 

It's called "Coffers and Coffins", from which I infer... nothing, really. Undead, maybe? Vampires? It looks substantial, with "content for all playstyles", EQII-speak for solo, heroic, raid and tradeskill. There are "new heroic dungeons, new collections, raids and tradeskill content", which is what I just said, except for the pluralization of "dungeons" and "raids". If there really are more than one of each, that will be impressive.

There's an open beta already running so I went over to the beta forums to see what people were saying. I guess I could have made a beta character to go test the new stuff for myself but don't want the full spoiler experience and anyway, if I can't find the time to play the actual game...

There's not a lot of feedback yet. The update only went into beta yesterday. What I can confirm is that the one new dungeon up for testing is called Merchant's Den, that it begins with a quest from Forlorn Gist, the final open-world map in the current expansion, and that to get the quest you'll need to "have completed "Visions of Vetrovia: Vacrul Intentions" or have "VoV Flag: Castle Vacrul Dungeons Unlock".

Since this is the exact same step of the Adventure Signature line that stymied me back at the beginning of the year and which led to me concentrating on tradeskills instead, I'm going to have to get my act together and finish it. I had been entertaining some hopes of using the coming update to gear up before going back to try again but it looks like that's a non-starter.

Although maybe not. Also included in the update is the very hotly antiicipated (At least by me.) Overseer Season Four. The Overseer system, referred to by Jenn Chan, entirely accurately, as a "mini-game", isn't to everyone's taste but I really like it. What's more, I've done really well out of it, too. 

The new season comes with "some much-requested changes" but personally I'd be more than happy to get the same version as Season Three, only with rewards updated to match the current expansion and new level cap. Last year, Overseer rewards allowed me to upgrade pretty much all the gear my Berserker had equipped from the Signature Questline, some of it quite substantially. If that happens again this year maybe I will be able to clear that pesky instance without too much cursing after all.

As well as the update, there's another beta running right now, this one for the promised 64-bit upgrade. I took a look at the forums for that, too, and the feedback there seems very positive, with most commenters mentioning notable improvements in the way the game runs and some even saying it improves the graphics.

Going back to the Producer's Letter and the Roadmap it follows, we are indeed getting yet another special rules server, even though we only had one a few weeks ago. The new one's called Varsoon and it's going to use the now-familiar Time Limited Expansion format, only with the "Free Trade" ruleset, which I think means almost all No Drop flags have been removed and you can buy and sell just about anything. I might have got that wrong but the F.A.Q. that's coming "soon" will no doubt clear it up if I have.

Finally and perhaps most intriguingly of all, the Letter mentions an upcoming "new spin on live events", by which I think Jenn means what we normally call "holidays". She elaborates: "We are happy to announce that Tinkerfest, Scorched Sky Celebration, and Oceansfull Festival will be receiving some new updates, including some heroic dungeon content for each event, as well as new and exciting rewards that can be earned along the way." My emphasis.

When we got a full dungeon instance for this year's Chronoportal event I thoroughly enjoyed it but commented "It does seem like an awful lot of work for something that's only going to be available for two weeks a year." Well, apparently that's how we roll, now. 

A new heroic instance for each of the three summer festivals, presumably including a solo version too, although it's not specifically mentioned, is one heck of an impressive effort. I know I always talk up Daybreak's ability to add content despite having a relatively small team but this is taking it to new levels.

We'll have to wait and see a) if it actually happens and b) if it's any good when it does but on the evidence of the year so far I see no reason to doubt either of those things will turn out to be true. Al I have to do now is find the time to enjoy all this unexpected benifence. It's a nice problem to have.

SteamWorld Quest: Not Dealing From A Full Deck

Last month's free Amazon Prime games included a real gem, SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamesh. I started playing it almost immediately and just finished it today. It took me a little over twenty hours to complete, playing on the default difficulty level, "Soldier", described as "A suitable difficulty for most players".

The other two are "Squire" ("Battles are easier and you'll have an easier time overall.") and Legend" ("Battles are significantly harder. Recommended for players who like an extra challenge.") If that's not enough choice, when you beat the game for the first time you can choose "New Game +", which lets you begin all over again, only with all your progress and extra cards intact. New Game + also adds a fourth difficulty, "Legend Remix" ("Battles are even harder and most foes have brand new tricks up their sleeves. The ultimate challenge".)

I really enjoyed SWQ:HoG. I'd recommend it unreservedly to anyone who likes slow, steady, unhurried gameplay and simple, clear, uninflected narrative. The characters are endearing, the art is evocative, the music is tuneful and the aesthetic is well-realised. There's no real world-building to speak of, even though it's part of a well-established I.P., but there's a surprising amount that can be inferred if you pay attention. It's skilful work.

As a game, I found the default difficulty pitched almost perfectly for both my skill level and personal taste. I haven't really played many turn-based, tactical card games other than Wizard 101, if that even counts, so I have little direct experience to draw on but I do seem to have read an awful lot of blog posts abut them. My guess is that afficinados of the form would probably want to jump straight to the Legend difficulty because if I managed to complete the game in a single run without losing more than a couple of battles throughout, it would probably feel much too easy for more experienced players.

It's not just that I was able to beat the game, more the way I was able to do it. As far as I can tell, the whole point of games like this is that you work towards acquiring a very large range of options in terms of both cards and characters so as to allow you to build teams and decks appropriate for every situation. It's supposed to be as much a tactical challenge as anything.

Didn't really work that way for me.

My team, as they were after the final battle.

It did at the beginning. There was a time, close to the start of the game, where I had few options, some of the fights were quite challenging and I had to think my way to a win. One or two of my handful of lost battles happened around then, before I'd really gotten into the swing of things. Once I got the feel of the game, though, I pretty much played the same cards and the same characters all the time and then I didn't lose at all.

By about half way through, when I'd met all the characters I was going to meet and added to them to the roster, I spent a while playing around with different line-ups just out of curiosity. You can only have three on a team for a given battle and you end up with a choice of five but although various combinations seemed to work well together, fairly soon I came to the conclusion that the original three were the best.

I benched the two later additions and did the last several chapters, including most of the bigger set-piece fights, using the classic combo of Fighter/Healer/Mage. (The two I left out roughly align to the Bard and Rogue archetypes, although less closely than the original three cleave to theirs.)

Along the way I acquired a truly overwhelming number of cards. Eighty-six to be precise. Each character can only have eight cards in their deck and you can have multiple copies of the same card. For the bulk of the game, I ended up using not just the same three characters but the same twenty-one cards.

What's more, the great majority of those twenty-one cards were ones I acquired in the first half of the game and they were almost all low-value. Cards cost from zero to four cogs to use and my deck of choice consisted of eleven no-cog cards, six one-coggers, three twos and a three. Rather than add higher-value cards I just upgraded the low ones as far as they'd go, which seemed to give far more bang for the cog.

I did go through an experimental phase in the mid-game, where I tried using some heavy-hitting three and four cog cards but I hardly ever built up the cogs to use them. Those were the other couple of times I lost a battle. Later on, I found myself regularly amassing enough cogs to cast cards like that but by then I was used to the rhythm of the low-cost cards and didn't want to change.

A really nice touch is that once you finish the game you get access to a Gallery of sketches like this and a Jukebox with all the music.

I suspect the cadence of my combat would cause most players to crack and change the deck for something more dynamic. Some of the fights lasted a long, long time. Battles lasting twenty rounds were fairly common. Some of the boss fights took twice that. I was almost an hour beating one particularly stubborn group of baddies, all of whom seemed to prefer healing to fighting.

It suited me very well. I can't abide long boss battles in mmorpgs but that's because you can't just get up and walk away when you want, to make a coffee for example or answer the door. In mmorpgs, with their real-time, always-on, live action gameplay, any individual fight that takes more than about five minutes is a bona fide pain in the backside. 

In a turn-based card battler, long fights are perfectly acceptable. The only problem with this particular game is that you can only actively save your progress at specific points, namely certain statues you have to click. The game itself saves your progress a lot more often than that but never in the middle of a fight. 

On the other hand, you can Retreat if you want, so you have a get-out clause. I only did that once and then only because I was losing. It was very near the beginning and it felt so wrong I never tried it again, even when things looked dire. And just as well, too, because I was almost always able to pull things out of the fire when it mattered.

Counter-intuitively, recovering from a bad situation got a lot easier toward the end of the game, when the fights got harder. I have an annoying disinclination in all games to use most kinds of potions or devices during combat. I carry the things around but I always feel they're there for emegencies and nothing ever feels quite emergent enough.

If I was going to play through the game again, especially on one of those harder difficulty settings (Something I have absolutely no intention of doing.) the one major change to my tactics I'd make would be to spend a lot more money on those potions, carry a lot more of them and use them a lot more freely. They are hugely overpowered and not that expensive, either.

The final few boss fights went much more easily than I expected. I put it down to two things: Blindness and Potions. 

The Blindside card, which I picked up very early on, is crazily powerful. It costs nothing to cast, is never resisted and has the effect of giving every attack made by a Blinded enemy a fifty per cent chance of missing completely. I put two Blindside cards in my Healer's deck and that meant most fights ended up feeling as if the opposing team were one or two players down almost from the start.

As for the potions, there are 25%, 50% and 100% heals and resurrections that bring a character back at 50% health. There aren't any limits on how many you can have or use other than how much money you want to spend and they aren't that expensive. 

In the event, it turned out I'd been wise to be cautious about using them. When it came to the final two bosses I ended up needing just about every one I had. With hindsight, though, what I should have done was save all the money I wasted on upgrades for the characters I never really played and spent it on a whole lot more potions instead.

All of which suggests to me that people who really enjoy the subtleties and strategies of these kind of games would probably find SteamQuest a bit babyish. Not to mention the true fact that even now I've finished the game there are still whole rafts of information about it I probably ought to know but still don't. An embarassing amount of detail flew straight over my head. 

Even though I was quite comfortable with the gameplay, I never really understood some of the mechanics. Most of the mechanics, if I'm honest. The first few chapters are a kind of tutorial and they go over the basics well enough but I ended up not knowing much more than those basics for the whole of the game and there are lot of things the Tutorial never even mentions, let alone explains.

 It really didn't seem to make much difference.

I never worked out exactly how the cogs built up, for example, or why some cards have no cog value , others a value of zero and still others a value of "X". At no point, though, did I ever feel I needed to go look it up. Not knowing seemed to have no impact on my performance at all.

I was three-quarters of the way through the game before I realised it actually shows you how many cards your opponents can play. As for the Bestiary, where you can look up to see which creatures use what cards, what resisitances they have and other similarly helpful information, I didn't even realise it existed until the game was over.

There are plenty of other things I missed. I won't elaborate. I've embarassed myself enough. Suffice it to say, I was able to play through the entire game, very enjoyably, with the equivalent of one arm tied behind my back, both knees tied together and a patch over one eye.

I offer that as a recommendation but you can take it as a warning if you want.

Stranger Danger

That's my Blade and Soul character up there, showing of the new outfit Jeff Bezos gave her. Generous Jeff we call him around here, as well we should. 

Jeff handed out a bunch of stuff today. There was the Velvet Rope outfit on the left, suitable for any red carpet premiere event, especially when accessorized by the Velvet Rope Accessory on the right. He threw in a whole bunch of upgrade materials and buffs and suchlike, too, although I think those may have been from last month. I have nearly two dozen unclaimed gift packs in my mailbox, most of which I daren't open for fear of overwhelming my inventory.

On that thorny and hoary topic, as I was checking just how much space I had, I was surprised to find I could buy several more rows of inventory for a small amount of in-game currency, eight slots for just six silver, then another eight for a further twenty-four. 

I'm fairly sure this is new for the simple reason that I would have already bought them if wasn't. If there's one thing I never begrudge paying imaginary money for it's bag slots. I'm just sorry I had to stop at two rows. The cost ramped up heavily at the third, jumping from a few silver to over a gold. Since I've only managed to accumulate a couple of gold in all the time I've been playing that seemed like an offer I ought to refuse. For now.

I was less impressed with what Jeff had for me in Guild Wars 2, although I'm sure many would find it useful. Even the name sounds utilitarian: Convenience Set. After a bit of a struggle I got it open and out popped a whole bunch of the kind of things that already take up space in my bank. Too useful to throw away, not useful enough to, y'know, use.

Those were just the mini-gifts, anyway. Fluff and fancies. The trinkets that fly out of the cracker before you get down to the serious present-opening. Only at Jeff's house it's Christmas every month.

This April, Amazon Prime has five games to give away. I took four of them and politely declined the fifth. Whether I'll ever install them, let alone play them, is another matter. 

The one I was certain I'd never need (Or want.) was something called Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. Every single thing about that title raises red flags for me. Turnips are not amusing vegetables and anyone who thinks they are does not have a sense of humor. "Turnip Boy" is not an amusing parody of a superhero name and ditto. Tax Evasion is morally reprehensible. 

Other opinions are available but I refuse to be swayed. As the extraneous "u" in the claim that "this is a very specific brand of humour" suggests, it's a humo[u]r that appeals to a particular, self-identifying group. They know who they are and I know I am not one of them. 

Okay, I realize my having included a Bonzos' track from the mid-60s in yesterday's post severely undermines my authority here but dammit I am not one of those people!

Moving swiftly on, the other four games are three flavors of RPG ("Turn-based", "Puzzle" and "Indie".) and yet another bloody Monkey Island adventure. Seriously, how many of these things did they make? However many it was, I assume Amazon plan to throw the lot at us. I guess I'll keep taking them but I don't expect to play all of them. Or possibly any.

This one ("Monkey Island 2 Special Edition".) does at least look newer than the rest. Maybe it's a remake or whatever they call it. The others (Guild of Ascension, NanoTale -Typing Chronicles and Galaxy of Pen and Paper.) all look considerably more interesting. They're also all meta in one way or another. I do like a bit of thematic unity. I might actually try all three of them, one day.

And that's it. Except it's not.

If I hadn't happened to have read it somewhere (I think it was on NME.com.) I might have missed this month's Big Ticket Feature. It's not even mentioned on my Amazon Games page. It only appears if you click through to the "In-game content" section where all the stuff at the start of the post lives.

This month, if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can have The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for free. I know it's been around a while and eveyone who ever wanted it probably has it already but still, you'd think they might have made a bit more of it.

Then again, it does only cost £4.49 at GOG.com, which is where the link takes you if you decide to have it. Given that the cheapest of the other games this month clock in at three times that much, I guess it's not that big a deal after all.

I don't own it, though, and I've never played it. I don't like Elder Scrolls games much. Even for free, I
probably wouldn't have bothered making a GOG account just for this but as it happens I already have one... and it still works. So now, I, too, own Oblivion, like every other person who'll ever read this.

That means I have 91 games in my Amazon Games Library. That's fifteen more than I own on Steam, where, paradoxically, I own two more Amazon titles, New World and Lost Ark. There was a time when Sony Online Entertainment catered for nearly all of my gaming needs. If things go on like this, pretty soon that'll be Amazon.

I bet that's just what Jeff wants, too. One minute you're petting the puppies, the next you're in the van. That's an analogy, by the way. I'm not sugesting there really is a van. Or any puppies for that matter. There are never any puppies.

D'you know what? I have a personal anecdote about that and this post's running a bit short so I'm going to share. When I was maybe nine or ten years old, I was at a village fete not too far from where I lived. I was wandering around with my cousin (I think it was.) and we were on our own because it was the 1960s and no-one cared about stuff like that back then.

Some guy came up to us and asked us if we wanted to see some puppies. We were nine (Or ten.) Of course we wanted to see some puppies. He said to come with him so we did. 

He led us off towards the trees at the edge of the field, out of sight behind some parked vehicles. He had a van there.

And some puppies. He really did have puppies. He was trying to sell them. We played with them for a while, then we went back and found whatever adults we were nominally with and said there was a man who had some puppies in a van and could we? 

No we couldn't. And that was that. No-one told us we'd done anything we shouldn't have done. No-one ever mentioned it again. 

I told you. It was the sixties. No-one cared.

It taught me one thing that I've always remembered, though. 

Sometimes there really are puppies.

Day Of The Dog

The big news today is that we got a dog. Well, Mrs Bhagpuss got a dog. I got a dog by association. 

She's not much of a dog, yet. More like a 1:4 scale model of a dog. I was going to take some pictures but I think that's going to have to wait a while. She's asleep right now and what she mostly looks is the wool you'd get if someone sheared an extremely small sheep.

In recognition of the momentous occasion I shall once again delve into my massive folder of fun for whatever songs that mention dogs I can find that I haven't already used. If you wish, you may accompany the music by scraping the bottoms of any barrels you have handy.

I thank you.

Your Dog - Soccer Mommy

Here's one that had to sit out the Dog/Cat Deathmatch on the subs bench back in 2020. It's got a great F-bomb in the opening verse that would sit well in that post I keep talking up that I haven't gotten around to writing yet, the one where I try to make the case for creative swearing in song lyrics. I can see I'm going to use up all the good ones long before I ever get to finish the post but never fear! I'm starting to tag possibles as I find them so maybe in another couple of years I'll have enough new ones to get started.

Rattlesnakes and Dogs - Jenny Don't and the Spurs

I do like me some alt-country, especially when it rolls like a train. Add this to the long list of songs I thought I'd featured before but according to search have not. Going to be finding that more and more the longer I keep doing this sort of thing. I'll stop mentioning it soon.

Call Me Cruella - Florence and the Machine but really Now I Wanna Be Your Dog - Joel McRea (at 2.45 or thereabouts)

If you'd have told me in 1975, when I was playing my cut-out copy of the first Stooges album at ear-splitting volume and making believe I was three thousand miles away and ten years older, that one day a Russian ice dancer would be using Now I Wanna Be Your Dog as her backing music at the Winter Olympics, let alone that the version she'd be skating to would be taken from the soundtrack of a Disney movie, I think I'd probably have punched you in the face. Either that or ripped up my rock 'n' roll membership card there and then and gotten into jazz instead.

Dog Days Are Over - Florence and the Machine

If we're going to have Florence at all I guess we should have this one. I'm cheating a little in as much as this isn't the version I have on my hard drive but there are about a million videos of Flo and the band doing the dog on YouTube and this is probably one of the earliest. I never really cottoned to Florence that much, truth be told, although I like this one and Kiss With A Fist. I never really noticed how seventies she sounds. It could almost be Sonja Kristina singing there.

Jizzney - A Giant Dog

That's pretty much it for songs that mention dogs in the title but there are still a few bands that call themselves after dogs we haven't had. Or to be more accurate that we have but they were doing other songs that aren't these ones. I have no idea what "Jizzney" means and I expect I'm better off that way.

The Walk - Dog Party

One of the big, lasting claims of the punk movement was a return to the three-minute single. I was all for it at the time but these days I feel three minutes is still way too long for most songs. One of the best things about Tik-Tok (and there are a few) is that it's forcing popular perception of what counts as a song to change and fast. Get on, make your point, get off. You'd be surprised how often a minute and a half is more than enough for that. This one's 1.22 and it doesn't need to be a second longer.

Canyons of Your Mind - The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

This is either everything that was right about the 'sixties or everything that was wrong. I'll leave you to make up your own minds.

And I really, truly think that's the last time I can dredge up any more songs about dogs from what I already have. I'd better start looking for some new ones because for some reason the topic keeps coming up. I need some more songs about cats, too. And foxes. 

I'll get right on that.

Fallen London Festival Of Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 PRESS PLAY HERE!

There you go!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Honestly, This Writer Blows..."

There's a post from AI Weirdness about AI-generated April Fools' pranks in the blog roll today. It links to a another post and that post links to a website called talktotransformer.com and that goes to something called InferKit, which is a free demo. I thought it might be amusing to have it guest-write today's post.

You get 10,000 free characters a week. I set it to the maximum per attempt, one thousand, gave it a draft version of the opening paragraph above and let it roll.

The result was utterly bizarre. It was all about tennis, a detailed report of certain named players' histories and standings. I wiped that, fiddled with some settings, then tried again. This time I asked for something about video games and music and television.

This is what I got.

Hey, anyone remember years ago, it felt like years ago but was probably just 5 years ago, the long Game Boy advertisement with the creepy ringtone, the one after the title? Well, if not, it went a little something like this: "When it comes to Japanese video games, do you work to live, or die to live?"

Super Mario Land 2 Mario’s mastered everything he knew about being a Badass, you might say. But life is a bitch, you know!

Oh, that’s right, that’s what Call of Duty doesn’t get.

In this game there’s no survivors. You land on the bottom screen of the screen, and before you can use your fancy hand cannons or your righteous fists, Bowser appears on the moving screen.

“Well, well! I see someone’s pulled their dad’s minivan into my stage! How rude.” He swiftly moves to the sound effects menu: “BANG!” BOOM! BANG! BANG! “DISGUSTING!” “I HATE you!”

Oh yeah, pretty personal stuff there. Bowser’s got a thing against children, or something.

DO YOU EVER WANT TO RUN INTO MY LAWN AND TELL ME TO SHUT THE HELL UP? WHAT AM I, A GOON?

Hey, were you just listening to some bad music? Because I’m here to ensure that not only your ears, but also your joystick, are sufficiently dented by Bowser’s deathsticks.

I think Bowser would be a good foil for Ghostbusters. Think about it: a famous ghost has to contend with the ghosts of each mode’s Mario.

Excellent. Next, my friends are supposed to break into the attic level where the ghosts are congregating for protection.

THINGS ARE GETTING BIGGER, BRAINS!

Pause the movie!

It’s a very big bother trying to write all of these horror movie posters, no one can seem to keep up with the continuity. Let me put my hand up: I once saw the Shrubman family wandering through a cornfield for no reason whatsoever. And I thought I was hallucinating. But now, I can’t go downstairs in my apartment because Dr. Moreau’s trying to lure and devour me.

It really doesn’t matter what this movie does, though, as long as Dr. Moreau traps the wild toads in there too and makes all the houseboarders their dinner…
THINGS ARE GONNA GET BIG, EYEE!

I don’t think Krillin liked being psychoanalyzed. You know what, he probably liked it, so take the air horns off there.

The pace of this level is very fast: you have to punch a whole lot of ghosts in a short period of time, which is a real departure from most of the game: you’re normally sat around sipping Super Mushroom juice and reading otome.

“I can read if I wanna, thank you very much.”

Now that’s respect. In addition to the justifications your girlfriend may have given you prior, keeping a dark poster open with morbid illustrations helps out too. Can’t believe I ever fought you for this.

Cool story, bro, but did my ego really need a stroke? Haven’t you moved on to better things, like drawing stick figures while using your Daemon Powers?

Also: “We aren’t necessarily in the business of coercing people into joining our DYNAMITE TIN POT.”

What? Can’t they just go on holiday at the same time as me? Or shorten work hours so I can spend more time with them?

Honestly, this writer blows, I can’t believe it. I mean, check out this form I filled out: “I’m a complete wussy for Capcom USA’s initial English dubbing of Resident Evil 2. But give me that English dub of this sequel with the voice overs by two guys sitting in rubber doughnut chairs who were so good that their roles were immediately recast (Amadio, Anderson, Sjoklany).” You can go on as long as you want, ’cause you’re doing a poor job of proving this stuff just makes you seem like an eccentric old fart in a virtual world.

This section has about three hours of legless Mario to it. Damn straight!

I know, I understand your pain. Just get yourself one of those crutches and a note saying you tried out for Cheers and didn’t get it.

Wow, what a downer.

Right. I tried to buy Roy Mustang’s real name on an episode of Millennium Quake, but I missed the deadline. We should probably sue the...

And that's about enough of that.

To get a coherent piece long enough for a post, I cut and pasted the first thousand characters and fed it back in as the seed for the second thousand, then used the two thousand character result as the seed for the third. Each section follows on seamlessly from the one before but as you read the whole thing you can sense the degradation of logic and meaning as the AI feeds on itself.

I thought the post probably needed some illustrations so I fired up our old friend Artflow and put in a few choice phrases from the piece. The results were distinctly underwhelming so I googled "free ai image generators" and tried a few.

It wasn't much of an improvement. Or indeed any improvement. Mostly they were useless. Eventually I got one or two I was willing to use. The four-legged oyster catcher is nightmare fuel but at least there's a cute puppy.

I did think of just putting the AI-generated text and images up as a post without explanation or comment as an actual April Fool's joke but I'm not really fond of those so instead, in the zeitgeisty spirit of talking about talking about things instead of actually talking about them (I stole that from something I read yesterday. I think it was in one of the Atlantic articles. It's good, isn't it?), here's a post about April's Fools jokes that's not in itself an April Fool's joke even though it kind of is.

Enjoy!

Hey, anyone remember years ago, it felt like years ago but was probably just 5 years ago, the long Game Boy advertisement with the creepy ringtone, the one after the title? Well, if not, it went a little something like this: "When it comes to Japanese video games, do you work to live, or die to live?" Super Mario Land 2 Mario’s mastered everything he knew about being a Badass, you might say. But life is a bitch, you know! Oh, that’s right, that’s what Call of Duty doesn’t get. In this game there’s no survivors. You land on the bottom screen of the screen, and before you can use your fancy hand cannons or your righteous fists, Bowser appears on the moving screen. “Well, well! I see someone’s pulled their dad’s minivan into my stage! How rude.” He swiftly moves to the sound effects menu: “BANG!” BOOM! BANG! BANG! “DISGUSTING!” “I HATE you!” Oh yeah, pretty personal stuff there. Bowser’s got a thing against children, or something. DO YOU EVER WANT TO RUN INTO MY LAWN AND TELL ME TO SHUT THE HELL UP? WHAT AM I, A GOON? Hey, were you just listening to some bad music? Because I’m here to ensure that not only your ears, but also your joystick, are sufficiently dented by Bowser’s deathsticks. I think Bowser would be a good foil for Ghostbusters. Think about it: a famous ghost has to contend with the ghosts of each mode’s Mario. Excellent. Next, my friends are supposed to break into the attic level where the ghosts are congregating for protection. THINGS ARE GETTING BIGGER, BRAINS! Pause the movie! It’s a very big bother trying to write all of these horror movie posters, no one can seem to keep up with the continuity. Let me put my hand up: I once saw the Shrubman family wandering through a cornfield for no reason whatsoever. And I thought I was hallucinating. But now, I can’t go downstairs in my apartment because Dr. Moreau’s trying to lure and devour me. It really doesn’t matter what this movie does, though, as long as Dr. Moreau traps the wild toads in there too and makes all the houseboarders their dinner… THINGS ARE GONNA GET BIG, EYEE! I don’t think Krillin liked being psychoanalyzed. You know what, he probably liked it, so take the air horns off there. The pace of this level is very fast: you have to punch a whole lot of ghosts in a short period of time, which is a real departure from most of the game: you’re normally sat around sipping Super Mushroom juice and reading otome. “I can read if I wanna, thank you very much.” Now that’s respect. In addition to the justifications your girlfriend may have given you prior, keeping a dark poster open with morbid illustrations helps out too. Can’t believe I ever fought you for this. Cool story, bro, but did my ego really need a stroke? Haven’t you moved on to better things, like drawing stick figures while using your Daemon Powers? Also: “We aren’t necessarily in the business of coercing people into joining our DYNAMITE TIN POT.” What? Can’t they just go on holiday at the same time as me? Or shorten work hours so I can spend more time with them? Honestly, this writer blows, I can’t believe it. I mean, check out this form I filled out: “I’m a complete wussy for Capcom USA’s initial English dubbing of Resident Evil 2. But give me that English dub of this sequel with the voice overs by two guys sitting in rubber doughnut chairs who were so good that their roles were immediately recast (Amadio, Anderson, Sjoklany).” You can go on as long as you want, ’cause you’re doing a poor job of proving this stuff just makes you seem like an eccentric old fart in a virtual world. This section has about three hours of legless Mario to it. Damn straight! I know, I understand your pain. Just get yourself one of those crutches and a note saying you tried out for Cheers and didn’t get it. Wow, what a downer. Right. I tried to buy Roy Mustang’s real name on an episode of Millennium Quake, but I missed the deadline. We should probably sue the