And Stay Down!

 It only took me six months but I finally did it. I killed Vorigan Mistmoore.

What? You haven't heard of him? No reason you should have, if I'm honest. He's hardly the most famous of the Mistmoore clan. That would be Mayong, the one with his own zone in both EverQuest and EverQuest II.

Vorigan is some kind of relative. There was some mention of it in the conversation after I went back to tell Tavian Faust, the vampire who sent me to kill Vorigan in the first place, but I wasn't really paying attention. 

I seem to remember some kind of warning about not going up against Mayong for a while since he might not be happy I'd just killed two of his children but I really wasn't taking much in. I was still reeling from the exhillaration of having finally gotten past the fight that's stymied me since January.

It's not as if Vorigan's even the final boss in the Visions of Vetrovia Signature questline. That is Mayong Mistmoore. Of course it is. He's up next in the final confrontation, Eyes on Vacrul Throne, the twelfth episode of a thirteen part epic, the thirteenth being a debriefing with Antonia Bayle back in Qeynos.

I know that because after I did the hand-in I read ahead on the wiki to see what came next, hoping the whole thing was nearly over. Until then I'd barely looked at it, other then to check strats on some of the bosses.

I checked Vorigan's strats a dozen times and it helped me not at all. EQII no longer attracts a lot of detailed commentary so information is hard to find. The wiki is still admirably up-to-date but if you need a second opinion, you might struggle.

 

The walkthrough for Vorigan did have plenty of detail. It just didn't help me much. Or at all, really. The full instructions for fighting him are:

• Hail the named to start fight. Interrupts can be used to stop his casting.
• Bloody Buffet - Run over the blood boils that appear to remove his incremental stoneskin.
• Vampiric Hemorrhage - Joust out of range or use an interrupt when he casts. If it hits you there is a knockback and a fast-acting trauma that will kill you if not cured very quickly.
  • Seems to be preceded by him leaping into the air. An interrupt at this point works nicely.
  • Staying near the far wall may help. However the knockback throws you in random directions, sometimes while in mid-air, so is very hard to correct for

I managed the "Hail the named" part just fine. After that things didn't go quite so smoothly. 

The first few times, back in January, I spent most of the fight being punted across the cavern, often dying before I even hit the ground. If I managed to avoid that, my Mercenary would inevitably die instead, cutting off the flow of healing but more importantly removing my main option for those essential trauma cures.

I tried bringing my own cure trauma potions. I tried putting my back to the wall. I tried jousting out of range. I tried interrupting Vorigan's casts. None of it worked. I can't remember how many times I died, back at the begining of the year, but it was a lot. 

Eventually I gave up, intending to wait until either I'd geared up sufficiently to overpower the script or someone posted a strat that worked.

Over the months I tried a couple of times with no better luck, then today, as I was swapping out several pieces of gear for upgrades from the new Scorched Skies dungeon, it occured to me my Bruiser must now be "geared up sufficiently" to give it another crack. 

So I did. And died nine times in a row. 

I know it was nine because I'd just repaired to full before I went in and I had to use a repair kit when my armor was at 10%. In the end I think it was ten or eleven deaths because I died a couple more times after that, before I finally got it right.

I also watched two YouTube videos of the fight. Yes, there are two. I was surprised as well. Neither of them really helped. 

One has no commentary at all, which is a shame because the person who made it clearly has some kind of strategy that works. He runs into the large pools of blood and stands there and nothing seems to hurt him. I tried that. I died.

The other is a guide of sorts. There's no narration but there are notes. It's helpful but unfortunately the character doing the fighting is so overgeared for solo content, Vorigan barely gets to show off his tricks.

Best loot of the day and it's from the holiday event.

After I'd watched it a couple of times, I noticed, on the one occasion the named does his emote and casts his fatal dot, the player was indeed able to joust comfortably out of range. That didn't depend on gear, just on observation and timing.

I'd tried it several times and it had gone horribly wrong but I had been panicking, running recklessly in random directions, assuming the range of the spell was large enough to reach most of the platform. Maybe it wasn't so big as all that.

I tried again and the merc died and then I died but I could see it might work. It ought to work. This isn't some super-difficult fight that everyone dreads. If it was, even given the age of the game and the corresponding lack of attention it gets, there would certainly be threads on the forum complaining about how unfair it is and demanding it be nerfed. There are none.

Clearly other people haven't been roadblocked by Vorigan the way I have. The two videos suggest there are multiple ways to beat him. My character is easily powerful enough. The sub-bosses in the rest of the instance are absolute pushovers for him now and he can comfortably handle the newer instances that have been added since, all of which are objectively tougher.

Even the issues I was having back in January, where for some reason I couldn't get the camera scrolled back far enough to read the emotes needed to judge the timing, have vanished. I could see and read them perfectly this time around.

Nope, I'm afraid to say there was only one thing getting in the way: lack of skill. The answer to that is usually "Git gud." So I did.

Well, kinda. I concentrated, used my brain, stopped panicking (as much) and took my time. I watched for the emotes, kept my eye on the boss instead of my hot keys and generally played properly for a change. 

Can't say I enjoyed it. Certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time. But it worked. Each time Vorigan went to cast his big spell I didn't waste time trying to interrupt or hit him one last time. I just jousted out of range, backpedalling so I could watch the progress of his animation. And it worked.

The up-gearing helped a lot. My Bruiser's dps is much better than it was six months ago, meaning I only had to dodge two or three casts. I also took the trouble to read all the descriptions of his combat arts, which reminded me he has a trauma cure and several self-heals that I'd completely forgotten about, although in the event the winning fight was one where my merc actually managed to keep herself alive, so I didn't need to use them.

I'm hoping the final instance won't contain any nasty surprises like Vorigan. It shouldn't. In the whole of the VoV Signature line, he's the only one who's given me any serious problems and I'm fairly sure now that most of those were of my own making.

I'm going to give it a couple of days at least before I carry on. Even if I manage to complete the Sig Line this week, that will make it the longest I've ever taken to complete one since they were made soloable a decade or so ago. Not counting the couple of years I was playing catch-up and didn't get the expansions when they came out, of course.

It'll be good to have it done before the warm-up for this year's expansion, anyway. Can't be too long before it begins. A couple of months, maybe.

Probably best not to think about that too much.

Short, Satisfying, Occasionally Sweet: Developing A Taste For Demos

Following on from the post where I wondered which games I could play for short periods without worrying about having to walk away from the keyboard at a moment's notice, it occurred to me that I'm already taking full advantage of one such option: demos.

There are only a couple of dozen posts here with the tags "Demo" or "Demos" (I really need to make my mind up.) but I only started using it a year ago. Many of the posts feature more than one game so it's plain I've played quite a few in a short time.

I really like them. Demos are a kind of gaming tapas and who doesn't like tapas? Granted, some of them turn out to be albondingas or ensalada rusa rather than patatas bravas or aicetunas and once in a while, god forbid, you might get a zarajo (I have never had an actual zarajo, let me make that perfectly clear, and I fervently hope I never will.) but if it's not to your taste it's soon gone and on to the next.

Like most of the tapas I've had over the years, demos are also free. It used to be the custom right across Spain for the waiter to plonk down a little dish of something you hadn't asked for with every drink you had. I've eaten some unexpected things that way. 

Sadly the custom seems to be dying out other than in the south, although last time I was in both Extramadura and Castile y Leon there still seemed to be plenty of traditionalists handing out free food in the country towns and villages. I know the local cats did well from all the free meat tapas I couldn't eat, having been a vegetarian since the late '80s. I do relax the rules a little on holiday, just to be polite, so I'll eat a small slice of ham or some cold bacon if it's put in front of me but I'm not eating a meatball or a bowl of something with bits of chorizo floating in it for anyone, politeness be damned.

Hmm. This metaphor seems to be on the verge of developing sentience. Let's get back to the point.

I could have done with more scenes like this one.

 

Demos tend to last anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours. They don't cost anything and they're widely available. There's no need to wait for special events like Steam's Next Fest. Half the demos are on Steam already anyway and Steam's not the only place to find them.

The thing I'm beginning to find about demos is that they have almost the opposite effect on me from the one the developers and marketers presumably intended. Demos differ from tapas (No, really? You're going there again?) in that no-one expects you to go back to the bar after a tapas and ask for the same thing as a meal. Game demos, conversely, are meant to get you do exactly that - buy the full game.

Except I hardly ever do. I might go so far as to wishlist it but how many of those wishes ever come true? Not one in ten. Not even one in twenty.

The ones I think I'm most likely to convert when I add them to the list are probably those where the demo has a strong storyline that ends with a cliffhanger or at least a lot of loose threads. At the time I very much want to know what happens next so I wishlist it and look forward to the full game coming out so I can find out how the story carris on.

... for about five minutes. Then I forget all about it. When I get an email months or even years later, telling me the game's now available to buy, I'm lucky if I can remember it at all. I certainly won't be able to recall the plot and even if I do, any fervent desire I had to know what happens next won't come back.

The games on my wishlist I end up buying have precious little to do with the demos I may have played. Purchases tend to be either entirely on a whim or because the game is the latest from a developer or creator I already know. It's like buying the latest album by a band you like. You just do it, you don't have to listen to a few tracks first to make your mind up.

Isabella has a dog. You can see it asleep on the bed. Sometimes it gets up and wanders around and barks. Granted it's a robot dog but they seem to be the in thing right now.

 

When I hold back on buying the less-familiar titles, it's not because I don't think the finished games will be any good. I'm sure most of them are fine. It's that an hour or two, maybe a chapter or a single episode is enough to satisfy my interest.

If the appeal of the game lies in the mechanics, that's usually something I can burn through in the first few minutes. Similarly, much though I love new graphical experiences, a fresh aesthetic already feels familiar during the course of an hour-long demo. Thereafter it's more examples of the same style, which is nice but not necessarily compelling.

I tend to come away from most demos feeling satisfied, which is a problem for the people trying to sell me the full game. Ideally, they'd want me to feel unsatisfied but in a good way, the old "leave them wanting more", but it's a difficult trick to pull off.

Not showing enough of your gameplay is a risk but so is showing too much. Leaving everything up in the air at the end risks annoying or even alienating your prospective customer but if the demo ends with all the loose ends neatly tied in a presentation bow, it can feel as though the whole experience is complete. No need to see what happens next.

Adventure and detection games, two of my favorite genres, suffer from this more than most. Adventure games, by definition, have long, often rambling or convoluted storylines that take dozens of hours to unravel. Whatever snapshot you present in a sixty-minute demo is likely to feel truncated, abridged, incomplete.

I have a dog, she has a dog, they have a dog, we all have a dog.

 

That, I would suggest, is still a lot better than detection games, which tend to offer up a single case as the format for their demos, while hinting at a wider story arc they then don't reveal. Several I've played recently have done that, including the one I played a couple of days ago, on the suggestion of Krikket, who reviewed it as part of her #JustOnePercent series.

The game is the awkwardly-named Song of Farca, "Song" being the last name of the protagonist and "Farca" being the Mediteranean island on which she lives. The game has already released and enjoys a "Very Positive" rating on its Steam page, where it describes itself as "a dark and cruel Black Mirror-esque novel", something that doesn't help me much, never having seen a single episode of Black Mirror.

It also claims to have "the narrative structure of a US crime procedural", by which I think they mean you ask a lot of questions and then pin all the answers on a big board so you can connect them with bits of string. And of course it's set in a dark, cyberpunk/noir near future because why wouldn't it be? Everything else is.

The main reason I decided to give Song of Farca a look were the screenshots in Krikket's post. Her review made the game sound interesting if flawed but the images and the text gave the impression of something a little more subtle and nuanced than the average crime-solving adventure. 

Having played through the whole of the demo I have to say that the shots Krikket chose, all of which are from the very start of the game, do the game a favor it may not deserve. Not that it's a badly written or illutrated game, far from it. It's just not as different from the baseline standard of its subgenre as I'd imagined. Well, at least not in the way I'd hoped...

First game I've ever played where I had to sign an NDA in the game as the protagonist. It's three pages long, too.

All of the screens in Krikket's post focus on the personal elements of the narrative, which gave me the idea the game would revolve around personal interactions and situations. There certainly were moments in the demo that veered in that direction but once the investigation began it was very much all business.

I was particularly disappointed that the AI assistant, Maurice, plays absolutely no part in the investigation. The introduction sets up a very interesting relationship between Maurice and Isabella but if it ever develops into anything it's not in the demo. I never got Maurice to say a single thing after that.

Weirdly, the case once again revolves around a child's missing robot dog. I thought it was an unusual scenario the first time I encountered it but to find myself tasked with doing the same thing just a couple of weeks later struck me as bizarre. If it happens a third time I'm going to have to call shenanigans.

Although the two cases begin with a very similar premise they develop entirely differently. Whereas the Hill Agency investigation revealed nothing more sinister than an extreme case of pester power, Isabella Song finds herself drawn into a web of underground dog-fights and regional crimelords.

Her methods are very different, too. Instead of wandering around the neighborhood, chatting to the locals, Song sits at her computer, hacking into everything from tablets and phones to cleaning droids and security drones.  

It's not as though she has a choice. She's under house-arrest for an unspecified crime so all her casework has to happen online. That makes for a somewhat clunky but quite enjoyable minigame as you take control of various devices, piggybacking from one to the next to get to where you need to be. There were a few times when I thought I'd run out of options but in the end I always managed to find one more chip to hack. 

I have a suspicion Farca is future-Malta. Looks like a nice place to live.

The dialog options felt less solid. I realize it's a game but being able to go back over and over again to the same people who just hung up on me so I could try a different approach felt false. They'd surely have blocked my calls. Either that or sent the boys round. 

As for the part where you pull all the threads together and make accusations or confront people with their actions, well, it works... but I never felt I was in control of the outcome. When someone caved and did what I asked it seemed more like luck than my sound investigative skills,

As for the odd split-screen staging, Isabella in her apartment above, the maps and schematics of the investigation below, the hint of gameplay associated with the format suggested in the introduction to the demo never resolves into action. Krikket complained that "if Isabella is not sitting at her desk, you cannot interact with the game in any way", which is true and you're warned about it in-game, but once Isabella sits down at her PC, at no point in the demo does she ever get up again, so the point is moot.

Krikket's review of the full game, or at least the first couple of cases, which is twice as many as I played, suggests if I bought it I'd get more of the same. Clearly the game is a police procedural first foremost and everything else has to fit in around the detecting. I like a bit of procedural work as much as the next pretend policeman. I have read almost the entire 87th Precinct series, after all. I'm just not sure I'd want to play-act my way through the process repeatedly using these particular mechanics.

None of which is to say I wouldn't play the full game. I almost certainly would. I just don't think I'd want to pay for the privelige. If it turns up in a free offer on Prime or Epic someday I'll happily grab it but I'm not going to pay £15.49 for it or even half that in the inevitable sale.

I'll play more demos, though, that's for sure. And review them here if I can find  anything interesting to say about them, which I fancy I usually can.. Enough for one post, anyway. 

It may well be as much as most games are worth - and most readers can stand.

Great Minds?

Boris Johnson resigns: “I’m immensely proud of the achievements of this government”

Quentin Tarantino says ‘Peppa Pig’ is the “greatest British import of this decade”

Headlines from consecutive news items I read at NME today. I don't think there's anything more I need to say.

Let's have some music. (Spoiler - You're not going to like any of it!)

Hero Journey - Chai (Feat. Superorganism) - Magnificent! There's a video but it's not out yet. There's a trailer for the video though because we live in a world where that's a thing that happens. Oh, what a joy to be alive...

I could have sworn I posted Superorganism's last collab with Chai a few months ago but if I did I can't find the post now. Oh, wait, no! Here it is! That time it was Superorganism hosting the Japanese noisepop outfit and now it's the other way around. To my ears both tracks sound like Superorganism.

Here's the other. See if I'm not right.

Teenager - Superorganism (Feat. Chai) - There. That'll save you having to click through the link, which I know none of you were going to do. I bet most of you skipped straight past it last time too, so we may as well have it again so you can do the same now. Not that I'm bitter.

The album's out in eight days and I have it on pre-order. Two days after that they're doing a signing and an in-store performance at a record store in the next city over from where I live. Fortunately it's on a day I'm working so I can pretend that's why I'm not going, rather than admitting I'm too lazy. And old. But mostly lazy.

While we're playing favorites, here's a version of a Wet Leg number for people who don't like Wet Leg. I guess there must be someone.

Too Late Now - Soulwax - I'd dance to that, only I'd need a resuscitation crew on standby. I guess I'll just sit here and oscillate.

Let's see... What else have I got? Oh, yeah...

I was going to do something about Drain Gang because it seemed like a thing I ought to have known about a lot sooner than I did and I didn't want to keep it to myself in case anyone else was still in the dark. I never got around to it and anyway everything you need to know is in the article where I learned about it and I'm not going to add anything by paraphrasing, so if you're interested maybe go read it.

I did peg a couple of tracks I particularly liked for use in the post that never was, so here they are.

Into Dust - Yung Lean, Bladee & White Armor - 2014. Another time. They'd give Sleaford Mods a run for their money in the "What does that guy who's just sort of standing there do, exactly?" stakes. Eight years later and they seem a lot livelier. Then again, they do have an audience this time.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun - Bladee & Ecco2K - Of course I was hoping it was going to be a cover of the Cyndi Lauper classic but honestly, there are probably more than enough covers of that already. 

Speaking of Cyndi, did you know her "original" was a cover?  TWIST! I bloody didn't. Not until I wrote this post. Here's the original original. This is why I have a blog. Also I love the way the YT comments reference personal nostalgia triggers from the 80s to the oughts. Sometimes other people just do my work for me.

Let's end with a recent favorite of mine, the band Mary Shelley, who are always called "the band Mary Shelley" to the point where I don't actually know if they're called Mary Shelley or the band Mary Shelley. I wouldn't mind, only I don't know where to put the italics.

Democracy Is Alive- Mary Shelley - I did know what they were called. I was just messing with you. Not the catchiest tune in their portfolio but it seemed appropriate somehow. Or ironic. One of those.

On to a bright new future!

Endings And Beginnings: A (Pretty Much) Spoiler-Free Spot-Take On Stranger Things Season Four And Umbrella Academy Season Three

Last night I watched the Season Four finale of Stranger Things. The night before I watched the Season Three finale of Umbrella Academy. Netflix chose to release both seasons as a package, although for Stranger Things they split the season in two, for either aesthetic or commercial reasons, depending who you ask.

I chose to watch both shows on my own schedule, one episode per evening, giving me just enough time to process each instalment and still be able to remember the plot. Seriously, with shows that release one episode a week I can barely remember what happened the last time. How we all managed back in the bad old days of broadcast TV I can hardly imagine. Or remember, obviously.

The reviews for both series that I've seen mostly fall into the "good but not great" category, with everyone liking Stranger Things but critics being happier with Umbrella Academy than audiences. As you'd expect, a lot of the commentary tends to be comparative, not so much with other shows as with each's own previous seasons.

On a snap rating, I'd give both shows a high mark on their latest outings but therein lies a problem. My unconsidered opinion is of limited value. I've said before that I'm easily pleased and it's no exaggeration. If I like something enough to bother with it at all, there's a strong chance I'll like it a lot, or at least I'll believe I do. 

I tend to get drawn in quickly and easily and not to notice flaws on a first viewing. It's why I follow the Rule of Three: once for the experience, twice to compare, third time to decide.

Only who has the time? I'm pretty sure the finale of Stranger Things is the longest single episode of a serialized TV show I've ever seen: two hours and nineteen minutes. Although it could have been even longer. 

When it comes to putting particular seasons or episodes in some kind of qualitative order within the context of the life of the show, I run into a different problem. Or perhaps I should say a different iteration of the same old one: I struggle to remember something I watched weeks, months or years ago.

Perhaps I ought to clarify that. I realize I'm starting to make it sound as though I have some kind of clinical condition. It's not that I can't or don't remember what I've seen or heard at all; it's more that I need a trigger for the memories to fire.

With TV shows, when I write posts like this, I usually begin by looking at a clip or two. Once I've watched a few seconds it all comes flooding back. Well, some of it does. Usually. If nothing comes it probably means I didn't really watch it properly in the first place.

As I write this, I haven't rewatched a single scene from the earlier seasons of Stranger Things or Umbrella Academy, so I can't in good conscience comment on which is better, worse or about the same. All I can do is say how I felt about them in the moment, as I watched, and now, a fw days later, as I look back.

Of the two, it surprises me to say I think I may have enjoyed Umbrella Academy more. If I was going to develop a full-blown critique of the two shows, which I am not, I'm fairly sure I'd come down on the side of Stranger Things being better-structured, conceived and realized but I don't think it could be described as more fun to watch, not least because the first ninety minutes or so of the show I watched last night was one of the tensest TV experiences of my life.

Asmiroth posted an excellent review of Umbrella Academy in which he makes a whole raft of observations that make complete sense to me, most of which I also noticed while I was watching. I commented on the post to say as much. 

Something I was thinking then but forgot to mention was how, despite the overall tone of Asmiroth's post coming over as unsatisfied or disappointed in some undefined fashion, almost all the specifics are positive. 

That makes sense. Umbrella Academy as a show can sometimes feel less than the sum of its parts. It's bursting with distinctive, interesting characters played by excellent, engaging actors, delivering smart, funny dialog, while doing exciting and surprising things.  

It's fast, supple, sparky and almost effortlessly entertaining, all of which makes it a great watch as you're watching it. It doesn't always make a great deal of sense when you think about it afterwards, though, and not just because the whole thing is predicated on time travel, which never makes any kind of sense.

Seriously, I don't believe I'm exaggerating a whit when I say that there has never been and will never be a time-travel narrative of any kind in any medium that holds up to even the mildest, most casual scrutiny. Time travel itself may or not exist - physicists seem to be divided on the theoretical possibilities - but the human mind is simply incapable of processing the concept without analogizing or metaphoring or anecdotalizing and once any of that begins you're already lost. 

I have a super-simple rule with all time-travel tales. I completely ignore anything that gets in the way of the plot. In the case of Umbrella Academy there's a lot to ignore but I can ignore six impossible things before breakfast and still feel satisfied so that doesn't bother me at all.

Poor character development does. Like Asmiroth I was not a fan of Alison's character arc in UA Season Three. In fact, I was so not a fan I may have yelled at the screen a couple of times. I also had a bit of a suspension of disbelief problem over the sequence where Klaus plays in traffic so he can be killed enough times to refine his powers, something which seemed to me to have certain practical impracticalities, not least what the hell anyone driving the vehicles might have thought about it.

Overall, though, I loved Season Three of Umbrella Academy. I really hope there's another because the way this one ends isn't an ending at all, it's a beginning. But that's what you get with time-travel stories.

The end of Stranger Things Season Four also ends with an obvious lead-in to the next but we already know there's going to be a fifth. Netflix could hardly afford for there not to be and the Duffer Brothers have already told us the have it in hand. Millie Bobby Brown, the show's superhero as the iconic Eleven, would like it to be a bloodbath, as would her onscreen boyfriend, Will, but I agree with the Duffers; that wouldn't be Stranger Things.

Above all, Stranger Things is cosy. It started out as a love letter to the lost 1980s, invoking the spirit of Spielberg, The Goonies and Stand By Me. Every season has seen that comfortable setting further questioned, challenged, threatened and yet even as the gates of Hell open beneath Hawkins, Indiana somehow the cosiness has never really scraped away.

It can't. It's no veneer. Stranger Things is cosy through and through. Even a flower-faced devil dog gnawing through the opened ribcage of a fresh killed corpse somehow contrives to look almost cute doing it. The whole show is wholesome. It's like a Twilight Zone version of The Waltons.

That's a compliment, by the way. I loved The Waltons. I watched the entire series, all nine seasons; more than two hundred episodes. I watched them twice, once when they were new in the 1970s and then again when they were repeated in the '80s. I watched them on broadcast TV, when you had to be there when they showed it, not just whenever you felt like watching. Yep, it's a compliment alright.

Millie Bobby Brown complains about how many characters there are. "It’s way too big. Last night, we couldn’t even take one group picture because there was like 50 of us." It's true but it's also kind of the point. 

Eleven and her friends are like a snowball of goodness rolling downhill, bouncing over the evil rocks and picking up more goodness wherever they land. It's one of those series, like Roswell (I love Roswell so much...), where you want more and more people to get in on the secret because everyone who does just gets better as a human being. 

Steve says as much in his heartfelt speech to Nancy, right before they head off on yet another stupid, suicidal adventure and he should know. He's pretty much the poster child for self-actualization.

Stranger Things is a better show than Umbrella Academy. It's a more important show with more important things to say and it says those things more convincingly. I like many more characters in Stranger Things than I do characters in Umbrella Academy. The plot makes more sense, the events it describes have more weight, everything seems to matter more.

Umbrella Academy is more fun though and the characters would be way cooler to hang out with. And it's funnier. It's almost a sitcom at times. Most characters are funny most of the time uinless they're having a moment. Even Victor gets a few one-liners. Alison doesn't, which is why her character is the one that rarely works, this time.

Stranger Things is funny, too, but the funny parts and the serious parts almost feel like different shows. In fact, certain characters in STS4 are funny all the time, like clowns. They seem to have been added to the cast for that specific purpose because characters who used to be the funny ones in earlier seasons have undergone character development and can't just make jokes all the time. (Hi, Erica!).

As I write ths post the thing that always happens is happening. Those occluded memories are coming back, faster and thicker. I don't always need to watch old clips to pull the trigger. Putting words down on paper does it too.

It means I'd better stop before things get out of hand. All I really wanted to do was acknowledge the moment. I thoroughly enjoyed both seasons of both shows. I feel priviliged to be living in a time when such visions are being brought to screen. 

We're very lucky. 

Now, what's next?

Finding Our Way Home

Since I added NME.com to my feeds a few months ago it has somewhat unexpectedly become my primary source of gaming news. Back when I used to buy it at the newsagents in the early 1970s, the New Musical Express was precisely that - a print publication filled with news about music and pretty much nothing else.

By the late seventies there was a lot of politics in the mix and by the time I stopped buying it in the mid-eighties there was coverage of movies and other arts, too. One thing that definitely never got a mention was video gaming.

Now, billing itself as "The world’s defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking what’s new and what’s next since 1952", I would estimate well over fifty per cent of everything that comes down the Feedly pipe from NME Towers relates to either K-Pop or Gaming. 

Indeed, NME covers K-Pop to such an extraordinary extent that I was astonished to read this morning that Nayeon "has become the first-ever K-pop soloist to enter the Top 10 of the Billboard 200." I was under the impression all these singers and bands I'd been reading about must be global superstars. Otherwise why would I need to know?

One of my backlisted projects for the blog is to take some time to listen to a selection of the seemingly endless series of Idols NME keeps bringing to my attention so I can put together some kind of post about whatever it is they're trying to tell me or sell me. I feel it's something I ought to know more about even if I'm not sure why.

That's an adventure for another day although I don't see why we shouldn't take a moment to enjoy POP, the ineffably-titled lead single from Naeyon's groundbreaking mini-album, IM Naeyon. It's very good, although it does sound like it could have been made at just about any time in the last fifty years.

And that's all the non-inflammatory content for today. From here on in it's all trigger warnings and swearing. No judgment if you want to dip out now.

What I came here to talk about this afternoon is a little more serious. I've been wondering for the last week or so whether to post about the infamous Supreme Court revoking of Roe vs Wade. It seemed such an important event on so many levels that to ignore it seemed weird and yet an English male weighing in on such a topic, paritcularly on what is ostensibly a gaming blog, felt uncomfortable, bordering on innapropriate.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about it as we walked Beryl last night and I told her that, after a good deal of consideration, I'd decided not to post anything after all. If anyone else in this part of the blogosphere had done more than mention the situation in passing I must have missed it and, while the effects of the decision are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, the immediate cultural moment seemed like it might have passed.

And then I saw this in my NME feed. Why I should have heard about it first from this particualar source is a question worth asking but that's where I got the news and I was glad to get it from somewhere. 

This makes the third itch.io charity protest bundle I've picked up in the last couple of years. They're fantastic bargains on paper - this one claims to be worth £2500 - but in practice it's a donation pure and simple. I've only played a handful of the thousands of games and it's extremely unlikely I'll even look at the descriptions of most of them. A lot of them are PDFs for tabletop games and many duplicate or even triplicate between the bundles. I'm definitely not buying these to play them. If I do, that's a bonus.

The fundraiser is for "the National Network for Abortion Fund's Collective Power Fund, which moves money directly to abortion funds across 20+ U.S. states, with a particular focus on the South and Midwest." The target is a modest $50k.  

When I bought my bundle a few hours ago the total so far already stood at $48k and as I write it's close to $60k. There are still nearly ten days to go. I'll be interested to see what the grand total comes to.

I don't have a lot more to say about it. I still think it would be crass of me to start analysing or interpreting the circumstances and implications of the politics from three thousand miles away. I'll leave that sort of thing to those who feel comfortable doing so.

What I am happy to do is relay the words and voices of a few of those people who have felt the need to express their opposition publicly. Last weekend, when all of this kicked off, I was watching the BBC's live feed from Glastonbury, where all manner of artists, from superstars like Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamarr to indie acts like Idles and Phoebe Bridgers made a point of using their plaform to express outrage, anger, disappointment and fear.

For a few days I was pondering the idea of a post featuring clips of all of the above and more but now I'm going to settle for my two favorites, both of which not only drive the point home with effortless authority and absolute clarity but also make for fantastic listening and viewing. Also they're both sweary as all get-out, which ties right into that other post I keep threatening but never come through with. 

One, sadly, isn't on YouTube but you can watch it on iPlayer as long as the BBC keep it up, always assuming you can access it from where you live. It's Jarvis Cocker and his post-Pulp outfit, Jarv Is, with a version of their extremely NSFW number, the real name of which even I balk at typing, here rendered slightly more acceptable for mainstream broadcasting as Pricks Are Still Ruling The World.

The other is this superb performance from the wonderful Olivia Rodrigo. Her entire set was a master class in how to charm and delight a huge festival crowd, many of whom hadn't come to see you and probably weren't expecting all that much. I watched the whole thing live and loved every second of it. 

Fuck You (feat. Lily Allen) - Olivia Rodrigo

Take this as a teaser. I'll do the whole damned thing one day! And don't foget the Itch.io fundraiser is open until July 14.

Dog Days

Shortly after we got our new puppy I posted about the unexpectedly positive effect she had on my reading habits. Since then I've mentioned a few times how having a puppy in the house has impacted the amount of time I have both to play games and write about them.

It's exactly three months today since Beryl arrived and I think I can now say she's effectively pressed the reset button on my gaming schedule. It's possible that things will swing back into the old pattern in due course, when she grows up and demands less attention, but I suspect some of the changes, like the dog herself, will already have settled down and made themselves at home by then.

The biggest impact has been the end of my decade-long affair with Guild Wars 2. I realised yesterday that I couldn't actually remember the last time I logged in. It must be several weeks. 

The last time I used the GW2 tag here on the blog was at the very end of May. That means I went a whole month and wrote almost two dozen posts without even mentioning the game, let alone making it the subject of a post. I'm not about to go back and look through a dozen years and more than two thousand posts (Over seven hundred of them tagged "GW2") to see if I've ever ignored the game for that long before but I'm guessing I have not. 

I don't have any plans to abandon Tyria for good but I'm beginning to feel it might be a good time to explore other possibilities. Mostly I'm looking for games that can be paused or saved or which have gameplay that can be left to idle indefinitely.

It's not as if I was playing the old three-to-six hour sessions of a decade and more ago anyway. I was already playing far fewer long sessions even before Beryl joined the family. Even games that I found compelling, like Valheim or New World, I was largely putting in sessions lasting no more than two to three hours.

The big difference is that, whereas a year ago I was able to play a couple of sessions a day and write a blog post, together taking up eight or ten hours all told between breakfast and bedtime, now two or three walks and a couple of play sessions in the garden take up much of that time. It's not that I don't still get time to play or blog but often it's either one or the other and when I'm doing either I need to be able to stop at a moment's notice and not return to it for quite a while.

It's a happy coincidence that my interest in single-player games has bounced back of late and that my tastes in that direction tend so strongly towards the walking simulator/adventure end of the market. It's a lot easier to drop in and out of those kinds of games than it is the average mmorpg.  

That said, mmos have changed a lot since the days of having to give notice and wait for a replacement to be found before leaving a group. I can remember when, even as what passed for a casual player back then, if you were playing an mmorpg and needed to do something in real life at three o' clock, you'd need to be making your apologies and sending out recruitment messages by two-fifteen at the very latest, in the expectation that it might easily be thirty minutes or more before you could actually leave.

Most of the kind of things I do in the mmorpgs I play nowadays don't require much more than that I finish the event I've started. There's usually no-one relying on my participation other than my pets and my mercenaries and they can go whistle. Even so, an event or a boss fight takes as long as it takes and unless you're willing to lose whatever progress or reward you were trying for, you do at least have to keep going until its all over.

Boss fights in any game, mmorpg or single player, can take quite a while. Ten or fifteen minutes isn't uncommon. I've known some last twice that long. That's a commitment I can't always afford right now. It does limit the options somewhat.

Yesterday I was pleased to be able to finish the whole of the new Scorched Sky instance while Beryl was fast asleep. She tends to sleep a lot in the morning and early afternoon, which means I'm learning to restructure my playing hours to fit around her naps. EverQuest 2 is a pretty good fit for what I'm after, especially if I play my Bruiser, who can flop over at an instant's notice and just lie there for an hour or two until I can get back to him.  

I have a lot of non-combat things I could be doing in EQII as well. Things that can be put on hold without hesitation for as long as necessary. The only problem with those is that, while both necessary and useful in preparing my many characters for future adventures, they aren't all that exciting in and of themselves. Even I can't get that pumped over the prospect checking every character against every potential upgrade in the bank.

Consequently I've been on the look out for mmorpgs that encourage fast drop-in, drop-out sessions with short bursts of focused gameplay that doesn't require a lot of set-up. I have a lot of mmorpgs installed and I'm happy to add some more. There must be some that fit the bill.

Yesterday I happened to get an email from AdventureQuest 3D promoting the new Nulgath Saga update. I don't usually pay a great deal of attention to press releases from games I'm not currently playing but I noticed the update included a raise in the level cap - to 37.

Thirty-seven seemed such an odd level for a cap that I ended up reading the whole thing. Then I started wondering what level my character was and then I noticed AQ3D is on Steam and next thing I knew I was patching up and playing.

I was going to write about the experience tonight but I seem to have written this instead and now it's too late. What I will say is that I really enjoyed playing AQ3D again. It seems to have come on quite a lot since the last time I played. It also seems to be very well designed to get you straight into the content with the least amount of fuss and bother, which means I'll almost certainly be playing again.

With a bit of luck and dog permitting I'll have something more substantial to say about the game itself later in the week. Right now, though, it's time to take Beryl out for the last time today before I settle down to watch the penultimate episode of Stranger Things.

Nobody and nothing is going to interrupt that!

They Don't Call It A Sweatshop For Nothing

Naturally, the moment I post in praise of Daybreak's engineering team, they break something. When I went to log into EverQuest II yesterday, the launcher didn't work. I found a workaround on the forums so it wasn't a serious problem. Then there was a patch and after that I didn't have a problem at all.

Until I logged in again today and found the launcher didn't work. Again. 

The same workaround did, though, so I was able to take a look at the new, improved Summer Jubilee version of Scorched Sky Celebration, which I realize I've been referring to as "Scorched Sky" or even "Scorched Skies" all this time, without the "Celebration", which is actually part of the name. Must pay more attention.

I read the news item and rushed off to Sinking Sands to get the new quest. Someone at the bonfire in Buccaneer Bay had a feather over their head so I chatted with them for a bit, took their quest, set off to kill some Scorched Sky elementals and then realised I was doing last year's new quest, which I wrote about back in 2021. At least I noticed before I'd really got going!

 Re-reading the news item, I spotted this key line: "The most advanced adventurers with a penchant for all things toasty warm can head to The Highlands in Butcherblock Mountains to find your path." Granted it's a bit flowery but I can't say I wasn't told. Must pay more attention. No, really, I must.

I'm a little unclear as to the connection between Butcherblock Highlands and the searing heat of summer. It's a pretty cold and unsummery place as far as I can see. There's a party of celebrants there all the same, including Chandrima, the questgiver, who I have a feeling may also be one of my Overseer agents. Or maybe I'm imagining that.

She explained the situation and sent me to get some Flaming Runes of Ro. After I'd popped the requisite number of Scorched Sky elementals, of which there were plenty within a shuriken's throw of the camp, it was off to another unlikely venue for the Scorched Sky Celebration, namely Dropship Landing in the Moors of Ykesha. 

This time there is a lore-appopriate reason to go there, despite the complete absence of sunshine, volcanos or deserts. It's where we went for Tinkerfest and the new portal uses the same "celestial apperture creator" as last time, handily still poking out of the ground where we left it. I imagine we'll be back there again in August for Oceansfull. 

I got the portal up and stepped through. I was playing my Bruiser this time. He's now my best-equipped character and he does a lot more DPS than the berserker, while being almost as tanky. Plus he has Feign Death, the Pause Button of mmorpgs.

Inside the zone, Doomfire Ro's Sweatshop, I found another questgiver waiting. I picked up his quest, which I found to be both nicely phrased and rather intriguing. There's been some speculation on the forums about whther the new hires at Darkpaw have been given the new summer quests to work on and I wouldn't be surprised if there's something in that. The new quests are very much in the standard EQII mode but there seems to be a freshness and an enthusiasm about the dialog that suggests whoever's writing them is really enjoying themselves.

I began pulling. Most of the mobs came in gangs of three or more but they posed little threat to my Bruiser, who chopped them down in seconds. The quest items came from boxes on the ground but naturally the owners of said boxes objected to them being rifled through by passing strangers so we came to blows. 

The drop rate was good and it didn't take long before I had everything. did the hand-in and got the pattern I was after, along with some directions and a word of advice. When I turned around and headed towards place I'd been told to go next, I found a horseman named Elemy Elmonnier in my way; the first boss.

He had a couple of tricks, one of which seemed to be the power to summon an unlimited number of guards to his side. The other was to have his horse trample me. 

According to the walkthrough, which I didn't look at until after I'd killed him, I should have backed off to avoid getting trampled. It doesn't mention the guards at all. I just stood there and face-tanked him and AE-ed the guards and that seemed to work.

The loot he dropped was nice for a solo character. Two pieces of Fabled gear, 305 Resolve, and an Adept spell book. The neck slot item was a good upgrade. I was going to carry on to the next boss but before I could spawn him, Beryl the dog woke up and came to tell me she wanted to play so that was that.

I really like these new instances, the Tinkerfest one and now what I've seen of this. The stories are fun, the difficulty level is just about right, the gameplay is enjoyable and the drops are worthwhile. I'm usually pretty happy with EQII's questing and the holiday content has always been some of the best in the genre but these have been noticeably above par. I do think the current team has upped their game significantly of late.

Beryl permitting, I hope to finish the instance tomorrow. I doubt I'm going to find the time to run it half a dozen times before the event ends to get the bracers I didn't get during Tinkerfest. I'll be happy enough with the rewards from the questline and the bosses.

After that, roll on Oceansfull!