Being Lazy Is Hard Work, Sometimes

I might have had something more substantial to post today if I hadn't spent several hours watching YouTube videos explaining how to make animated movies using AI, then following links to various utilities so I could play around with the tools. After all of that, my takeaway is that, while the technology may have come a long way, it still has a lot further to go before it can do what I want it to do, by which I mean everything.

The way things stand now, what I can see is a whole lot of extremely useful short-cuts that will save both professionals and dedicated amateurs a great deal of time and effort, just like I found when I was looking into whether I could get a team of AIs to write and draw a comic book for me. Unfortunately, that means instead of a project taking a few weeks, it might now take a few days, when what I want is for it to take a few seconds.

Basically, I want AI to be magic. I want to wave my wand and mutter a few incantations and have a fully-finished, polished, animated movie, ready to publish on my YouTube channel or on the blog or some other place where almost no-one will ever see it. In an ideal world I wouldn't even have to wave the wand. The AI would just know what I wanted and make it for me, without my even having to ask.

This would probably be a good time to ladle out that old pudding "Be careful what you wish for." There's an episode of Carole & Tuesday that hints at what will probably happen if and when the AIs reach that level of sophistication. It's Series One Episode 4: Video Killed The Radio Star. (Every episode of both seasons is named after a well-known song, usually with some relevance to what happens within it.)

This blog post gives a rough impression of what happens in that episode. I sugest not reading the comment thread, though. (And now everyone's gonna do exactly that...) 

Before anyone brings up my own long-promised post on the show, I'm happy to say it's done! I finished it a few days ago but I've been sitting on it. I'm not really happy with it - it's superficial - but I know I'm never going to finish the five or ten thousand word essay I have roiling around in my head so I'll just have to suck it up. I might publish it tomorrow. Depends what else comes along. 

The impact of AI on music and especially on songwriting is a major theme of Carole & Tuesday. The whole premise of the show is that the two girls are extremely unusual in that they write their own songs with no assistance from AI at all. Almost all songwriting in their time is at least AI-assisted, if not entirely subcontracted to software. 

Carole and Tuesday are both already singer-songwriters before they meet but it's a plot point that they only really attain a standard that's commercially viable when they pool their resources and write in tandem. Before then, barely-solvent Carole tries to supplement her meagre gig economy income by busking, mostly playing keyboard instrumentals no-one stops to hear, while poor little rich girl Tuesday composes songs on her acoustic guitar and sings them to herself in her lonely bedroom, somewhere in the invisible depths of a vast mansion.

Every other musician and singer we see in the entire show either performs work written by AIs or works with AIs to create their own music. To almost everyone in the narrative, the idea that anyone would try to do the whole thing alone seems not just unlikely but faintly ludicrous.

When Gus, the girl's manager, reformed alchoholic and one-time drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich, tries to get a video made on the cheap by buying an AI video bot called IDEA, the results are predictably terrible. Worse, the AI is a con artist, completely fooling everyone into thinking it can somehow whip up a stat-of-the-art music video for no money and no effort (By the bot, that is. It's a lot of effort for everyone else.)

I don't think we have to read very far between the lines to see what's going on there. Even four or five years ago, when Carole & Tuesday was being made, creative artists didn't like what was coming. They were right to be worried. 

The protracted actors strike wound up today (Pending final approval by the members.) following an earlier conclusion to similarly-motivated industrial action taken by their screenwriting colleagues. A number of issues were involved but in both cases fear of an AI takeover was one consideration. 

The compromise agreements reached revolve not around an abnegation of the upcoming technological revolution but a means of benefitting from it financially. A share of the spoils. 

And, to be fair, some say over whether studios can do away with existing actors, while still enjoying the public interest in those same actors' generated by their former appearances as living beings. I'm pretty sure the studios will be looking further ahead, to the day they don't need any actors at all, so it's only a temporary stay of execution for the craft but I guess it'll keep the current crop happy for now. Whether we'll even have live screen actors in fifty years is another question, as is whether anyone around then would still want them by then.

As I've said before, I believe all of this will have about as much long-lasting effect on the coming AI-pocalypse as the objections of eighteenth century weavers had on the success of the Spinning Jenny but as with the Industrial Revolution, a full turn will take longer than its proponents would like or its opponents fear. That's what I find so frustrating about it.

It's interesting to see the difference in rate of change between the various media to which AI is being applied. Applications requiring just a single, static image could very fast be approaching the moment when humans won't be necessary at all. I wouldn't think this would be the best time to take up a career producing book covers for self-published e-books for a start. I imagine most DIY authors will also be doing the pictures themselves before long.

As I found today, though, getting the images to move convicingly still takes rather more effort than I imagine most dabblers would care to give. I had no difficulty following the processes outlined in the videos I watched, most of which involved little more than typing prompts, selecting suitable results, then a lot of cutting, pasting and uploading. The problem was being bothered to do it.

Of course, that says more about me than the software. Once, the sheer amount of fiddly detail wouldn't even have slowed me down. 

Watching someone else fast-forward through the nitpicking process reminded me of that summer, back in the 'nineties, when I bought a sampler and spent a week making a three-minute song using samples of Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. I was quite pleased with the result but even I didn't want to listen to it again once I'd finished. 

Or there was the time in the early 'aughts, when Mrs Bhagpuss was away with the kids for a few days and I spent every evening making "music" with some sequencing software I'd bought. Again, by the time I'd finished, I never wanted to hear any of it ever again.

The first time, I thought it was time well spent; the second time, I wasn't so sure. If I was in my teens or twenties right now I'm pretty sure I'd be staying up 'til 2am every night, working on some ludicrously time-consuming AI project. At the age I am now, I flatter myself I'm over all of that. 

What I want, as I said, is for the AI to do just about all of it for me and I'm already getting tired of waiting. I never got my flying car or my jet pack and we still can't get our meals in pill form but I can't help thinking this new future is a lot nearer than those science fantasies ever were. It's just not near enough!

Still, every day brings something new. The anouncement made at OpenAI's DevDay that all their AI tools are now available in one package is drawing a lot of attention. With the integration of DALL·E 3 into GPT4, you don't have to swap from text generator to image generator any more. That's sure to save some time. 

Elon Musk is trying to get in on the act but the less said about that the better. Meanwhile his erstwhile partner, Grimes, is - as always - playing both sides. The more I know about her, the better I like her.

There's also a growing trend towards personalised AI packages that allow you to feed in your own data to get responses more closely tailored to your requirements. NightCafe chides me every time I log in because I haven't yet trained my own model, while GPT4 Turbo now lets you input the equivalent of a three hundred page book as a single prompt. With additions and improvements like those, the possibilty of my having an AI write and illustrate a whole post that might plausibly pass as my own work gets nearer every day.

I probably wouldn't use it for that even if it were possible. I like writing posts. Then again, it'd be handy on days when I'm just not feeling it but don't want to skip.

What I really want, though, in addition to a GPT-powered wifi mic and speaker combo I can clip to Beryl's collar so I can talk to her and have her seem to talk back, are some AI apps that can produce music I want to listen to and video I want to watch, infinitely and on demand. Games I can play, too, why not? And I'd like it to tailor them to my preferences from nominal input that doesn't take me more than a minute or two.

Is that too much to ask? I mean, come on!

Right now, though, the best I can come up with is something like this. That's Dylan Turner's lo-fi generator and I've had it on in the background the whole time I've been writing this post. It does a job but it's no Julia Holter.

While I was there, I spent a while playing with Dylan's other toy, LudoTune. It lets you build three-dimensional structures with colored blocks and have them play music. 

Well, some people can get them to play music. I made an IF logo for the blog that plays a station ident. Kinda. If you squint. With your ears.

And that is why there's no real post today (Although the Carole & Tuesday digression is solid, I think.) Once the real AI gets here, there'll be none of this nonsense. It'll be solid gold every time. 

I bet you. 

 

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Ironically, I had a ton of trouble getting images to illustrate my text. I used up a load of credits at NightCafe, trying various models and prompts. None of them were really what I wanted. It turns out that if an AI doesn't know who you're talking about, it's really bad at making a picture of it. Who'd have thought? And it seems as though Carole & Tuesday just isn't sufficiently well-represented in the training data for any of the AIs to be able to render a recognizeable image of even the main characters, let alone the supporting cast. 

This, of course, is where the work comes in. I could have supplied sufficient images to train a model of my own but life's too short to do that for one blog post so instead what we have is:

Top image: DreamShaper XL alpha2 at 50/50, from the prompt "Carole & Tuesday the characters from the anime of the same name . 1970s cartoon. Full color". Background filled out by Uncrop, then manually cropped by me because it kept putting distracting extra characters, peering into the frame or mugging from behind. It's great, being photobombed by an AI.

Third image: same model, same settings. Prompt "drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich. Include the name of the band on the drums. Anime". I had ten goes at ths one and that was the only one that even came close. The AI did not, as asked, "Include the name of the band on the drums". I put that in myself in Paint.net. 

Fourth image: SDXL Beta 50/50. Prompt "Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Scooby Doo style." I did nine of these. I was trying to get a picture of Dale Cooper making a deal with Gus from C&T but none of the AIs could understand what I wanted. One of them put Cooper in a bar and wrote "Gus" on the wall behind him. Another had a hand reaching in from outside the frame offering Dale something that looked like a mutant squirrel killed by a truck. It sounds better than it was.

Let's Get Ready To... No, I Can't. I Just Can't. Warcraft Rumble First Impressions

After I finished writing yesterday's post I did indeed go take a look at Blizzard's newest venture, a mobile game called Warcraft Rumble. As you might expect from the name, it's set in the world of Azeroth and stuffed with characters the developers are clearly hoping you'll recognize from World of Warcraft or the rest of the franchise.

The cute wrinkle this time is that the characters aren't the original NPCs but their "Minis". I wasn't aware minis were a thing in WoW. I associate the term wholly and solely with Guild Wars 2, where no-one is anyone without a whole entourage of tiny clones of mobs and NPCs trailing along behind them like an unruly school outing. 

Actually, plausible though that sounds, it's not remotely accurate. You'd think an AI had written this. Sadly, you can only have one mini out at a time in GW2. I wish you could have more but there you go. We don't always get what we want, even when it's something trivial.

Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes, Warcraft Rumble. So, the idea seems to be that you control an army of NPCs...

...No, wait, we'll have to stop again. I'm not entirely sure who "you" is in that last sentence. It's not explained in the game or if it was I missed it. 

There's no "Player Character". It could just be you, the Player, but that seems a little shaky as a peg to hang the whole thing on. There is a framing device that alleges the game is being played by NPCs in inns and taverns inside the gameworld itself: "Throughout Azeroth people can’t get enough of this mysterious new machine. A new strategic sensation has swept the land..." so I guess it could be your WoW character in the game, in an inn, playing Warcraft Rumble on a gnometech arcade machine...

It's all a bit meta, frankly, which naturally I liked. Or I may be overthinking it. It's probably that.

Going back to the "army"of NPCs I mentioned, that is literally what it's called in the game: your Army. There's no explanation of whose army it is, either. It looks like a random bunch of NPCs and monsters to me...

Okay, I'm definitely overthinking this...

Your army fights... other minis. Not another Army as far as I can see. Villains, maybe. Bad guys? Whoever gets in their way. 

Honestly, I feel like it would have been more realistic to give your "Army" some sort of superhero style team name. The Azerothian Avengers, maybe, although I guess that might have caused some copyright issues. 

They certainly seem to act more like a bunch of superheroes than an army. They all act independently of each other for a start and most of their fights seem to be duels and skirmishes rather than formal battles. Then again, I guess modern warfare can be a bit like that. 

I withdraw my earlier objection. "Army" it is.

The gameplay is described as "mobile action strategy" by Blizzard, who ought to know. They also call it "frantic" and sum the whole thing up as "joyful chaos". Having played for about half an hour, I can't fault the language. It's non-stop, crazy action. You can have that if you want, Blizz.

It goes without saying I don't have any hand-held devices capable of playing Warcraft Rumble. Mobile games these days require the kind of processing power that would have put Neil Armstong on the moon five years earlier, had NASA had it in the 60s. 

That's a ludicrous analogy that bears no scrutiny whatsoever, by the way. Please don't scrutinize it. 

The point I'm trying to make is, I can't run any modern mobile games on my Kindle Fire or my aging and faulty phone and don't expect to. That's fine because I don't much enjoy playing mobile games on phones or tablets anyway. I'd rather play them on PC, which is what I did with Warcraft Rumble.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to run. I tried Bluestacks first. It took three goes to get it started and then it crashed during the opening cinematic. I swapped to Nox, which wouldn't run it at all. I went back to Bluestacks and that time it worked on the second attempt, after which it ran flawlessly for as long as I wanted to play, which ended up being about half an hour.

The game is formatted for a phone in portrait mode. It seems most people use their phones in vertical alignment, which mystifies me. I've seen a few GenZ jokes about old people (That's anyone over 25.) using phones in landscape mode so it seems to be an age thing but to me it just seems counter to the way eyes work. 

Either way, as with YouTube Shorts or TikTok, the portrait form factor looks very wrong on a PC monitor. And yet I got used to it surprisingly quickly. It took about five minutes before I forgot about it altogether. Well, almost.

The one reason I wasn't quite able to forget about it completely was the need to scroll up to see the full playing-field. The only time I lost a round was when I was concentrating on the top of the screen without scrolling down to see what was happening at the bottom and my harpoon gun blew up.

Remember when I said there's no Player Character? That might not be strictly true. The harpoon gun is you, basically. It has hit points and when they reach zero, you lose. It has its icon at the top of the screen opposite your opponent. I think that makes it your avatar.

Why they picked an inanimate object as the PC I have no idea. It seems very uncommercial. Wouldn't it have been better to have a little person you could dress and buy expensive cosmetics for in the Cash Shop? 

Gameplay consists of defending your harpoon gun, while trying to kill whoever's at the top of the screen, sending minis down to destroy it. Sometimes they also have a harpoon gun. Sometimes they don't.

There's a tutorial of sorts and although it's mostly tips and suggestions it's enough to get you started. The mechanics are very simple. You pick minis off the bench at the foot of the screen and drop them onto a blue area where they spawn into the gamefield. They then march or fly or waddle off to do whatever it is they do and that's just about the end of your control over them. There are some switches you can flick to get them to change direction but that's it. There may be more options later but I only completed the first zone and that's all I saw.

Minis do a lot of different things. There are melee minis, ranged minis, flying minis, mining minis. There are also Effects like Chain Lightning and minis like the S.A.F.E. Pilot, either of which you can aim at any part of the playing field without them having to travel there first.

There are Meeting Stones you can take control of to allow minis to spawn in at forward staging zones, and the aforementioned switches to send your minis going in different directions. Your melees and ranged minis fight while your miners dig up gold that you use to... I didn't get that part. You need gold though. Of course you do.

Your supply of minis is infinite although sometimes all of them are greyed out. That might be what the gold is for. Not sure. All of them level up and get different abilities and there are points to spend doing that and you can buy more and different types of minis for your army in the store and swap them in and out and the whole thing started out slowly but by the time I got to the end of the first zone there was so much going on at once I felt like my head was going to explode.

Frantic? Chaos? Yes!

Joyful? Not sure. Maybe. 

It was fun but the kind of fun that makes me nervous. I kept wishing there was a pause button so I could stop and consider strategy. In the absence of that I just kept throwing minis at other minis and as I did it I could feel a rhythm building. I can see how gameplay could become both intuitive and addictive. 

The first zone is Elwynn Forest. There are five missions, beginning with Goldtooth and ending with Hogger. I imagine you can see what the idea is already. 

The second zone is Westfall. Now you know for sure!

Even as a WoW casual I can see the appeal here. It's a trip through Azeroth, zone by zone, meeting all your favorites and whacking them in the head, just like in the real game. There's no pretense at a plot or a narrative or any of that dumb stuff that gets in the way of fun. Just pure name recognition and non-stop clicking. It's the Haribo Family Fun Multipack of the Warcraft franchise.

I really enjoyed it. I'm definitely going to play some more. It's frenetic and exhausting but you get rewards win or lose and anyway I only lost once. The final mission in the first zone, the one with Hogger, is flagged "Hard", as you might expect but it wasn't hard at all. I don't know if the game does get genuinely hard later. I don't even know what "genuinely hard" in the context of a mobile game like this would mean.

There's a full PvE campaign involving 70 zones. There are dungeons and raids. You can play solo or co-op. There's PvP. It's basically WoW without all of the stuff that makes WoW meaningful or significant, assuming you think it is or was. 

If I had a phone that could play modern mobile games and if I was minded to play modern mobile games on my phone at all, I might very well play Warcraft Rumble. Then again, if all of that were true, I might play any number of games and I'm not sure I'd pick this one over dozens of others. 

If it was on Steam, I'd play it for sure. A PC port would be nice. I might need a lie down after a few missions but that's okay. My reaction time could use a good work-out, once in a while. 

All told, it looks like a pretty good game if you know the characters and the locations. I'm not convinced it would stand out if you didn't but that's probably not going to be an issue. I don't imagine anyone other than Warcraft fans are going to be playing it. 

You Wait All Year For An Expansion And Then Three Come Along At Once

Now that the dust has settled on Blizzcon '23, I thought I might have a bit of a potter through the various headline announcements. I did kind of pre-empt myself with my post on Tarisland but since that was written before the actual event I think a revisit is justified.

Of course, when I say "headline announcements" I really mean what they said about World of Warcraft. I have never played any other Blizzard games and I don't even know much about them other than what I've read on various blogs over the years. The thing about Blizzard, though, unlike other major players in the online multiplayer gamespace such as NCSoft or Tencent, is that it's very hard to avoid knowing about their games even if you're not particularly interested in them. I can give a precis of the Diablo franchise or Overwatch or Hearthstone even though I've never played any of them. 

Don't ask me about Heroes of the Storm, though. What even is that?

Blizzard, unlike other developers, penetrates the cultural consciousness to an extent not often enjoyed by gaming companies. It's become evident over the past couple of years, as the Blizzard name has become a byword for deceit and depravity, that a large number of people had far more invested in the reputation of the company than would seem rational or predictable to anyone outside the bubble. For many, it seems, Blizzard wasn't just a company that had made some very successful video games; it was some kind of role-model or exemplar.

I'm not sure I was even aware a lot of people felt that way until the roof began falling in. I knew the games were popular because I kept reading people talking about them but people talk about playing things like The Sims and Civilization all the time, too. There's a fairly small set of games that crop up over and over again, in the same way certain TV shows or movies are reference points for everyone of a certain age. You don't have to have watched them to know something about them. I didn't have to have played Diablo to know what it was but I didn't realize it represented the end product of a myth-making process that extended far past the game itself.

It was only when the seemingly endless stream of dire revelations began to spew out of Blizzard like a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment that I began to appreciate the deep, emotional connection the company maintained with with many of its customers. It did seem a little unsettling, even to someone with an arguably unhealthy tendency towards brand loyalty like myself.

As the pile-up of distressing revelations continued, I learned a few things, some of the more interesting of which were the explanations people gave for their deep connection with the company. As is common in other forms of popular media, growing up with certain activities and entertainments forms an associative bond. The things that surround you as you go through formative life experiences for the first time become inextricably linked with the intense feelings created by those experiences.

I'd like to say that being in my twenties when I first started playing video games inoculated me against anything like that but I was forty when I started playing EverQuest and look how that went. What I definitely would say is that at no time did I ever translate my affection - let's not say obsession - with the game into an idolization of the company that produced it. I mean, I knew SoE was my favorite MMORPG developer for a while but I never thought it went any further than their design choices matching my gameplay preferences. It was a marriage of convenience not a love match.

Back in the 2000s, I remember reading with something approaching incredulity the reports of conventions and fan events dedicated to specific games or publishers, SOE's Fan Faire included. For some reason, even though by then I'd spent the better part of two decades going to comics conventions, where I'd sit in a side room or an auditorium listening to writers, artists and editors repeating well-worn anecdotes from glory years spanning the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies, it seemed bizarre to imagine anyone might want to do the same with video games. 

After all, the people who made those were just technicians and administrators, weren't they? It'd be like going to a convention to meet the people who'd designed and built your refrigerator. (Even as I type, it occurs to me there are probably people who do exactly that...)

Eventually I either came to a more nuanced understanding of the factors involved or became assimilated into the gamer hive-mind. Still not sure which. The concept of video game expos and cons and fan gatherings shifted from "weird and a bit scary, if I'm honest" to "no stranger than traction engine meets or renaissance fairs". Which, I admit, is still weird and a bit scary but in a much more ordinary way.

I still wouldn't want to go to one and I don't even want to sit at home and watch a livestream but I do find myself being drawn towards the comfortable thrill of mild anticipation arising from the possibility of hints of things to come. Which is really about as solid as most of this stuff ever gets, making this year's Blizzcon somewhat unusual in that respect.

We didn't just get to learn the name of the next WoW expansion. We got to hear the names of the next three! It's a brave move that I imagine has more to do with setting a marker than with any fundamental change of practice or principle. 

Given the last couple of years, it looks as though the plan is to establish the new Microsoft-owned company as a solid, dependable and even predictable supplier of quality product, to be delivered in a timely and reliable manner. Announcing a trilogy of themed expansions with an explicit but finite narrative arc makes a clear statement of commitment to the game and its players. 

It says we're going to be here for the foreseeable future so you can feel safe to start making your plans with WoW again. We've got you covered for MMORPG entertainment for the next five years, minimum. No need to start looking around. 

The same sentiment is contained in the commitment to only adding mechanics that will hold value over more than a single expansion cycle and the increase in systems that benefit the whole account rather than a single character. These are moves designed to foster a self-sustaining ecosystem, where players feel too comfortable, committed and embedded to find it easy to pick up and move elsewhere. 

The only thing that's hard to understand about such a change of emphasis is how the hell it took them this long to come up with it. Every other MMORPG developer figured out years ago that you need to get players so enmeshed it's harder to leave than it is to stay. Meanwhile, Blizzard has been fostering a culture around expansions that, coupled with one of the slowest development cycles in the genre, actively mitigates against the kind of loyalty and retention they used to be famous for. 

Everyone knows you can just skip the content droughts or even the bad expansions and come back later. Or not come back at all. It's not like you'll miss anything that matters. Every new expansion is a full reset.

The three expansions themselves sound interesting enough, as far as the information available goes. They revolve around known areas of the existing world, not excursions into unknown realms, which is a solid play towards the installed base and that great mass of lapsed players, many of whom, on reading a news item somewhere, will think to themselves "Oh, I remember having some good times there!" and think about maybe coming back to see what's going on.

None of that is going to work on me because I don't have the necessary nostalgia for such an announcement to trigger in the first place. I like WoW but I don't feel closely connected to it. With the Microsoft buyout in place, however, I have given myself permission to revisit Azeroth, and I would certainly not rule out trying one or more of these expansions at some point. Of course, I'd have to re-install the game first...

The widely-expected confirmation of Cataclysm Classic interests me more. As I've said on several occasions, I know just enough about the areas that were disrupted by the original Cataclysm expansion to be curious to see how they've changed, without the significant emotional attachment to the originals that would make me feel disturbed or angry when I find out what's been done to them. And since I mostly never bothered to investigate any of the post-Cataclysm zones when I had the chance, it would all largely be new content for me.

It's always nice to jump into these things along with everyone else, so there's a not-insignificant chance I might resubscribe for a month or two when CataClassic arrives, presumably sometime next spring. I'm fairly curious about the new "Season of Discovery" that's coming to regular Classic much sooner as well, although I'm not sure the timing works for me to join in right away. 

As I commented on Shintar's WoW blog "Priest Without A Cause", this really does seem like Holly Longdale making her influence known. Sony Online Entertainment began the idea of the rolling nostalgia circus as far back as 2008 but it was under Holly at Daybreak that the operation really took off. 

For years now, it's been the practice at EverQuest and latterly at EQII to fire up new nostalgia servers at least once a year, almost always with slightly different rulesets. Go back far enough and it was generally assumed these servers would stay up, if not permanently, then at least until there weren't enough players left on them to justify their continued existence. In more recent times, there's been a much clearer expectation and understanding that they'll only run for a couple of years or so before being merged into a more recent or a more stable server.

Much of that predates now-familiar online gaming concept of "Seasons", a more elegant solution to the concept of shaking things up to keep people interested than booting up whole new servers every five minutes. The Blizzard way of doing things is marrying up nicely with the Daybreak experience, potentially creating a more flexible model for endless experimentation within a fairly fixed framework. It's presumably just what they wanted when they made Holly an offer she couldn't and didn't refuse.

It is ironic that, in both games, the supposedly most traditional part of the game, the nostalgia-driven servers where time, if it doesn't exactly stand still, certainly travels in a closed loop, is also the place where the companies feel most free to experiment. If you tried these kinds of shenanigans on Live or Retail there'd be uproar. It makes me wonder sometimes who the true traditionalists really are.

All in all, I'd say things are looking good for the immediate future of WoW. Certainly a lot better than it seemed they might a year or two back. The last expansion, Dragonflight, while reportedly no resounding success, was certainly no disaster, either. People seemed generally affable towards it and largely still do which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a win for Blizzard. 

Responses to the announcements at Blizzcon '23 also seem generally favorable. No-one's jumping up and down, waving a flag or claiming the glory days are back, or at least not that I've seen, but the tone of the reporting has largely been optimistic and positive, if occasionally grudgingly so. 

Equally, I don't think many are claiming the myriad problems of the past have all miraculously gone away but there's only so long most people can retain a sense of outrage and frankly there are a lot more serious things to be outraged about right now than what happened at a video company a few years ago. The company changing hands may well not fix all or even most of the underlying problems but at least, until and unless evidence of new or ongoing malpractice surfaces, it'll be convenient for many of us to act as though it has.

Finally, there was one announcement at Blizzcon this year that took my fancy. Warcraft Rumble, the new, free-to-play mobile title, is already up and running. I think I might go take a look. After all, it's not every day Blizzard gives us something for nothing. Well, not anything we might actually want, anyway.

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A note on AI images used in this post.

The header is by DreamShaper XL alpha2  with Prompt and Refiner Weights both at 50. The prompt used was "Firiona Vie from EverQuest as a character in World of Warcraft". I used Uncrop to reformat the image to fit the space and it mostly added some foliage. Firiona has dyed her hair for some reason and seems to have grown a second belly-button somehow but otherwise it kind of works.

The second image uses the same source and settings. The prompt was "a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment World of Warcraft". I tried it without the WoW suffix but either way it just gives a volcano. I was kind of hoping for some personifcations of abstract ideas but no such luck.

Tarisland: Round Two

I enjoyed the first closed beta for Tarisland. At the end of the test, I described the game as "bright, cheerful, well-made and fun" but "not original or profound or ground-breaking". I summed it up as "a mainstream MMORPG, aimed at the existing MMO audience" and I thought "it ought to meet most reasonable expectations".

I also mentioned that one one reason I was interested in Tarisland in the first place was as a potential replacement for the disgraced World of Warcraft. The irony of replacing a game I wasn't prepared to play because of the unacceptable moral standards of the company behind it with one tacitly sanctioned by an considerably more questionable government was not lost on me but you have to pick your battles.

The issue has been made moot by the long-delayed completion of Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard. Once again, I'm not going to pretend I believe the change of corporate masthead washes the company as white as the snows suggested by its name but I said I'd be willing to draw a line under the affair if the takeover happened and it has, so I will.

The fact is, I don't play any Blizzard games other than WoW and I play that only sporadically. It's not as though I was making any great personal sacrifice by leaving my account untouched these last couple of years. Still, as is often the case, the bare fact that I "couldn't" play has made me keener to revisit my old characters than I might otherwise have been, although I have to say that now my self-imposed time-out has ended, I haven't actually done anything about it.

As I write, BlizzCon is due to begin in a few hours, at which point we'll probably learn a couple of things that will be pertinent to when and if I resubscribe. Wilhelm gave his predictions yesterday and the two possibilities that interest me are Cataclysm Classic and the next Retail expansion.

I'm just familiar enough with WoW to find the changes made to Azeroth by Cataclysm intriguing but not upsetting. I've seen some of the revamped zones but by no means all of them and although I could obviously explore them in Retail, doing so in something closer to their original context is considerably more appealing.

looks like we get to summon Scooby Doo!

I'm also curious to see if Cataclysm-era WoW is a sweeter spot in terms of gameplay than the current version, which does seem somewhat overcooked. I know just about everyone who isn't married to 2004 seems to believe WoW hit its perfect stride during Wrath of the Lich King but that's when I first played and I thought it kind of fell between two stools at times; a little too easy to feel authentic but a little too awkward to feel cosy. 

I suspect the true sweet spot for me might be Mists of Pandaria but I'm happy to give Cataclysm the benefit of the doubt. Wilhelm predicts an early spring launch, which would suit me nicely. I guess by the time this posts we'll already know if he was right.

Surprisingly, when I got the email from the Tarisland Team this afternoon, telling me about the second Closed Beta Test, I was considerably more excited about the news than I was when the Microsoft deal went through. Tarisland may not be anything groundbreaking but it does have novelty value and I'm very curious to see how it's changed in response to the feedback and metrics from the first test.

I haven't been keeping close tabs on the details but I have seen several press releases, all of which give the impression that most of the alterations they've made have been designed to make the game easier. That seems a little surprising. It certainly didn't stike me as difficult but then I only saw the low end of the open world. I never even set foot in a dungeon.

Changes to PvE, described by the developers as "core gameplay", include making player characters stronger and dungeon bosses weaker. Raids and dungeons are getting some form of specialised loot and there will be selectable difficulty levels for both. There's also a dungeon-finder style "random matching system" intended to "help new players get familiar with the game more quickly and free those who would like to challenge elite dungeons repeatedly from concerns about teaming up."

Of more interest to me is the "Dark Invasion", a recurring open-world event that brings corruption to different parts of the map on a rolling three-day schedule. I'm not clear whether that's three game days or three actual days. I think it must be the latter. Or maybe, as in WoW, they're one and the same. I really ought to remember but I don't.

There are a whole set of separate quests and events that only happen in areas of the map that have been "invaded" and the whole thing reminds me of both Rift and the pre-expansion events in WoW that heralded the coming of Legion. If the Dark Invasion is anything close to either of those it ought to be a good time.

Separate to the invasions are World Bosses, described as "apex predators" and "highly territorial" which is probably as good a lore explanation of why these things stand around, ready to fight anyone who looks at them, as I've ever seen in an MMORPG. Sometimes the simple explanation is the best.

The CBT also brings some new, as yet unspecified, classes and some changes to existing ones. Rangers, who recently got a whole post to themselves on the official website, can look forward to a shake-up to pet taming, something which interests me since that was the class I played last time. Of course, we'll all be starting over from scratch again so maybe I'll play something else next go round.

Always assuming I get an invite, that is. Inclusion in the first beta test does not guarantee or even increase your chances of inclusion in the second. I've signed up again so fingers crossed. If nothing else, betas for big games always make for plenty of ideas for posts.

If anyone feels like joining in, here's the sign-up page and here's the FAQ. See you in beta. Maybe.

Running To Keep Still

One of the big problems with trawling for tunes on YouTube is you never know whether that great song you just found is the one and only good thing that band ever did or just some run of the mill filler that doesn't begin to stack up with their best stuff. When you discover bands or artists organically, following their career as it builds and grows, you just know this stuff without trying but when you come in late, about the best you can do is take a few random samples and hope.

Well, you could go back and listen to everything they've ever done but who has the time for that, right? What I tend to do is try a couple of very recent examples and if those are good, go all the way back to the start to see how much things have changed. I'm aware it's not getting me anywhere but it makes me feel like I've tried and that's about all the self-validation I need these days.

I was thinking about all of that this week because of katie dey's new album, never falter hero girl, which cropped up, cut up into individual tracks, in my YouTube feed because I subbed her channel a short while back after stumbling across Dawn Service, the video for which I included in this post. As I was listening to those, I noticed just how many other katie dey tracks there were and how far back they went and since the new stuff is relatively challenging I started to wonder if she'd mellowed or become more extreme over time.

Judge for yourself. This is the oldest one I could find. It's from 2015.

unkillable - katie dey

And this from four years ago.

No-One's In Control - Devi McCallion and Katie Dey

And then this from the new album.

hoarder - katie dey

I dunno. I feel like it's a bell curve with the softness at the peak. 

Anyway.

Stepping away from the edge (It was close.) let's see what else I have in the bag this time.

Okay, here's me acting my age for once. Eric has a great post about this on his excellent blog, Ericland, which I suggest everyone reads because he's as good a diarist as he is a songwriter and that's saying plenty.

Badhat Town - Wreckless Eric

While we're with Jools, how about this? When I first saw The Last Dinner Party I thought they were going to be a momentary distraction, fated to be remembered only by a few who happened to be looking the right way at the time. And now here they are, hobnobbing with the musical elite on the BBC's premiere serious popular music showcase. Then again, they did pretty much start out opening for the Rolling Stones so I guess it's not that much of a surprise.

My Lady of Mercy - The Last Dinner Party

That's prog, isn't it? I mean, I know progressive rock when I hear it. 

Speaking of support acts, guess who's going to be opening for The Last Dinner Party when they play in the next city over from me at the end of January? Yes, well, don't waste your time because you'll never have heard of them (A sentence I wrote before I realised they'd been all over the music press recently, and even the mainstream press, thanks to an endorsement from Courtney Love, which just goes to show that even when you think you're there when it's happening, you're probably not.) but by a strange co-incidence it's another band I just happened upon entirely co-incidentally and had bookmarked for this feature. 

They're called Picture Parlour, which is a terrible name. I can't even remember why I clicked on them now. It's exactly the sort of name I'd normally skip. Fortunately, for some reason I didn't, which is just as well because they're very good.

Judgement Day - Picture Parlour

I can see why they're on the same bill. It's just that one date, though, which makes me wonder if they're local (They're not. They formed in Manchester.) They sound ludicrously similar to Tranquilty Base Hotel & Casino era Arctic Monkeys and they have the nerve to have a song called Norwegian Wood that isn't a cover so confidence doesn't seem to be an issue.

Obviously I ought to be at this gig, not least since it's happening twelve miles from where I'm sitting, in a venue I used to visit almost monthly but luckily for my nerves it's already sold out. I'm definitely too old for all that. Probably.

What next? I have so much to choose from I can't decide. Someone we've had before, like Charly Bliss or Putochinomaricon or someone new, like yune pinku or Tanukichan?

How about one of each and you can click through for the others?

NPC - Tanukichan

Pretty much had to pick that one, with a title like that, didn't I? I'm always toying with the idea of a whole post of video game related songs (As opposed to songs from video games, which I'll leave to Syp.) There are plenty to choose from, that's for sure. Not so many good ones, maybe, but honestly I haven't really looked into it in depth yet so I oughtn't to assume they're all going to be embarassing.

I Need A New Boyfriend - Charly Bliss

"Cause he never even liked my band". Okay, I think we can all agree he was an idiot. Let's move on.

TWENTYSOMETHING - talker

I do like a racket. Reminds me of Fluffy. I miss Fluffy.

K2 - Melenas

Guess what that one reminds me of? Here's a clue from the comment thread: "Me recuerdan a Stereolab". Okay, that's not so much a clue as a solution.

Notice how I'm keeping the words to a minimum? Supposed to let me fit more songs in. I think there's a fault in that logic somewhere, though. Hey ho. Press on.

Right Here - H31R

I think I prefer Backwards but it has one of those videos where some people are walking backwards while other people are walking forwards and I've seen too many of those. Anyone want to take a stab at the microgenre? Backwards does have the comment "nice teenage engineering drums" if that helps...

Rupert - Birthday Girl

Over the last week or so, Jarret Wolfson posted three unconnected videos of bands with "girl" somewhere in the name which, like bands with "pony" somewhere in the name, is something I rely on as a mark of quality. Sadly, only one of them was supportive of the theory. This one. (As an aside, just a few minutes ago, as I was checking something for the post, I discovered a band called... Pony Girl. And they're great! Imagine if they hadn't been. Also, how the hell did they never come on a recommend before? It's not like I haven't done searches on both words plus "band" before.)

Getting back to Birthday Girl, that's a fine performance but the studio version is even better. Why not be the 56th person to watch it?

Oh, alright then... for the completionists among us, the other two bands were partygirl and Best Girl. I don't think they'll be troubling us again although props for those Twin Peaks costumes.

Soooo many more songs ( I must have added seven or eight just writing this post.)  but I guess I'll have to let them run over again. This is getting out of hand. Gonna finish with a couple or three I rather liked, even though they're really not doing anything we haven't heard before. Nothing wrong with doing something familiar and doing it well.

worlds greatest emoter - bar italia

God, it feels like the last thirty or forty years never happened sometimes. I really like bar italia even though I think I probably shouldn't. I'm gonna get the album, at least I will if someone picks it off my wishlist. I wonder if that's the real ending? I guess I'll find out. 

OTTERPOP - Kevin Abstract

That's just a teaser for the album that comes out in a couple of days. It's called Blanket. He's been dropping tracks from it all week and they're all great. I never really payed any attention to Brockhampton. Guess I'm going to have to start.

And finally...

I Saw Water - Joyce Manor

I really love Joyce Manor. They're so tight while keeping it so loose. It's a trick and a half, that's for sure. The original by Tiger's Jaw is fine but this is sublime. Tiger's Jaw returned the favor with a cover of Constant Headache, which was sweet of them. I bet it's a great scene to be part of.

And much though I'd like to carry on I think that's enough. More than enough, some might say.

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Notes on the use of AI in this post:

Just the header image, which is by DreamShaper XL Alpha2 at an overall prompt weight of 50% and a refiner weight of 10%, since NightCafe now recommends refinement should be low or zero for this particular model.

The prompt was "never falter hero girl glitchcore". I tried three variations and they were all great. Could have used any of them.

Legends Of The Fall... And Rise

When I started writing this post abut Legend of Edda: Pegasus, I found it surprisingly hard to come up with the usual, scene-setting background information I'd normally drop in to the opening paragraph, when writing about a game I didn't expect most people reading would know very well. It wasn't impossible. Just difficult. And certainly a lot more time-consuming than I'd expected.

To be honest, most of what I needed was in the same MassivelyOP news story that drew my attention to the game in the first place but you never want to rehash your primary source. That looks cheap. You need to show at least a little evidence of original research.

Of course, for the last decade or so "original research" has mostly meant skimming a Wikipedia page. Everybody does it but it's especially easy for anyone writing about the kind of things that get traction here. Even after all these years, Wikipedia is still overstocked with articles on popular culture. If you want to check every line-up change in an indie band that broke up fifteen years ago or get a timeline of every time a C-list superhero swapped their costume, Wikipedia most likely has you covered.

I've always found it a highly reliable source of information on MMORPGs, at least as far as launch dates, closures and changes of ownership are concerned, so it was a bit of a shock to find there's no Wikipedia page at all for Legends of Edda. Not so much as a stub.

Luckily, I know how to google. Here's a piece from Gamesindustry.biz that tells you more than you almost certainly want to know about the game as it was back in 2010, when it was just about to enter closed beta. It explains exactly why I never tried this free-to-play title when it launched later that same year:

"Legend of Edda is a hardcore PVP MMO, with a deceivingly cute interface. The game features fast-paced intense battle featuring a lot of very powerful PVP, and large scale RVR battles."

There you go. Hardcore PvP. That'll put you off every time. 

Too cute to kill. Oh, I meant the mobs but yes, I take your point!

And it would have put me off, I'm sure, if I'd ever known about it. In fact, I barely remembered LoE when I saw it in that MOP piece last week. It rang the vaguest of bells but I'd be lying if I claimed I recalled anything about the game, other than thinking I'd heard the name somewhere before.

I certainly didn't know it had closed down twice already, the first time just a year or so after it launched and then seemingly for good a couple of years after that. Apparently it was the subject of some concerted hacking and illegal RMT that publisher GameCampus (Probably best-known for the golf MMO Shot Online.) couldn't handle. 

Hacking and cheating in a hardcore PvP game. Who could possibly have predicted that?

The game stayed offline for years until the original Korean games developer EyaSoft inexplicably decided to relaunch it in July 2023, with the help of games publisher IndigoWare. EyaSoft is probably best-known, if it's known at all, for the very short-lived (2011-2012) "gypsy-themed" (?!) MMO Iris Online or the slightly longer-lived Luna Online (2009-2012), a game that sounds remarkably similar, apart from the Romany trappings. 

Then there was the even more obscure Titan Online, an mmorpg based on Chinese mythology that also launched in 2009 and presumably closed soon after, although no-one anywhere in the world seems to have cared enough to record the event. EyaSoft was really knocking those F2Ps out back then.

IndigoWare is a Brazilian company, which explains why the two languages available in Legend of Edda: Pegasus are English and Portuguese. The publisher seems to release games exclusively through Steam. Legend of Edda is its only MMORPG. 

Well, this looks nice...

Other than by the games its developed, I have no idea what kind of organisation EyaSoft is. The company's LinkedIn page doesn't seem to have been updated for well over a decade and I can't see much evidence of activity between the second closure of LoE and this sudden resurgence of interest. Maybe Titan Online is still operating in China or South Korea and they've been busy with that.

It seems they have - or possibly had - plans to bring back Iris Online too. There's a Steam page for a new version called Iris Online: The World. The game is listed there as "Coming Soon" although it's not available in an English translation so I imagine you'd need some Portuguese to play it. 

You'd also need a miracle because there's a big, orange warning:

Notice: Iris Online: The World is no longer available on the Steam store.

That's a shame. I was curious to try the "intricate Tarot Card system" that allows players "to have their Tarot Cards read by a fortune-telling NPC". You don't get that in World of Warcraft.

Until and unless that seemingly abandoned project resurfaces, I guess I'll just have to settle for Legends of Edda: Pegasus. I downloaded it on Steam yesterday, registered the required account with Eya Soft and logged in to make a character.

The game is exactly as I expected, given that at that point I hadn't yet realised I was letting myself in for a "Hardcore PvP" experience. I played for an hour last night and another hour this morning. I'm level six and there's been no sign of any PvP so far although I guess it's early days yet.

My very loose understanding is that the game is based around dungeons rather than outdoor zones and presumably the PvP happens indoors, although really who knows? There's a drop-down menu on the very good map that gives a long list of dungeons with their appropriate level ranges and possibly allows for instant movement between them, although I haven't tested it.

Excuse me Ma'am. I think you were expecting some pipes?

My gameplay so far has been absolutely identical to the opening levels of every South Korean anime-style F2P mmorpg I've ever played, which is quite a few. I've been running around town picking up simple quests from guards and shopkeepers, all of whom have either had tools or crafting materials stolen by monsters while they were out travelling or who have incompetent subordinates who need help keeping the city safe from those same tool-stealing monsters.

Almost inevitably, there was a quest chain involving the unrequited - and indeed unwanted - affection of one townsperson for another, in this case the local vault-keeper and a nearby shopkeep. She'd noticed him eying her up from a distance and understandably wanted him to stop, so naturally she asked the first passing stranger to find out what he was up to and put a stop to it. 

As always, that led to some to-and-fro in which I played the part of the young boy in the Go-Between. I'd love to be able to say Legends of Edda is a different country and they do things differently there but they really don't. I will say that it's surprising how the gift of fifteen raw, untreated skins, freshly flayed from the backs of a bunch of mad pigs, will turn a girl's head and quite possibly her heart. I'm not sure it would work that way on me.

Legends of Edda may not be very original but at least in the early stages it is extremely polished. It looks very good for its age, the animations are excellent, combat feels solid and satisfying and everything works as it should. 

The UI is pleasing to look at and intuitive to use. The English translation is solid if unspectacular. Quests are easy to follow and pleasnat to complete. None of them take very long or require a great deal of travel. 

The map, which as I said earlier is excellent, shows everything you need with exemplary clarity. What's more, you can click on both the full and mini maps and have your character trot to the spot you've marked. This is arguably even better than full auto-questing in the way it effectively removes the tedium of finding your way from place to place while still allowing you to feel like it's you doing most of the intellectual heavy-lifting.

Everything happens at a brisk pace except for the actual running, which is oddly sedate. Every mob you need to kill is present in numbers although near-instant respawns mean you can almost stand still and kill what might as well be the same monster over and over to make your quota. Quest drops are guaranteed and time-to-kill is measured in seconds so what seem at first like daunting numbers - twelve, fifteen - take no time at all to knock off. 

Every mob drops loot. Sometimes it's just gold but often it's health and mana potions or wearable armor and wieldable weapons. There are crafting mats and other utilities too but no trash loot. It's very satisfying. When I got an upgrade to my basic bronze sword and wooden shield, I felt positively cheery.

The whole thing just jogs along. I had a great time. If I hadn't played a dozen games like this before I might even have felt a little excited about my future prospects. There are some solid-looking progression mechanics involving skills and abilities, you can upgrade your armor, there's crafting and pets and mounts. That's all the good stuff you want in an MMORPG, right there.

It's interesting to play these old games, the ones that failed at launch but come back a decade later, ready to go again. Especially when you compare them with the numerous modern equivalents going through alpha and beta and Early Access. I played Rose Online around this time last year and very much enjoyed it. I can easily see myself putting a similar fifteen or twenty hours into Legends of Edda before drifting away.

Aww, come on! I just want your skin!

By contrast, I rarely manage more than two or three sessions in any of the would-be successors of these games. I consider myself more than averagely tolerant of unfinished games, works in progress and even bug-ridden messes but the more I revisit some of these older titles, the more I notice just how polished they are. They have bugs, sure, but they're rare. Much more importantly, they have systems that work and content that's complete. They also know what they want to be and don't try to do too much or be everything to everyone.

When considering why they failed or just faded I have to suspect a large part of the problem was just that there were so many of them. There must be scores if not hundreds of competent, formulaic MMORPGs in which everything pretty much works but nothing very much stands out. 

It's strange how many keep coming back, although Legends of Edda is unusual in that the reported reasons for its closure were external. Not many MMORPGs close down because the developers can't handle the riotous attentions of their players. Mostly they shut because they don't have any players so they aren't making any money.

I hope Legends of Edda: Pegasus fares better than its predecessor. I suspect a more likely fate than a hyperactive and delinquent playerbase is going to be very little interest at all, something that's just about guaranteed to sink a game that relies on the kind of player interaction necessary to keep a PvP title, hardcore or otherwise, in business. 

For now, though, if you're looking for a light-hearted, relaxing, semi-old school MMORPG experience, you could do worse. Until the PvP kicks in, anyway.

If it ever does.

Weasel Do!

When last I posted about the latest Prime Gaming monthly offers, I agreed with Nimgimli in the comments that it might be better in future if I stuck to talking about the games and freebies I was thinking of claiming, rather than trying to get a cheap laugh out of the ones I wasn't. As he also pointed out, very gently, by pulling back the veil on Amazon's own coverage, I'd removed any newsworthiness my Prime posts might have had, leaving the commentary as the sole reason for their continued existence. If I couldn't make that work, there really wouldn't be a lot of point carrying on with the feature.

Luckily for my posting average, this month's selection is a lot better than it has been of late. Or maybe it just falls fortuitously closer to my tastes and preferences for once. There were several games I thought I might play and some decent in-game freebies I felt were most definitely worth grabbing.

For Guild Wars 2, a game I actually logged into today for the first time in months (Not just to claim my Prime freebies either, but more of that in another post, perhaps.) there's a Pirate Cosmetic Bundle. We all like pirates, right?  Those over-romanticized little sociopaths! They're so cute, what with that funny way they talk and their parrots and the missing limbs and all. Dontcha just love the drunken, flithy, murderous little weasels?

Speaking of missing limbs, that's what you get. The bundle comprises two "skins" and a hat. The first skins turns one of your hands into a hook and the other lops off a leg and replaces it with a wooden one. Dismemberment chic!

In Blade & Soul, which I swear I'm going to play again some day soon, there's a bunch of generally useful stuff including a thousand gold. I wish I could remember of that's a lot or a little. I mean, it sounds like a lot but in some games I've played, a thousand gold wouldn't buy you breakfast.

New World has a similar offer, minus the money but plus a "Skull Candleholder" for your house. I also snagged last month's pack with its "Tall Ivy Covered Trellis". 

New World is another game I really want to get back to playing. The problem is, I'm not really playing any games to speak of at the moment. I can't seem to find the time, what with all the dog walking, gardening and general going outside that seems never to end. I'm counting on the eventual arrival of winter to keep me indoors long enough to get some proper gaming done.

Last and most definitely not least, this month's World of Warcraft freebie is an actual flying mount - the Armored Bloodwing. With the completion of the Microsoft acquisition, the criterion I vowed would have to be realised before I'd play WoW again has been met, so I might soon be riding this fine beast. 

Or maybe not. If I do set foot in Azeroth again it'll most likely be by way of the extended Free Trial and I don't think that's going to allow me to play a character who can fly. Still, I've claimed it on the off chance. Can't really turn down a free fying mount. That'd just be rude.

So much for the freebies. Obviously, there are literally dozens of others for games I don't play but you can check those out for yourself.

On to November's free games, which don't look at all bad. There are nine, of which the highlight is probably November 16's Knights of the Old Republic. On the down side, everyone who ever wanted this almost certainly already has it. I know I have. On the up, even though I own it, I've never played it. If I ever get the urge it's going to be a lot easier to fire up this version than to try and get my old DVDs working.

Before that, on November 2 there's a post-apocalyptic, open-world vehicle-based FPS called RAGE 2 I might claim even though I know I'll probably never play the thing. It does look pretty, so long as your idea of prettiness includes a blasted wilderness full of psychotic bikers. The go-to description seems to be Mad Max crossed with Fallout crossed with Borderlands, which weirdly tells me all I need to know even though I've never played or seen any of them. I think that's called cultural bleedthrough.

Skipping over Centipede Recharged on November 9, the very next day, November 10, brings something a bit more interesting by way of Evan's Remains, described as "a mystery-thriller puzzle adventure". I'm in two minds about this one. On the one hand, it looks charming and has an interesting premise; on the other, it's a form of platformer, although supposedly one based more on solving logic puzzles than on fine motor skills. Again, one I'll most likely claim then never play.

Arriving on the same day as KotOR, presumably as a form of counter-programming, there's the intriguing Behind The Frame: The Finest Scenery. Supposedly "inspired by Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli visuals" this is interactive fiction where the story unfolds through brush-strokes. It'll be something different for me and it looks gorgeous so the plan is to claim it and play it. We'll see if it happens.

More in my usual line is November 22's The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos. Described as "an adventure filled with surprises and silliness", it's an isometric RPG along the vague lines of Baldur's Gate or Divinity:Original Sin, only much less ambitious and not anything like as serious. Humor in RPGs is always very hit or miss and the voice acting in the trailer is verging on the embarassing but I can always turn the sound down. It has a story mode, too, which means I might even be able to finish it - always assuming I want to.

Finally, there's the intriguingly-named Orten Was The Case, which makes itself available on November 30. It's "a single player, lore driven, detective/puzzle adventure game with a time-loop mechanic" and a really odd graphic style that makes it look like one of those  European animated shorts I used to have to sit though sometimes before the main feature at my local art-house cinema back in the 90s. 

Even more oddly, it's not yet available. The website sends you to Steam, where you can play a demo but the full game only has a "Coming Soon" tag. I don't know if that means Prime has an exclusive or if the game is set to launch earlier in the month. Either way, I'm going to claim it and most likely play it, too.

Apart from a couple I didn't mention because I have no interest in them whatsoever, that's the lot. Much better than last time, I think. One or two there that I'm quite looking forward to. 

If I do play them and they're of any interest, no doubt I'll have more to say. Until then, that's Prime Gaming for November.

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A note on the AI used in this post.

Just the astonishingly good masthead this time. Once again, I used DreamShaper XL alpha2, weighted at 50%.

The prompt, taken from the post, was "Pirates as drunken, filthy, murderous little weasels. Studio Ghibli". I had to add the prefix "Pirates as" because my initial prompt, using just " filthy, murderous little weasels" resulted in this, which is cute but not exactly what I was expecting.

I mean, do they look either filthy or muderous to you? They're not even fricken' weasels! Great image, though.