My Top Five Free Prime Gaming Picks For June

How d'you like the clickbait title? I guess if I really wanted views I should have said "All The Games Amazon's Giving Away For Free In June Stink - Except For These Five!" or something like that. I do still have some self-respect left though...

And in any case, this is more than a little late, seeing as how I got the email telling me about the June slate of free games on Amazon Prime Gaming over a week ago but what is it they say? Better late than after the horse has bolted the door or something like that. Or maybe it was never look a gift post in the eye. One of those.

Anyway, I did want to mention it because it seemed like a considerably more interesting offer than last month's. I don't think I claimed a single game in May. I have to say it doesn't say a lot for your selection process, when people won't even take what you're giving away for free. Of course, that might just be me. I do have very sophisticated tastes, I'll have you know, as must be obvious to everyone by now.

Enough waffling to up the word count. So, what games did I take? It goes without saying, I hope, that I have no idea. I mean, it was a few days ago now. Who can be expected to remember anything that far back? Luckily, Amazon sends a confirmatory email every time you claim anything so I don't have to go grubbing through Good Old Games and the Epic Store to find what I took.

Oh, and this is handy! They even give you a nice little picture of the game with a little icon to say which platform you claimed it on. That's very thoughtful, especially since I can steal those and use them here. Saves me scrubbing around for some screenshots from the website. (Anyone getting the idea this is some sort of cut-price, low-effort filler can just go try and come up with five posts a week themselves and see how they like it. Not the people already doing that, I don't mean you... or the ones who post every single day, either... all of you can have a good laugh if you want but I bet you've all been here...)

Back to the games. I'll take them in the order I claimed them. It would be easy to read something into that but it was most likely just the order they appeared in the original email.

Just for fun, let's see how much I can remember about any of these before I go look them up. I did read the descriptions at the time or I wouldn't have known which I wanted, so I ought to have at least a vague idea. There were far more games available than the five I picked, though, and I read some of those as well, so there could be bleed-through.

Hmm. I think this one's a turn-based rpg set in the Warhammer universe. (Edit: It is!) More than that I couldn't say but I'm quite impressed I could remember that much. It does look a bit Warhammery but then so do a lot of things. 

I bought the Warhammer RPG Rulebook when it was first published and GM'd some of the campaign that came with it or that came out at the same time. It went down quite well but I don't think we finished it. Then I played the Warhammer MMORPG for a few months but only a year or two after it appeared. Mrs Bhagpuss and I did an awful lot of battlegrounds and I think we got into the thirties or maybe the forties before we quit. I know we never got as far as the cap.

Other than that, I have no experience with or affection for the IP. I do like a good turn-based RPG, though. 

I seem to remember this is a Point&Click adventure. And that's just about all I do remember. I was going to go through all of them without looking up any details and then grade myself at the end to see how well I did but clearly that's not going to work. 

Ok, so I checked and I was right. This is going surprisingly well. It's a "throw-back, retro-inspired, point and click adventure with chunky and beautiful pixel art" according to Steam, where it has a "Very Positive" rating, albeit from fewer than a hundred reviews. 

It also says "Inspired by games like Myst and Riven with a dash of the LucasArt adventures of the 90s, The Abandoned Planet is sure to scratch that old-school adventure game itch.", which very nearly put me off taking it even for free. I did not like Myst or Riven at all and I find almost all LucasArt adventures intensely annoying. I'm hoping those are just generic touchstones for "popular puzzle-based adventure games" and not actual templates the dev team followed. Looks pretty, anyway.

Pretty sure I know this one. It's another Point & Click adventure, set in the 1920s, in which a flapper finds herself partnering with Oscar Wilde's ghost to solve a mystery. Now, that's a solid elevator pitch.

More than that, though, I can't say without looking it up. So let's look it up. 

Ooh! It's more interesting even than that! 

"In 1921, young French artist Jennifer Chevalier becomes embroiled in death, espionage and revolution, assisted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde. A hand-drawn Point & Click adventure with a unique comic book inventory design. " 

Yep, there's "comic book inventory design".  Worth claiming just to find out what the heck that means. Comic books aren't famous for inventory management and I find it hard to see where the connection comes in so that'll be interesting. I note it doesn't say she's a flapper but just look at the cloche hat...

Now, this one is set in the French Revolution. Go on! Ask me how I knew! That makes it the second game in the set with a French setting. Other than that I got nothing. Let's ask Steam.

Well, stap me! I would have been a long time guessing this one. It's "a deck-builder roguelite inspired by the French Revolution and body horror." Was I drunk? I don't much like deck-builders, I have never knowingly played a "roguelite" and I have a total aversion to body horror. Why the heck did I pick it?

I can remember, as it happens, or rather it's coming back to me now. I thought it might be time I gave roguelikes a try, seeing as how I'm always reading about them but never have played one. 

Astute readers will have spotted that I said "roguelikes" not "roguelites". That's not a typo. I realise now that I misread it the first time. Not that it would have made much difference. I haven't played any roguelites either so the principle still applies. 

As for the body horror part, though, I missed that completely. Had I spotted it, I very likely would have passed and now I've seen it the chances of my ever playing Liberte have gone down by an order of magnitude.

And finally...

Nope. No idea. Don't have clue one. It could be just about anything from that generic name and picture. Going to have to look it up.

Ah! It's a dungeon crawler! Now I remember! Also it's famous, if ancient. "During the golden days of action RPGs, FATE was a powerhouse, winning runner-up for PC Magazine’s Role-Playing Game of the year. Popular enough to spawn 3 sequels, this was one of the premier dungeon crawlers of its time."

You'd think I'd have heard of it then. Maybe if they hadn't given it such a bland, unmemorable title...

Still, probably going to be quite good, of its kind. Not that I was a fan of action RPGs back in their heyday. I bought Dungeon Seige when it came out, thought it was pointless and boring and never bothered with the genre again. I think when I claimed this one, I was thinking of modern ARPGs, which I like a lot more.

"Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam though, from almost four thousand reviews, so somebody likes it.

That's my pick of what's available so far for June and not bad at all, I'd say. If you want to see the full line-up, it's on the Prime Gaming blog. 

Other than the above, it includes one of the Thief games (Again, bought the original when it came out, didn't like it, never played a stealth game since.) and one called "Dark Envoy" that's not available for another week or so that I might claim then. That's some kind of party-based RPG.

And finally, it seems I was mistaken when I slagged off the May collection. On closer inspection, some of the ones I picked in June were actually from last month. Maybe I just didn't even look at May's choices.

Someone ought to do a monthly blog post about this stuff so we'll all know what there is! 

Crystal Of Atlan: Further First Impressions

As you might surmise from the picture above, I have been making some progress in Crystal Of Atlan. I'm Level 27 now. This is as much a surprise to me as anyone. I didn't expect to be playing the game much at all after downloading it on a whim, especially since I'm currently not doing a lot of gaming. And anyway, if I was going to pick the pace back up, wouldn't there be a whole load of games more deserving of my time than this one? 

Well, yes, probably. For a start, Wuthering Waves is far more nuanced, sophisticated and aesthetically satisfying and don't I keep going on about how good the story is there? That game is getting a huge content drop in a few days and I haven't even started the storyline from the last one yet.

So, why am I playing CoA instead of WW? I don't think there's a very straightforward answer to that. It's new, of course, which always helps. It's linear and straightforward, which could be a problem later on but which, at the start, makes the game very accessible and easy to follow. 

It's pretty to look at at and while the visual style says anime, the writing feels a lot like a good old Saturday morning cartoon series. The story skips along cheerily and the characters are broadly drawn but with plenty of personality. 

The witch of the mines. She's a baddie. Or is she?

Structurally, there's just enough choice to make it feel as though you have some agency but really it's a straight through-line you're happy to follow. Everything progresses through a series of "dungeons" that a helpful bot teleports you to on request. There's no traveling as such but you can wander around the fairly large and very attractive non-combat areas to get a sense that you're somewhere with substance.

I'm not entirely sure that there isn't some kind of open-world element to the game, anyway. I was wandering around the city the other day, when I bumped into a zone line that popped up a warning about the next area being some kind of combat-enabled area. It made it sound as if there was an open-world area beyond, where PvP might happen, but I was too chicken to go through and find out. 

I could google it but for the moment I'm in that honeymoon phase, where I want everything to surprise me, so I haven't. That's always a sign of a well-designed game and CoA is nothing if not well-designed.

The most significant reason I find myself wanting to log into this game at the moment, rather than any of the dozen or more others I could be playing, is the torrent of new systems and mechanics that just keep on coming. This is true of most games and accounts for a great deal of the excitement and enthusiasm I have for starting over in new ones all the time. 

Classic example; the game told me how to change my appearance and I did but then I still looked the same after. Now I have to figure out how it works, which is my idea of a good time.

It's absolutely an Explorer Archetype thing and if there was ever any doubt that that's my segment of the pie chart, this blog, with its never-ending drip-feed of First Impressions and game reports from the early and mid-levels of games I never go on to play at endgame, proves it. 

I'm sure the exact same aspects of this and many other games, the long introductions where you learn how the game works and what you have to do to survive and prosper in the world that's being revealed, are the very parts that drive so many new players to give up and log out, never to return. A lot of people just want to get on and play the damn game, not fiddle-faddle about with ninety-seven different ways to do stuff they don't care about and never will but for me it's like unwrapping a huge pile of presents under the tree.

And modern F2P titles really do go nuts with the things they give you to do. After a while it does indeed become too much and I'm noticing almost as many burnout stories cropping up in blog posts over there being just too damn many things to do in games these days as there used to be about how much of our lives had to be given over to getting to the point where we could do anything much at all.

The big difference I see between the two eras is that for the most part, the filler developers use to keep us busy these days is far more avoidable than it used to be. The open-world RPGs that are broadly replacing MMOs scarcely seem to respect our time any more than EverQuest or the rest ever did but they also seem a lot more amenable to casual play. You can spend a ton of time and money on them, sure, but you can entertain yourself very nicely in short bursts for free, too.

Building up your vinyl collection: A lot cheaper here than in real life.

How long that will persist in Crystal of Atlan I'm not so sure. One of the main reasons I'm so positive about Wuthering Waves is that so far it's proved not just possible but quite easy to keep up with the main storyline simply by... playing through the main storyline. 

Unlike Genshin Impact, generally acknowledged as the founder of and trend-setter for the genre, a game I liked but had to give up after a few weeks because the fights just got too hard, or even Noah's Heart, where I lasted a lot longer but eventually fell off the main story for the same reason, combat in storyline instances in Wuthering Waves has actually gotten easier as time's gone on. I don't know how long that can last, especially given that the whole business model presumably relies on players wanting to get the latest Resonators for some practical purpose, not just to fill out their collections, but I'm very much there for it so long as it does.

In Crystal of Atlan, though, I can already see the fights becoming more challenging and requiring more skill and I'm not even out of the introductory phase just yet. I wouldn't say I was still in the tutorial but the lessons are still coming even though the story is fully engaged. 

NuVerse make a big thing of how their game isn't a Gacha but of course it is. The swerve is that you don't roll for characters to do the fighting for you, so in that respect I do think it's quite likely the impact of increased difficulty will fall on players' skill instead of  their wallets. 

I know it looks like one but that's not a skill tree. It's the gear progression table and there's a screen like that for every slot on the paper-doll. I mean... why??

Unfortunately for me, I don't have much in the way of skill when it comes to action RPGs and perhaps worse I have a very low tolerance indeed for skill trees, builds and all that kind of nonsense. I never liked it much but the longer I've had to put up with it, the more I'm beginning to see it in much the same way other players see slow leveling or lengthy travel or long blocks of quest text or endless cut scenes: an annoying waste of my time that I should be able to click through or that the game should just take over and do for me.

It's more than just a lack of interest or enthusiasm on my part. I actively dislike having to read skill descriptions and I really, really hate having to try and figure out which one has synergy with which other one. I just want to hit stuff with a big stick or shoot it with a gun and leave it at that. 

So long as I can get away with button-mashing I'll put up with it but once I have to start thinkiong about sequences and putting combos together it all starts to become work. And if I'm going to do work, I either want to get paid for it or have something solid to show for it at the end. 

Beating a boss, just so I can go on to beat the next boss, doesn't motivate me in the same way painting the kitchen wall does. I really don't want to paint the kitchen wall either but at least when I've done it I have a better-looking kitchen and the comfortable knowledge that I won't have to do it again for a few years.

Never mix it with the maid.

Given the way Crystal of Atlan is constructed, I would imagine my time with it will be short for that reason alone. I'm guessing that when the time comes that I can't beat a boss in a storyline dungeon my ability to progress will be put on hold until I figure out how to do it, which I won't because I'll just stop and play something else instead.

Or maybe that won't happen. Maybe I'm negatively projecting. Maybe the devs have already thought about that. There was this odd thing the other day when I was playing...

I was right in the middle of a very hectic fight in a dungeon when Beryl came bouncing in, barking and jumping up at me and instead of carrying on with the fight I stopped and took her out to play. When I came back, my character had died (I literally abandoned her in the middle of a fight so it would have been very odd if she hadn't.).

It was the first time I'd died in the game so I wasn't sure what would happen but I figured at least I'd have to start the instance over from the last save point. Instead, I just ended up back at the questgiver, who congratulated me on a job well done, as though I'd finished the whole dungeon, and the story just carried on. I haven't deliberately gotten myself killed again to test it but wouldn't it be nice if the game just patted you on the head every time you died and gave you a pass to the next stage?

Spoiler: She's down but she's not going to stay down.

Yeah, I doubt that's going to happen. I think the way it's supposed to go is that you start engaging with all the many improvement and enhancement mechanics they've been introuducing you to over the first twenty-five levels and learn to git gud.

I've been shown how to upgrade my armor with spare parts I can get by dis-assembling my old stuff. I've been shown how to socket circuits to make it more powerful. I've been shown how to spend points in the many talent trees. I've been tested to see which Class specialization I'd like to take up and given a whole new skill tree for that. 

I've been introduced to the idea of hiring pets to help me. Pets who have their own stats and skill trees and the whole shebang. You can collect pets and you can have two up at once. And then there are the "cosmetic" clothes, the outfits and what-not. Those turn out to have stats, too. And you can collect those as well. At least they don't seem to have talent trees.

Hmm. "Fleets"? I seem to have missed that one...

It's early days and there's a lot I don't understand yet but it does appear to me that the whole "We don't do Gacha" thing falls apart quite fast when you spot that both pets and costumes, for both of which there most definitely is a gacha mechanic, directly affect your combat-worthiness. Not that I care, since I won't be paying for pulls, but it does seem a tad shifty.

Then again, maybe if you can actually play the game - if you have the knowledge and motivation to figure out a good build and the speed and dexterity to use it effectively - the added boost from pets and cosmetics is just icing on the I Know What I'm Doing cake.

I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not afraid to admit it. But I'm having plenty of fun all the same. We'll see how long that lasts.

Popism

Now... am I going to do that Crystal of Atlan post that got bumped from the schedule yesterday or should it be the music post I was saving for Saturday? Hmm...

I could flip for it... 

Nah, let's stick with the program and do the music one. I like a bit of a racket on a Saturday. Don't we all?

So, anyway, it turns out that I haven't been doing the homework, thanks to all the goofing off with my AI pals, which means pickings are thin. But only in volume. In quality they're thick as heck. I nearly said thick as milk but that's kind of a queasy simile. Then again "thick as heck" is just plain assonance with no semantic value at all, so...

Geez, just try to stay on topic for five minutes, can't you? No-one wants a repeat of yesterday's fiasco...

One thing I have noticed, which I'm leaning towards being an artefact of not spending so much (Read: any.) time crusing the back alleys of YouTube, is that everything I'm hearing right now is Big Pop. And I am not complaining about it.

It bears some repeating, I think, how what goes by "pop" these days would easily have passed for something else back in my younger days. Half of it would have been fricking avant-garde and about as likely to get airplay on an AM station as Bartok. (Not that I could pick a Bartok tune out of a line-up but you get the drift.)

I've been idly watching a few fragments from Barcelona's Primavera festival these last couple of days, just because it's being livestreamed on Amazon Prime and it's right there in front of me. That's ostensibly a rock festival, if the term still has meaning, and who are the headliners across the three days? Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. Not sure I see the point of genre boundaries much anymore. It either bangs or it doesn't.

I'm not one hundred per cent sure whether Sabrina Carpenter's current single bangs or not because it's hard to concentrate on the music when I'm watching what has to be the best video I've seen this year. It's a complete road movie in a shade under four minutes. I'd love to see the full two hour version.

Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter

Do yourself a favor. Even if you can't stand Sabrina or the kind of music she makes, watch the video. Put some of the sort of music you like on instead or sing the national anthem or whatever. You'll be missing a treat if you don't.

It also made me wonder... do people hitch-hike any more? They certainly don't over here and haven't done since the 'nineties. You might see the odd driver with plates under their arm, waiting for another professional to stop and do them a courtesy but that doesn't count. Other than that, if I see one person with their thumb out every six months, I'd be surprised.

I used to do a very great deal of hitching. I hitched from University to home and back, a couple of hundred miles each way, almost every week for a year, before my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife, moved up to join me. I hitched for my summer holidays several years in a row, starting out at the end of the closest motorway and finishing in Spain. I didn't stop until I was in my mid-20s, when it started to get embarrassing, having to tell drivers I was in full-time employment and not a penniless student.

I loved hitching. One of my favorite things I've ever done. I really missed it for many years after I stopped, although I'm about over it now. I wonder why no-one does it any more? 

 Leave Me Alone -  Reneé Rapp

Is Reneé Rapp pop? Apparently, although it really shows how definitions have changed. This sounds like the Beastie Boys to me and no-one ever called them pop. Well, no-one who knew what they were talking about.

I think this is Reneé's first time here on the blog, which seems odd. I had seen her name around but I can't recall ever hearing any of her work before. Apparently she has "a reputation", which was news to me but which supposedly just means she lacks "media training". I thought all pop stars got that by law.

Fame Is A Gun - Addison Rae

Reneé Rapp cut her teeth on YouTube before going into theater, movies and TV. Addison Rae bypassed all of that traditional grind and just went straight to TikTok. Once again, everything says she's a pop singer but if this was on Soundcloud with a DIY video on YouTube that some friend of hers shot on an iPhone, would anyone be asking questions? Sounds like indie pop electronica to me. Maybe it's just me that's obsessed with these definitions...

Also, what's with all the tortoises? Are tortoises pop now?

Sue Me - Audrey Hobert

Audrey Hobert is pop too. I guess she sounds it. Maybe? She's pals with Gracie Abrams and Gracie's definitely pop so that tracks. Audrey is also a singer-songwriter, though, and so, I think, are most of the pop stars these days. And they're good at it, too.

This really sounds like singer-songwriter territory to me. It's almost like Courtney Barnett or something. I mean, if you close your eyes and squint.

The big strike against Audrey being truly pop, though, is obviously that she keeps all her clothes on for the video. I mean, what pop star does that nowadays?

 And Audrey, you may or may not be pleased to hear, is the last of the pop princesses for this week. But not the last we're going to hear about pop music itself.

Maslow - Pop Music Fever Dream

I think the day a song denying the validity of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs tops the singles charts is the day we have to declare pop music over forever. Fortunately, I don't believe there's much chance of that happening and certainly not with this chirpy little number. They're going to need another three orders of magnitude of views for the video on YouTube for a start. And I bet they don't have their TikTok strategy figured out, either.

Is he done with the "pop" schtick yet? Nope. One more...

Girl Band Starter Pack - Panic Shack

Okay, there is literally not one pop thing about this one except that girl bands were a huge pop deal a few years ago. This really needs to be played very loud so it's a shame the upload on YouTube seems to have been set to half volume. I heard it over headphones first time and that was much better.

Young - Little Simz

I guess it's video week. Until the Sabrina Carpenter arrived, this was my favorite video of the year. Also one of the best lyrics. Don't be looking at my face weird.

1800-Call-Me-Back - M(h)aol

Ain't no-one calling M(h)aol pop, that's for sure. Kinda weirdly reminds me of that Missy Elliot song I really liked but can never remember the name of (And now want to hear again.) I am sucker for an insistent, nagging, repeated sample. 

And that's where I'm going to stop. I have a few more but that would just be "Here's the latest thing by that person I like" rather than anything I have actually been paying attention to this past couple of weeks. 

Oh, okay then. One more. Don't think we've had any covers so far and I have quite a few of those backed up, waiting for a post of their own. How about this one?

 Norman Fucking Rockwell - Evie Irie

If I need to tell you who the original's by, you must be new here. If so, grats for staying right to the end!

At the start, I wasn't convinced Evie was going to make a go of it but by the end I was glorying. Her voice could hardly be more different from Lana's. It gives the whole thing a totally different texture and scruffs it up the way a good cover should. Plus the little bit of Radio at the end. Genius!

And that really is it. More pop songs next time! 

Is Crystal Of Atlan On Steam? Well Now, I'm Glad You Asked Me That...

My first post on Crystal of Atlan got ten times the usual page views, so I thought I'd do another. I'm nothing if not opportunistic. Also, I did play again yesterday, for only the second time, so I have a few screenshots and a couple of things to say about it.

[Editor's Note: This will not, in fact, be a post about Crystal of Atlan. That post has been re-scheduled. Instead, this will be a post in which Crystal of Atlan appears only as an illustrative example in an otherwise unrelated topic. Actual Crystal of Atlan fans may wish to skip this and wait for the next one, when there may actually be some mention of the game itself. We can only hope...]

As far as I can tell, Crystal of Atlan does not have a dedicated screenshot function. I've been all through the keybinds and there's no sign of one. It's possible that there's one of those nifty in-game virtual cameras that pop up in many similar games and that you have to reach a certain level or do a particular quest to get it but I doubt it. I've googled to check that and not been able to find anything. 

[Edit: Theree is indeed an in-game camera function. It's accessed via the "H" key by default but the game didn't tell me about it until I dinged Level 20. More about that another day.]

That wouldn't normally be a problem because there are numerous ways to take screenshots of games using various apps and add-ons. I tend just to use the innate Windows Key + PrtScr option in Windows 10 these days. It's simple and it nearly always works.  

That doesn't get you a nice, clean screen suitable for use on a blog page, though. For that you need to be able to remove the UI. Almost all games offer that facility, usually buried somewhere deep in the settings, but I've fine-tooth combed my way through every tab in CoA and I can't see a way to do it.

Never mind, though, eh? We don't need to do all that grunt work ourselves these days, do we? We have good old AI to do it for us! 

I was having a little chat about that very topic with Nimgimli in the comments to yesterday's post, where I was saying that my experience using Google's Gemini as a research assistant wasn't giving me much confidence. For one thing, I always have to check Gemini's work. It can't be trusted to operate without close supervision, something even Google admit by appending the caveat "AI responses may include mistakes." to every response.

That's fine as far as it goes, for now at least , although if AI Search is really going to take over from the regular kind, it's going to have take those training-wheels off some day. And I guess I could live with it if the responses were "mostly right" but at the moment I'm not sure they're even hitting that minimal threshold for competency.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that Gemini confidently told me the current Overseer Season in EverQuest II is Season 6, when in fact it's Season 7. Unfortunately, I didn't take a screenshot of that result and today when I asked again, Gemini gave me the correct answer, so now I'm wondering if it had something to do with the way I phrased the question.

Even if we give Gemini a pass on that one, it can't wriggle out of today's mistake. As I was starting to write about the lack of screenshot and/or remove UI functions in Crystal of Atlan, I thought I probably ought to just fact-check myself, so I asked Google. Specifically, I typed "crystal of atlan screenshot hide UI" into Google Search.

These days, as I'm sure everyone has noticed, the actual search results are frequently prefaced by an "AI Overview" which Gemini provides whether you've asked for it or not. And now, because this is basically a live blogging event, I've just asked myself "I wonder if you can disable that?" so I asked Google and got a reply from Gemini, which felt a bit like asking a condemned man to knot his own noose.

It seems we're stuck with the AI Overview whether we want it or not, although there are "workarounds" to prevent anyone who really doesn't want it from having to see it. Personally, I quite like it, even if I trust it to give me accurate information about as much as I'd trust that guy down the pub who thinks he knows the answer to everything.  

Anyway, getting back to the point, for today's post I typed that simple inquiry into Google Search and got a very helpful reply from Gemini: 

 Ah, that's good then! So there is a way to hide the UI! Still, better check it to be sure, I guess.  

I logged in to Crystal of Atlan, which doesn't take long, and gave it a try. And guess what? 

Ah, you're ahead of me. Yep. Doesn't work.

There's a good reason for that. It's because NumPad+ is how you hide the UI when you take a screenshot in Steam. Not in Crystal of Atlan.

It's useful information in itself, of course. I actually didn't know you could do that in Steam and it's going to come in very handy, so thanks, Gemini, for bringing it to my attention.

It is not, however, an accurate answer to the question I asked you. It might have been, if Crystal of Atlan was on Steam, but it's not.  

Or is it? Again, I was pretty positive it wasn't because if it was, that's where I'd be playing it and I'm not, but I thought I'd better do my due diligence and check anyway. So I asked Google Search "is "Crystal of Atlan" on Steam?" and Gemini confidently told me it was. 

Look! There it is in black and white. Highlighted in blue, even. And with a link to the right that seems to confirm it. I mean, that link has the words "Crystal of Atlan" "Launches" and "Steam" right there in the title, right? 

Well, yes it does. Only, if you click through, you'll find that link goes to the IGN feed on Steam's News Hub, which is a basically a way of reading IGN without having to leave Steam. I didn't even know it existed so, once again, thanks to Gemini for bringing some useful information to my attention. Pity it wasn't an accurate answer to the question I asked but there we go...

You can, of course, add Crystal of Atlan to your Steam Library, just like you can add any game. It's apparently not all that easy to get it to work that way - there's a detailed guide in the description for this YouTube video on how to do it if you're thinking of trying -  and I guess the NumPad+ thing might work then...

Still not enough to give Gemini a passing grade, though, is it? And it's very clear that isn't what the AI meant. If it was, I'm sure it wouldn't have opened with "Yes. "Crystal of Atlan" is available on Steam."

But wait! Hang on a moment! What about the other links the AI Overview provides to back up its erroneous assertion? One goes to somewhere that wants to sell you a key for a F2P game, which is nice money if you can get it. The other goes to the very same MMOBomb news item I linked in my First Impressions post. 

It says right at the top "The magicpunk game will be available on iOS, Android, PC, and PlayStation." No mention of Steam. 

Except... er... look a little lower down, just below the buff guy with his shirt off... "Upcoming free-to-play action MMORPG Crystal of Atlan is launching on May 28 across iOS, Android, Steam, Epic Games Store, and PlayStation 5. " My bold, obviously.

At least Gemini wasn't the only one to get it wrong, then. And who knows? Maybe COA is on Steam after all. I guess the only way to be sure is to log into Steam and try to find it...

Nope. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Not on Steam no matter what anyone tells you, AI or otherwise.

All of which, I guess, proves that you can't trust anything you read on the internet. But we all knew that already, right? Whether AI is going to make that truism even more true than it's always been is something I guess we're just going to have to wait and see. My bet is it won't make a lot of difference in the long run, although it might make quite a difference to anyone who chooses to rely on AI Search right now.

As I was saying to Nimgimli in the comments, my experience of using AI as a source of information has not been encouraging and still isn't. I love what it can do in the creative fields but as a way of getting accurate information faster than before, it's not there yet, not even nearly.

The above is fairly representative of most of the results I get to the kind of questions I ask, but then most of the topics I search on are game-related. It's entirely possible that the available pool of knowledge on that topic from which it's having to draw is already quite badly polluted. 

It's not like we haven't all complained about finding old, inaccurate or just plain fanciful "facts" about the games we play when we go looking for tips or hints or walk-throughs. There's a lot of hand-wringing going on right now over the ouroboros effect as AIs feed on false information provided by other AIs but the term "Garbage In, Garbage Out" predates the AI revolution by decades, so it's not like humans weren't already doing a pretty good job of that on their own.

For the time being, I think I'll carry on checking and double-checking everything AI tells me. True facts are hard to come by, these days, from any source, AI or human. 

Post Script:

Because I just can't leave well alone, I carried on fiddling about with AI Overview and got this even more authoritative reply to my query "crystal of atlan add to steam", which I believe explains why Gemini is so adamant that the game is on Steam after all.

If you follow those links, they go to this Steam Store page. It's for a game called Crystal of Atlantis. 

Welcome To Our New Cash Grab... Shop! I Meant Cash Shop! No, Wait... Game! That's It! Welcome To Our New Game!

It would be disingenuous of me to claim that I was excited when I read yesterday that Blade & Soul NEO was about to launch on Steam, but I did feel a slight frisson of interest. I already have the revamped version of B&S installed via NCSoft's proprietary Purple launcher but I have now largely been assimilated into the Steam hive mind and, like all the other drones, I prefer to have all my logins in the same folder.

Of course, I haven't played any B&SNeo since the day I installed it around the end of February. That doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the game or lack thereof, more the plain fact that for the last three months almost the whole of my available free time has been spent on Suno. 

Making music with AI has effectively replaced playing games as my core leisure activity and seems likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm putting almost as much time into it now as I used to put into MMORPGs ten or fifteen years ago, although that's still nothing close to the time I would have spent in virtual worlds a decade before. 

But for that, I like to think I would at least have given B&SNEO a few sessions and written a few blog posts about it. I really like the original game, into which I must have put a few hundred hours over the years, and I was curious to see how the updated and supposedly improved version might stack up. Not curious enough to actually play it to find out, though, apparently.

It seemed at least a possibility that, if I had the thing on Steam, I might get around to playing it once in a while. I'm in my Steam library every day, looking for something or other, so anything that's there gets brought to my attention a lot more effectively than if it's sitting in the forest of icons on my desktop, especially if it's something I've played recently. There's a cruel synergy in the way Steam displays recently-played games that means the more I play something, the more likely it is to get played again, while the games I neglect slip further and further down the stack, probably never to be played again.

I didn't get around to doing anything about it yesterday, what with babysitting my Overseer missions in EverQuest II and spending eight hours working on one song on Suno (And still not getting a final version I was completely happy with...) but this morning almost the first thing I did was fire up Steam and go to the B&SNEO store page, where I was greeted with this:

I've highlighted the relevant line to make it stand out a bit more but it was already quite prominent enough to catch my eye the moment I saw the page: Mostly Negative. I don't generally treat the overall Steam review rating of any game as a flawless arbiter of quality or desirability but it is a useful indicator of general sentiment and a particularly good or bad rating will often send me to the individual reviews so I can get a reading of why people are choosing to rate it or slate it.

In the case of Blade & Soul NEO, the reason for the downvoting is very clear. People think it's a rip-off: 

Extreme Pay-to-Win: if you don’t swipe, you don’t play.

The cash shop’s so predatory it makes casino slot machines blush 

AVOID this clear cash grab and play something else

This game is the largest pay2win dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. 

Some of the reviewers get quite eloquent about the game's predatory tendencies:

Costs a paycheck to get enough gear for content that's 1 patch behind and a brand new car to almost do the current content

You can only like this game if you want to try fent4nyl, while being in an abusive relationship with someone that empties your credit cards, hits and mistreates you, giving you nothing back but misery

I hope you have a solid job and no family, no debt, no vacations planned so that this game can become your second, third, and fourth job. 

They're also very articulate in explaining exactly why. So much so, in fact, that in some cases the detailed analyses of just what NCSoft did wrong when they gutted the original to pump and dump NEO run to more than a thousand words. 

 Someone did a nice list though:

10 reasons to not play and quit Blade & Soul Neo

1) DDOS or just sh!t servers
2) Bots everywhere
3) P2W/Whales
4) Useless Devs (No real fixes or bans)
5) TP Cost/Channel Change Cost/Lack of Gold
6) Cheating (Xml modifications already available)
7) Boring & Repetitive (Same sh!t everyday)
8) Time consuming (Ritual/Boss Timer sucks)
9) RNG (Loot/Skillbooks/Fusion/Enhancing...)
10) No arenas No Costumes (too expensive) 

The tl:dr of all of them is 

this is a giant nostalgia bait cash grab, very heavily monetized and falsely advertised as a classic experience that plays nothing like the original release

and 

Everything in the game is RNG! Even RNG is RNG, so RNG is the game, and thats no joke. 

Now, to be very fair, the game has only just arrived on Steam and there are only about 160 reviews so far, but I've read over half of them and they all tell the same story: former B&S players came back to try the game out of very fond feelings for the original and found their beautiful old home burned to the ground with a gaudy, tasteless shopping mall and casino built on top of it. 

Even the "Mostly Negative" rating is doing game a favor. Several of the positive reviews are actually ironic negatives like this:

I love this game. Been playing everyday since the launch in february.
I also like being in an abusive relationship where my partner doesnt listen to anything I say and just takes my money so i can stay with my partner <3

Ah, where do I even begin? This game is truly something special! I’ve never felt so empowered by random chance before. The RNG system is a masterclass in how to keep things exciting - and by exciting, I mean completely out of your control. Every time I want to get a new skill, I love the suspense of knowing that my 20% chance is definitely going to work out. It really keeps you on the edge of your seat, and who doesn’t love a little uncertainty in their life?

Or they're from people so worn down by the process they can't even bring themselves to complain any more:

The negative reviews are valid. The game is a massive cash cow, but its NCSoft.. All NC games are cash cows, it's always been that way, always will be.

Remember that this is a Korean MMO. Its going to favor p2w heavily as well as have some rng systems added into it. I've seen this in most Korean MMOs.

I played the original Blade and Soul about 10 years ago. It was my formal intro to the most savage form of gacha p2w that I've ever seen.

Interestingly, that last one is from a player who makes a point that, I suspect, I might be making myself if I was actively playing and enjoying this new version of the game, namely that if you "Just play your game and have fun, leave the card in your wallet", you could probably do a lot worse than Blade & Soul NEO.

I enjoyed reading the reviews this morning. I was saying to someone at work the other day that video games have an undeserved reputation for fostering illiteracy, just as comics did when I was growing up. Anyone who spends any time on the forums or message boards or comment threads or review pages for either medium will find themselves disabused of that notion very quickly indeed. 

Whether I'll take any notice of any of the complaints and accusations is another matter. In common with almost every online game I've played in the last decade and more, I'd be very surprised if any of the P2W or RNG or Gacha mechanics had much of an impact on my natural playstyle, just as very few of the issues that so concerned players back in the Golden Age of MMORPGs - camping, waiting hours in LFG, the endless grind - had much relevance for me. 

When it comes to F2P, if you aren't interested in endgame activities or competitive PVP or leaderboards, most of the levers devs like to pull to get you to give them money don't have anything like the power often assigned to them. Or, to put it another way, no-one baits a hook for bottom-feeders.

Even so, the time I spent reading the reviews made me think again about installing the game on Steam. There's no realistic chance I'm going to start over in B&SNEO yet again and level up yet another new character. If I want a nostalgia hit and a quick run-around in the truly gorgeous world, the old, non-NEO servers are still up and running and I have a character in the mid-40s and another in the 60s, both just waiting for a chance to grab another level or two.

Instead of adding another version of Blade and Soul to the two I already have, I patched up the old one and I'm logging in right now to take some screen shots for the post. Probably going to be the only time I log in for a while but nostalgia, like Stamina in B&SNEO, (From what I read, anyway.) takes a while to regenerate.

An Unfortunate Oversight

You know what could use another pass in EverQuest II? Okay, okay, it's a long list, I'll give you that, but I'm talking about the Overseer feature. It's the classic example of a really useful and rewarding part of the game that hides its virtues beneath layer after layer of obfuscation and awkwardness, all for no good reason I can see.

When the mechanic was added with the Blood of Luclin expansion back in 2019 it wasn't particularly well received but it's hung around and now regular players seem to be quite at home with it. Once you know how to pull the levers, it spits out all kinds of useful things, including some that even very well-set-up characters can use. 

On the forums you'll sometimes see experienced players recommending Overseer as a way for new or returning players to gear up and get themselves back into the swing of things. Mostly that's not for the gear itself, although a solo player could do a lot worse, but for the many useful boosts and buffs that drop from Overseer reward chests like leaves in the fall, some of which can reduce the numerous grinds considerably.

Well, eventually. And that's the problem. There's plenty in those chests worth having but it's mostly in the bonus chests from the high-quality Missions, the ones that take fifteen or twenty hours to complete. And you don't get those by wishing for them.

No, you have to  work at it. Really plug away. Day after day after day. All the while getting mostly crap you don't want. Crap you can't imagine anyone wants.

Guess what happens? People give up. They look at what they're getting and they think "Sod this for a game of tin soldiers" and they pack it in and look for something else to do. And then, when they can't find anything better and come to the forums complaining that no-one wants them in groups because they don't have the gear or the spells or the stats and that good gear's too hard to get and stats and spells take too long and you have to have mercs and mounts and familiars and they all need to be leveled up as well and it takes fucking forever unless you throw money at the cash shop, which is OBVIOUSLY what they WANT you to do because the game is just Pay2Win now...

The Missions You Want

... and someone always comes into the thread and says "Well you need to do Overseer, don't you? Not for the gear because, yes, that's useless, but for the merc and familiar and research time reducers"" and the poor person who just picked up the game (Unlikely but it still happens once in a while.) or who just came back after years away (A lot more likely, happens all the time.) replies, usually in very bad humor, "I tried that and I didn't get any of the stuff you're talking about."

Well, of course they didn't. They most likely only gave it a few tries or maybe a week or two at most, which all anyone in their right mind would spend on it. And that's just not long enough.

Do you know how long it takes to start getting the good stuff out of Overseer? Bloody ages! And not only that but it's fiddly as hell. And not in the least intuitive.

I'm not going to go through the whole thing again. I did that back when it was new. The short version is that you start with just a couple of missions and they give the lowest rewards. You have to keep doing those over and over again until they drop some better missions. Then you do those and hope they drop better Missions again and so on, like that, until you have enough good missions, the green and purple ones or at the very least the yellow ones, which aren't great but will have to do for the time being, to fill all ten of your daily slots. 

Then you just pound and pound away at those until the drops start coming. Which they will. Eventually.

All of which is bad enough but there's another problem. Those two missions you get at the start? They take an hour to run and they have a half-hour cool-down. So you can't just log in, slot all your missions and forget about it until tomorrow, like you will be doing one day. Oh, no, nothing so restful.

The missions you'll put up with.

You either do just those two missions a day (Then three, four, five as you get more from the reward chests.) and accept the whole thing is going to take an even more insanely long time than you thought it would or, more likely, you steel yourself to having to log in multiple times a day for the first week or two, just so you can keep recycling your paltry pot of missions every time they come off cooldown. I mean, you weren't going to log in anyway to play, were you? No. Thought not.

And that process resets every time you level Overseer into a new Season, which you want to do because the best drops, the ones you might even use, are all in the current season (Season 7 as I write this, although if you believe Gemini, Google's AI assistant, it's still Season 6. I never believe Gemini so I checked and it's not.) 

Every Overseer Season has ten levels because everything in EQII has to have levels because we all love leveling so much. That's why they sell skip potions in the store. Only not for sodding Overseer or I'd be buying them!

Want to know how long it takes to go from Season 5 to Season 6? Because I can tell you. Three months. Three loooong months.

As I posted back at the end of February, I bought a tradeskill booster for my Necromancer to begin the long, slow process of converting her to be ready for the expansion due later in the year. Among the many things I needed to do was get her up to the current Overseer season. Fortunately, progress there is account-based, so all the work Conkers had done counted. Considerably less fortunately, he gave up on Overseer a couple of years back. I think I misunderstood something but at the time he'd gotten everything he wanted and I'd gotten fed up of the routine of logging in just to pick those ten missions every day, so I stopped.

The missions you get.

Well, that was a mistake, especially since I never got back on the horse, so when Mordita took over she was way behind. Since then I've been logging both of them in pretty much every day so they can tag-team the Overseer missions and just today Mordita handed in the quest that took her into Season 6. That's about three months solid grinding to get one Season done. Is it any wonder people don't stick it out?

There is some good news. Level 50 itself (It's like centuries - you're always one ahead in the numbers.) only took three Celestial missions from Season 5 to finish and I had those already done and waiting to hand in, which was just as well because as soon as you get the two starter missions for the new Season you lose access to all the missions from the previous one. (Well, you can go and "buy" them for no money from a vendor if you want to re-do  them for some reason but although those still get you the rewards, they don't give any experience. I tried that.)  

Sadly, as soon as you ding Overseer Level 51 it's back to minuscule xp for the two blue missions you've got. It's like chipping away at a glacier with a teaspoon. 

But it has to be done. The other good news is that although I'm still a season behind, I am now at least into a Season where loot is flagged for Level 130 (That's character level this time.) The gear's not going to upgrade anything I'm wearing (It wouldn't have upgraded the gear I took off to put on the gear I'm wearing...) but there's other stuff in there that's worth having, not least the crafting rares, the mercenaries and the ever-popular time-reducers.

How long it's going to be before I see any of those is another matter. I suspect it could be a while. With luck - or more likely with patience and persistence - I will be in Season 7 by the time the next expansion lands. At which point, no doubt, we'll be on to Season 8 and I'll have to start pushing the blasted stone up the hill again. 

And they wonder why it's so hard to get new and returning players to stick around... 

A Pride Of Pandas

Based on evidence, rather than expectation, I think it's fair to say I'm no longer that guy. The one who's willing to log in every last character on every account, just to grab a freebie for each of them, even though they know it will never be used. 

I know. It surprised me, too, when I found out but the facts are had to argue with. I keep posting about this, that and the other wonderful offer I'm going to be sure not to pass up and then that's exactly what I do.

Okay, I don't miss out completely. I'm not that far-gone, yet. If I've mentioned it on the blog, I always at least log in whatever character I'm currently playing, in whichever game it  happens to be, to blag the free loot and take a few screenshots. And usually I get as far as logging in any other characters I play, at least semi-regularly, as well. But my days of going  through every last character, on every server, on every account, something I really did do more times than I'd probably want to admit, do finally seem to be over.

I was thinking about that when I logged into EverQuest II a couple of days ago to do my Overseer dailies. (There will be a post about those very soon. Probably this week. Or a paragraph in a portmanteau post at least. I'm not sure I have enough to say for a whole post.) 

Daybreak are extremely good about posting links in the patcher to whatever's new and this time they had something up about Pride Month, so while the game was loading I clicked through and had a look at that. I found it very heartwarming, particularly the subtext. The phrase "Help show your unwavering support..." seemed to me to be particularly astute and well-judged.

Anyway, politics aside, Pride Month in EQII means free stuff, specifically free familiars, and no-one wants to miss out on those. Not only do they look great, they're really useful and you can never have too many of them

I am of the opinion, however, that it is at least theoretically possible to have too many rabbit familiars, which is what the Pride ones were for quite a while. The Darkpaw devs obviously agreed because a few years back they swapped from bunnies to lions (A Pride of them - geddit?). 

I wasn't as keen on the lions if I'm honest. The bunnies were there or thereabouts real size but the lions, by necessity, were a lot smaller than lions usually are and I thought they looked a bit chintzy. Still nice but not sure if the pun was worth it. 

This year, though, the devs have really done us proud (God, now they've got me at it...) with a whole new set of familiars to collect - red pandas. What a great choice!

Red pandas (Aka firefoxes) have to be one of the cutest creatures on the planet. They look like they were designed in the Jellycat testing labs (Although weirdly the actual Jellycat red panda doesn't really look that much like the real thing...) They'll make excellent companions for posing at the bank and the great thing about familiars in EQII is that you can have a hideously ugly blob equipped for the stats while overwriting its appearance with something much cooler  and better-looking from your collection.

Based on previous Prides I think we'll have pandas for three years at least. There are nine gender identities represented in the celebration and we get three different ones each year. 

I guess that does mean that if you have a particular identity you want to acknowledge or display support for, you might have to wait a couple of years before it comes around, which isn't ideal, but all the variations are available in the Store for free for the duration of Pride Month so anyone who has to wait for the right panda to arrive can at least make do with a bunny or a lion until then.

The familiars aren't supposed to be tied inextricably to specific identities in any case. The descriptions are intentionally vague but the colors, which are taken from the Pride flag, indicate the specific alliances. The EverQuest Show produced a very handy visual guide last year. I don't know if they plan to update it but I  guess they have until 2027, by which time we'll have the full complement of pandas.

The three on offer this year are Boundless, Trueheart and Proudheart which, according to the guide, are the colors of the bisexual flag, the transexual flag and the rainbow Pride flag itself. Given the current climate, I think I'm going to be traveling with the Trueheart beside me, if only to annoy J.K. Rowling (Not that that's hard to do. A lot harder not to, really.)

I am also going to make the effort to log in all my characters in EQII for which there's a realistic chance I might actually play them once in a while, so they can claim their three pandas. That means everyone on the account I pay for, so that's fifteen times I'm going to have to do it.

And a final note - I just equipped a panda for the first time to get some screenshots and whoever designed them (Ttobey I'm guessing.) went the opposite way from the lions. The new pandas look like they have to be at least twice life-size!

And a final, final note... since it fits the theme, here's the excellent and extremely NSFW new song from the great Kate Nash. She's flagged it as Age-Restricted so I don't know if it can even be embedded.

 GERM - Kate Nash

Apparently it can but you have to go to YouTube to watch it. Which I very much hope you will. It's not  so much a song as a lecture you can dance to and all the better for it. 

Sadly, I suspect the only people who'll see it will be those who already agree with what it has to say but you have to do what you can, don't you? Thanks to Darkpaw and Daybreak for doing their bit.