The Seven Ages of Norrath

I stole the graphic at the top of this post from The EverQuest Show, where there's an excellent post breaking down EverQuest into a sequence of developmental phases. I found myself in broad agreement with most of the commentary there and I thought it might be interesting (to me!) to count down all the expansions from a personal perspective.

Classical Age:

Classic - It's funny how we don't have a proper name for the initial release of any MMORPG. "Vanilla" and "Classic" seem to be the accepted terminology but of course no-one playing at the time would ever have dreamed of calling the game anything of the kind. I only barely scrape in to the true "Classic" period, not having started until November 1999, by which time the game had been running for six months.

To listen to people talk now you'd think it was a prelapsarian paradise but by the time I arrived "Bored 50s" was already a meme. Down in the newbie trenches where I was, "twinking" was considered a major social issue, along with the overcrowding that sometimes made it hard even to find mobs to kill, far less grind. The main reason I moved to the Test server within weeks of starting was because I'd heard it was much quieter there and had double xp. From a safe distance we may romanticize the slow gameplay of the early days but at the time many players were willing to do just about anything to speed things up.

It can't have been that bad, though, because I was hooked. It was the virtual world I'd been imagining for a couple of decades, a place to immerse myself in a new and magical life. Did I know it was going to last for decades? If I had, would I have been delighted or terrified?

Ruins of Kunark - When RoK appeared I'd been playing for almost six months. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had individual accounts and even a PC each to play on. No more taking turns, looking over each other's shoulders, backseat driving.

I had characters on a bunch of servers but with Kunark I made an Iksar Shadowknight on yet another. I really enjoyed the whole Iksar experience. The race was incredibly well documented compared to anything I'd seen in EverQuest before. They also had four full size zones as starting areas and a vast, confusing, labyrinthine city, Cabilis. Just playing an Iksar was like a whole new game.

I think my Iksar got to about level twelve before it all just got too difficult. Everyone hated him. It was wearing. I was also playing my Druid, who was in the mid-teens, and pretty soon she was my focus character. I spent a lot of time with her in Lake of Ill Omen, where I learned to group properly at last. Fun times at the Sarnak fort. I still miss those Saturday mornings.

Scars of Velious - Velious was an unusual expansion in that it had a clear starting point in the mid levels. Most expansions either begin at the bottom or the top; for SoV you needed to be about level thirty. The six months between Kunark and Velious hadn't quite been enough to get my druid that far. She'd done about a dozen levels by then. A level every couple of weeks was about my average, playing forty-plus hours a week. Different times.

At level twenty-eight she was just about able to get groups in Iceclad Ocean although she wasn't anyone's first pick. I spent many happy hours in pick-up groups outside The Tower of Frozen Shadows but it would be some time before I ventured inside (on an infamous Guild Raid that barely managed to get to the third floor. Come to think of it, we might have wiped on the second...).

Mostly I soloed. I spent a lot of time making runs to the dwarven ice city of Thurgadin, where I bought velium weapons, which I then hawked around South Karana for considerable profit. I also liked to take brand new starting characters on a wanderjahr all the way to Thurgadin just to prove I could do it. Some of them may still be there.

Shadows of Luclin - I wasn't around for the launch of SoL, which may have been just as well. It was rocky, or so I heard. I was off playing Dark Age of Camelot but when the novelty of that wore off (quite fast) I drifted back, followed by Mrs Bhagpuss, and we re-invested ourselves on the moon.

If Kunark was Lake of Ill Omen, Luclin was Paludal Caverns. In those days there always seemed to be a ghetto zone, where the dregs of society gathered to sop up what was believed to be the best xp for the least risk. I'd loved LoIO but I loathed PC. It was dark, dank, ugly and loud. My prevailing memory isn't of the gameplay or even the appaling behavior of the players - it's those endlessly looped, yelping sound samples.

After a while, when we'd levelled some more, Paludal gave way to Dawnshroud Peaks, a wide-open, sunlit savannah where I spent an inordinate amount of time. I hunted rockhoppers and zelniaks and lived in wolf form because that way half the wildlife ignored me.

The other defining trope of SoL was The Bazaar. It was supposed to be part of the expansion at launch but it was months before EverQuest's trading post/broker system worked properly. It hadn't even gotten started by the time I came back to the fold. Once it was up and running, though, it all but took over my life. There was a point when I spent almost all my time scouring NPC vendors for things to buy for pennies and resell on my Bazaar trader at huge profit. Mrs Bhagpuss and I both left our PCs on 24/7 for months (years, probably), our traders bringing the money in overnight before we logged on and went out to re-stock them in the day. An odd way to play an MMORPG.

Golden Age

Planes of Power - When the books on their stone pillars began to appear all over Norrath in the run-up to PoP there was widespread speculation on what it might mean. The end of life in Norrath as we'd known it, it turned out. Shadows of Luclin had introduced a form of "fast" travel with the Wizard Spires and The Nexus but there weren't that many of them and they only fired up once every fifteen minutes. There was a PoP book in almost every zone and all you had to do was click it to find yourself transported to the Plane of Knowledge.

Luclin had already changed the way the game was played with the introduction of Shadowhaven and The Bazaar, zones where NPCs were universally racially tolerant, meaning good and evil characters alike could trade and mingle without fear or restriction. PoP took that to the next level, creating an entirely safe, instantly accessible zone where players could find all possible services, along with plenty of space to socialize.

For many years everything began in Plane of Knowledge. Even today it's the game's social center. By this time I was running with both a guild and a custom channel crew and PoK was where we met up and decided what to do before we headed out. Over time it would also become the place we bought KEI and Temp and all the other player-cast buffs without which half the population of EverQuest came to consider combat unthinkable.

For many EQ players, Planes of Power recalls the heyday of raiding. Not for me, although it is where I draw much of my minimal personal knowledge of the raid experience, because it was also the era of pick-up raids. I chain-healed a few of those and it was... well, something I'm glad I can say I've done but would be happy never to have to do again.

No, my overriding memory of Planes of Power is the shopping. The endless round, every blasted day, of all those hundreds of NPC vendors in PoK and Plane of Tranquility, hunting for stock for my Bazaar trader. I made a lot of money but in the end it wore me out.

Legacy of Ykesha - LoY was the first of EQ's mini-expansions. Sony Online Entertainment didn't even call it an "expansion". It was, officially, an "extension", although that nomenclature never caught on.

I liked LoY a lot. I made a froglok on a fresh server even though I was one of the many absolutely outraged by the eviction of the trolls from Grobb. I may even have signed a petition. I hated the way the frogloks blurp and blorp and do backflips so that character never got played much. I can't even remember what class it was, let alone the name. LoY also introduced the first non-horse mount, the peculiar Drogmor, which everyone had to have. I got one for my necromancer but all my other characters stuck with their ponies.

LoY was another mid-level expansion, the new zones beginning at around level thirty and going steadily up to the cap from there. The Wikipedia entry is very negative on that content, saying the new zones "were generally received as very uninspired and added little to the lore of Norrath". I'd strongly dispute that. While it's true that the Gulf of Gunthak and the rest may not have gone down particularly well at the start, over time they became busy, popular levelling zones. I spent a great deal of time there, on the boats, down the tunnels, battling pirates and Lovecraftian fishmen. Some very good times indeed, and pretty darned scary, too.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath - If I had to pick one favorite out of all EQ's expansions I think it would have to be LDoN. It was EQ in concentrated form, possibly the most formalized and directed expansion the game ever had (The Serpent's Spine runs it a close second).

The aptly-named expansion consists entirely of instanced dungeons. It ought to have been one of my least favorite but instead of fighting the concept I went with the flow and found a whole new way of playing. LDoN is famous as the expansion that taught casuals how to group effectively. In some ways it was one vast tutorial. I learned more about playing my class well in a group in six months of LDoN than I learned in all the years before or since.

What's more, I watched many other players develop and change from nervous, hesitant, low-skill performers into confident, competent colleagues anyone would be happy to have in their group. I can't really say why those particular dungeons were so efficient at turning solipsistic soloists into team players but that's what they did.
 
Discord Age

Gates of Discord - And then it all fell apart. Gates of Discord is quite possibly the most destructive expansion ever unleashed on any MMORPG (although World of Warcraft's Cataclysm might want to dispute that honor).

2004 was always going to be a tough year for EverQuest, what with the upcoming EverQuest II scheduled to split the playerbase and Blizzard's as-yet untested competitor waiting in the wings, but there was no need to worry about any of that; the EQ team was perfectly capable of shooting itself in the foot without any outside help. In fact, all the "help" needed was very much coming from the inside as various factions wrestled for control, all at the expense of the game and its players.

The version of Gates of Discord we got was horrifically difficult. It was years before we found out why; it was originally meant to come with a ten level cap increase. Without those extra ten levels much of the content verged on the impossible and almost none of it was fun. Guilds broke themselves against it and broke up with many top-tier raiding guilds leaving the game altogether for the more fruitful fields of WoW's beta.

Strangely, I quite liked GoD. Yes, it was terrifyingly difficult but for a while I was one of the handful of people trying to cajole friends and guildies into making a push into the lower foothills. We all died. A lot. Many of us just trying to get there. I still quite enjoyed it.

Omens of War - By the time the delayed OOW arrived in mid-September it was too late for me and many of my in-game friends. Most were considerably less committed to EQ than they had been; some had given up and weren't logging in at all.

A few, myself and Mrs Bhagpuss among them, had received invites to the EQII beta by then. When Omens of War launched I don't believe I even bought it. EQII beta was buggy, the gameplay was grindy and slow, my PC struggled to run it. It was still ten times more fun than Gates of Discord so we stayed.

I didn't get to see Omens of War until a year or so later, when EQII had proved itself to be no kind of substitute for the real thing and absolutely every single person, without exception, we'd known or met there had given up and gone elsewhere in search of a game that might actually be fun to play.

I don't really have any very clear memories of OOW from that time. I vaguely recall spending quite a few hours in the first zone, Dranik's Scar and the next, Nobles' Causeway. That was probably all I saw until much later, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I came back to Norrath yet again and spent several months going around all the places we'd missed the first time, gleefully trashing them with our higher-level characters and their mercenaries.

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All the above barely even qualifies as jotted notes towards an introductory essay. The moment I start to write about EverQuest the memories just come flooding back. I could write a series of posts on each and every expansion I've mentioned so far.

And, looking ahead, there are at least five more expansions where I could do the same. I did think that by the time I got to the Lost Age I'd be able to speed up but maybe not quite yet.

Let's reconvene for part two in a while.

Trailer For The Future

As I write this I'm downloading Fortnite. How did that happen? Like this...

I have a terrible habit of flicking between things as I wait for loading screens. It's pathetic. These days most MMORPGs take a minute or two to log in, seconds to swap from zone to zone. It's time that doesn't need to be monkey-filled with chatter. Just let it flow.

Good advice I don't listen to. If there's a loading screen that lasts more than three seconds I'm off, alt-tabbing out, rabbitting through the favorites scrolling down the left. Except, insanely long as the list is, there's not much on it I actually care to look at, most days.

This morning I'd swapped between EverQuest and EverQuest II, setting Overseer quests and missions. By the time I'd been through the various stages, swapping characters a couple of times, I'd exhausted Feedly, my blog roll, the weather, the news, and matchup reports for World vs World in Guild Wars 2.

I was about to log in to GW2 to do dailies but as I exited EQII, in the thirty seconds it takes to camp out (because I always log out properly instead of just quitting, because I remember when closing an MMORPG too quickly could lead you to miss a character save and lose a few seconds of progress - or at least some people believed it could and why take the risk?) my eye cast around for distraction and found it in the shape of Box Office Pro.

I have five movie sites bookmarked from back when TAGN Movie Obsession was still a thing. Remember that? Of the five, two (Cinemascore, Theater Counts) are completely dormant for obvious reasons and one, Box Office Report, might as well be.

The remaining pair struggle on. The Numbers has turned into what feels like a personal blog about DVD/Blue Ray and Streaming releases. Box Office Pro, true to its name, has concentrated on interviews with cinema professionals and think pieces on what might happen to the industry in months to come. Today they ran this report, which opens with the news that

"The new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated Tenet has debuted online via the video game Fortnite and on YouTube."

Say what again? It happened last night while I was asleep and as far as I can tell wasn't trailed anywhere much earlier than that. The big video game sites had the story around eleven, my time, by when I was tucked up in bed playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp and watching Season Two of Community on Amazon Prime.

I read the piece on Box Office Pro. Then I googled around and read a couple more reports on Kotaku and The Verge. The Kotaku piece has a magnificent clickbait headline which neatly sums up the reason I have Fortnite downloading in the background right now:

"New Tenet Trailer Premieres In Fortnite, Which Is No Longer A Video Game"

Isn't that fantastic? Give that sub-editor a donut!

I'd read about Fortnite's new Party Royale peace-out bliss mode, of course. I knew it was a non-combat area where Fortnite players could do what many of them have always done, namely hang out and chill, only without the buzzkill of imminent apocalypse. I also knew about Epic's propensity for using the game as a backdrop for major music and pop-culture events. Oddly, I hadn't quite put the two things together.

The Verge had:

"There’s an outdoor movie theater and a club with towering holographic dancers, alongside race courses and other points of interest like a pirate ship and soccer field. Epic describes it as an “evolving space,” so we’ll likely see more activities and events added in the future. Both of these updates point to Fortnite’s likely future"

The Travis Scott event, which made global headlines in the non-gaming press, took place inside the game itself - the Battle Royale - but there's already been a major concert in Party Royale, featuring Dillon Francis, Steve Aoki, and Deadmau5. Even I know Deadmau5.

As the Kotaku report on that one puts it "The show made Fortnite feel like a world". Yes, like the real world.

Because that's where this is heading: towards fulfilment of the promises made and never met by Second Life. Or, more pertinently, made by a mainstream media fooled into believing Second Life was William Gibson's cyberspace and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash all rolled into one.

As that BBC piece explains "Mentions of Second Life first crept into the UK media mainstream in early 2006... newspapers fell over themselves to cover it, devoting many column inches in their business, technology and lifestyle sections to profiles and trend pieces. "

But just a couple of years later there was silence. Businesses who'd jumped the trend backed off. Stores and embassies closed. The reason was simple. No-one cared:"You could go and open these stores and no-one would turn up...They would have 20 to 30 people there when it opened, and after that no-one would bother going in there again. It just wasn't worth the spend."

Those handfuls have become multitudes. Events in Fortnite reckon their attendances in millions. In tens of millions. These are the jetpacks we were promised.

I'd been kind of meaning to try Fortnite for what feels like a couple of years now. I've read so much positive print about about it. I've played a few Battle Royales, though, and they're not really my thing. Everything that interested me about Fortnite was the not killing each other part. And now, here it is...

... Intermission ...

So, the first thing I do is break Fortnite. It's downloaded and installed. I've made an Epic Games account. Woohoo! Free games for me!. I've logged in and...

Can I find Party Royale? I cannot. I fiddle around for a bit and then tab out to google it. I find what seems to be a seperate download. I download that and install it. It's not the right thing. It's something called Party Hub and it breaks Fortnite good and proper.

After several repairs, a welter of error messages and offers of online support, I finally decide to re-install the whole thing. That, eventually, does the trick.

... End Intermission ...

Turns out, Party Royale is something you select from within Battle Royale. I had to watch a YouTube video before I worked that out. I guess the hundreds of million who already play Fortnite don't need to be told but a signpost for the several billion who don't would be nice.

Then again, Fortnite is still in early access. I'd forgottent that, what with it being one of the most successful video games in the entire world! But no, there it is on the login screen. Early Access. Can't expect anything too polished, I guess.

When I finally stepped out into the mall-like streets of Epic's brave new world, the movie trailer was just about to begin. I could hear someone interviewing the star, John David Washington. Then it started and I could hear that, too, but by the time I'd figured out where the screen was it was all over.

A movie trailer does only last a couple of minutes. If it had been a concert or the promised full Nolan movie to be shown later in the summer, I'd have had plenty of time to get a seat. The trailer's showing on the hour, every hour. Maybe I'll drop back in and take a screenshot or two.

Except you can't. Or I can't. I went through all the in-game options looking for the screenshot key. There isn't one. I fired up FRAPS and it doesn't work with Fortnite. I googled it and watched some YouTube videos and apparently you either take video with the in-game playback feature or you just hit PrtScr and tab out. Which is what I did.

I know static images are so twentieth century but not even having a screenshot function does seem a bit primitive. Feel free to tell me what an idiot I am when you point out it does have one and how to use it in the comments.

Anyway, that's the hard work done. Fortnite is installed and working. I have an Epic Games account. Now I can play the game - all of the games - and drop in to mingle and marvel whenever something culturally significant happens.

I don't think Fortnite is the future. I just think it's a pointer to where the future's going to be. Think of it as MySpace to Second Life's GeoCities.

The next generation's the one. Or maybe the one after that.

I Recommend To You

Booksellers tend to be cynical about author's recommendations. Well, the ones you see on the backs of paperbacks, anyway. There's always a strong temptation to check if the writers share an agent or a publisher.

The vast majority of such puffs are technically legitimate. Anthony Horowitz did a great job of explaining the nuances involved in a piece he wrote for The Guardian back in 2012. A few years earlier the Daily Telegraph went further, quoting a number of well-known authors, admitting to having given favorable quotes for books they'd only skimmed or hadn't read at all.

Little has changed. If anything it's worse. Books still come plastered with glowing endorsements only now they're on the front cover not the back. Sometimes a casual reader might even be misled by the relative size of the names into thinking the book was by someone else altogether.

It's a shame, because I've found there to be a noticeable correlation between my tastes in fiction and those of writers I particularly enjoy. When reccomendations arise out of interviews, where authors are expressing their genuine enthusiasm for things they've actually read, it pays to pay attention.

I was musing about this as I was reading an interview with one of my favorite writers of recent years, Emily St. John Mandell. I'd been thinking about her because of the pandemic. As evidenced by the awards it won, or for which it was nominated, her breakout novel, Station 11, is one of the finest examples of genre-bending I've read in a long time.

It takes some doing to win the Arthur C. Clarke and also be nominated for the National Book Award and the Bailey's with the same novel. In our store, Station 11 is shelved in both mainstream fiction and S.F., a very rare occurence.

Station 11 isn't about a pandemic but it begins with one. A much more serious affair than the one we're living through right now. A couple of decades later, when most of the action takes place, the world is changed because of it. That's what makes it a science fiction story.

Having read the book I did something I rarely do. I bought all her other novels and read those, too.

There were four of them because like most overnight sensations Emily Mandell had been around for quite a while. It helped that they were published in a clean, austere uniform edition. Books are always to be judged by their covers, don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise.

Photograph by Jessica Marx

They're all excellent. Like the astonishingly wonderful Donna Tartt, Mandell writes crime novels and doesn't tell anyone. Her latest, The Glass Hotel, for which we've been waiting a long time, continues the trend. I haven't read it yet. I'm pondering whether to get it on Kindle or buy the imported U.S. softback. It's not published in the U.K. in hardback until August. I hate hardbacks, too.

Backtracking, I was googling the author because the pandemic had reminded me I hadn't heard anything about her since Station 11. That happens a lot. I love things and then I forget about them. I need constant reminding.

Google led me to the interview linked above. In it, beneath a picture of herself looking maybe seventeen (she's forty), Emily mentions two of my favorite and most respected novels or series of novels (A Canticle for Liebowitz and The Dark is Rising) and two authors with tenure on my "must read" list, whom I've shockingly still to find time for (Toni Morrison, Ali Smith).

In the course of what's only a short interview, Emily St. John Mandell namechecks more than a dozen writers, living and dead. It's what creative artists tend to do and we should thank them for it. I'm probably not going to try Sarah Waters just on the strength of a mention - I already have opinions of my own - but I'll keep an eye out when I'm back at work for Ronan Farrow's account of his part in the Harvey Weinstein affair (inappropriate word...), which somehow passed me by when it was published last year.

The most interesting of all, though, would seem to be Dan Chaon, whose name was completely new to me. He looks to be another genre disregarder, a reccomendation in itself.

I'll most likely give him a try after I've finished the book I just started, Lightning Field. It's the first novel by another of my very favorite contemporary authors, Dana Spiotta. I've read her others, all three of them.

I started with the superb Stone Arabia, which landed in the proof pile at work a few years ago. I seem to recall I wouldn't have looked at it only it had a recommendation from someone I rated on the cover...



Illustrations "borrowed" from the interweb. If they're yours and you'd rather they weren't here, just let me know.

New You : Auteria

Back in April 2018, I wrote a first impressions piece on Auteria, a ten-year old MMORPG I'd found through a reddit thread. It took a while, like a couple of years, but eventually that post got a comment and from someone who'd actually played the game, no less.

In my original piece I'd noted that, although Auteria had been running for more than a decade, it didn't seem to have had an update since 2010. According to LexiAtel that's changed. Today I finally got around to taking another look.

The website, which is quite detailed and informative, includes a handy patch history. There were twenty-three updates between 2007 and 2010 and then silence until 2019, when the game received patches in March and April. With the first of those it also moved from Release 1.97.3 to Version 2.00 which has to mean something big happened!

Having read the patch notes on the forum, I'm not exactly sure what that was. When I said in chat that I hadn't logged in for a while someone asked me if I'd seen the new map yet. So I guess there's a new map. Whether they meant a new zone or the change to the on-screen map (Pressing "M" does now open a map!) I'm not sure.

I also mentioned in chat that I hadn't seen much outside the starting area and someone said something about using "port stones" on the map to go on a tour. Maybe that's new, too. I couldn't figure out how to do it so it's a moot point.

Before I began I needed to re-download and re-install  the client. That took just a few minutes. My login details worked fine but there was a surprise waiting for me when I got to character select.

Before

After

When last I wrote about Auteria I made much of the quirky fashion sense the game displayed. I described Lisa, the NPC who gives you your first quests, as looking " like she's about to go for a nice dinner at a fashionable beach-side restaurant sometime in 1986" and said of my own character "I quite like the idea of fighting evil in blue jeans and a skintight blouse".

Well, I guess it was nice while it lasted (more than ten years) but all good things come to an end. Auteria now has a choice of races, although nothing seems to tell you what they're called, and my first task before I was even able to log in was to pick one.

I went for something that looks like Grobb's entry for Miss Norrath. Either that or a cross between She Hulk and an Asura. There was plenty of choice. I could have had a plain old human, a dwarf, a gnome/halfling, a lizardperson, some kind of crystalline elemental or several flavors of goblin/orc/troll/ogre. They all look pretty spiffy. And no elves that I could see, which has to be a bonus.

Before (never saw my face)

After

I'd write something about the couple of hours I spent playing but reading back what I wrote in the first impressions piece it would be almost exactly the same, minus the sightseeing tour by dragon.

It was incredibly dark and stayed that way for almost the entire time I was logged in. I had the same trouble working out how to fight and how to heal myself. I had another run-in with an insanely tough ant. I made the same trip to the same nearby town and was as just impressed with the lighting effects as I was the first time.

The sunrise, when it did finally arrive, was spectacular. More like someone let off a mini-nuke just behind some mountains, really. I literally stood and watched the sun come up for about five minutes, it was that amazing. Screenshots don't do justice to the way it throbbed and pulsed, nor how my shadow suddenly leapt across the sand, making me actually start in my chair.

One thing that was new to me was the cat family. I met a bunch of kittens, all with names beginning "Me Me", which is a little on the nose. They had me killing mice (mice the size of pigs, I might add) and carrying messages back to their sisters and mother.

It's probably a breadcrumb quest to lead you to the next town but in the pitch black night there's really no choice anyway, since that's the only lit path. Well, other than the big wooden bridge. I went that way too, to try and kill a bandit, but I hadn't figured out how to handle a sword at that stage so I came back pretty quick.

I took a look at the website while I was healing up in the hut. There's obviously far more to Auteria than I've been able to see, pottering around in the starting area. The Screenshot section shows lots of interesting places in seven regions, including a capital city called Renvale.

I hear it's the manufacturing center of Tegratia. Maybe I'll see it one day although I certainly wouldn't put any money on it. Auteria's an endearing game with an old school feel  but I suspect its moment may have passed me by.

I would like to make some armor though, I need something to wear, now I don't have my blue jeans and blouse any more...

Upload/Undone

Seasons of original shows on Amazon Prime seem to run eight or ten episodes. It's a curious length. I grew up with U.K. television series lasting about that long but I'm used to American seasons stretching out for twenty weeks or more to fit the way Network schedules used to align with the calendar. There's a reason they call them "Seasons", after all.

Freed from those constraints I guess it makes sense to take smaller bites, especially when you take into account the tendency to let the whole thing go at once. Eight episodes makes for a handy weekend mini-binge.

I try not to do that. For series that come in single figures I try to ration myself to one a day. Or one a night, since that's when I watch. I've come semi-circle (not full) from TV advocacy in the eighties/nineties through abstinence in the oughts to what I like to feel is a balanced stance today.

After Tales from the Loop, which turned out to be every bit as good as I'd hoped, I moved on to another science fiction-inflected original, Upload, a brand-new show debuting this month. As the trailer says, it's from "The guy that brought you The Office and Parks and Recreation" only I didn't watch the trailer until later so I didn't know that. Also I've never seen The Office, either version.

I have seen Parks and Receation, though. It's superb. That might have swayed me, had I known. The trailer certainly wouldn't. It's a terrible advertisement for the show. Yes, it is partly a romcom with a lot of rather unsubtle social satire ladled on top but it's more a murder mystery and a lot better than the trailer would suggest.

I'd definitely reccommend Upload. It's smart and funny and has an involving if highly unoriginal plot. Its big strength is some very strong, nuanced characters. Andi Allo, once a singer and guitarist in Prince's New Power Generation, has been drawing all the attention for her turn as Nora and she is a warm and inviting presence but for my money the most interesting performance comes from Allegra Edwards in the far less likeable but unsettlingly nuanced role of Ingrid.

With only ten episodes, I was through Upload in not much over a week. I sped up a bit towards the end. Watched a couple of episodes back to back. Hard to resist doing that.

Amazon, naturally, uses algorithms to suggest things you might want to watch next. One of the shows it put in front of me after Upload finished was the very similarly-named Undone. Makes you wonder whether they're sorting these things by subject and theme or just going with the closest character match.

Luckily, Undone is another top choice. Better than Upload?  Maybe, although I'm not sure it makes much sense to compare the two. They have some similarities, sure, particularly in the female leads and the murder mystery backdrop and the "from the guys that brought you" pitch (in this case, those would be the guys that brought you Bojack Horseman, a show I really want to see...) but they're more different than they are alike. At least the trailer's better, we can all agree on that.

Undone came out last September but I didn't notice it back then. It's  Amazon's first original animated series, although I sometimes balk at including rotoscoped motion capture in "animation". Where Upload's reviews are somewhat mixed (people seem either to absolutely love it or think it's very weak), Undone has had almost universal critical approval and I can see why.

It's a very adult show, something I also felt keenly with Tales from the Loop. Very much television for grown-ups. That's definitely down to the outstanding writing, but I also believe it has much to do with process. Animation always drags a huge weight of history along, pegging anything that smacks of cartooning as for kids, but I have a strong suspicion rotoscope imparts a gravitas that's not always fairly earned. It's a paradox.

Something about the cleanliness of the surfaces, the ability to include only what's wanted, combined with the eerie sense of watching real people (which we are) conspires to elevate the experience somehow, make it feel more important, give it depth. A heightened reality. That's certainly the case here, where the acting is exemplary, the illustration overwhelming.

Undone triggers me. It might be argued I see Philip K Dick in everything but he's here for sure, not just in the fracturing of reality but in the stylistic hat-tip to the stone-age mo-cap of A Scanner Darkly. I was minded also, at all times, of the Hernandez brothers' classic work on Love and Rockets. It's a more dangerous comparison. Lazy, maybe. Latinx characters, ligne claire by way of Riverdale High... an easy conclusion to jump but I'll stand by it.

It's more than surface. Alma's spiky, punk attitude, the relationship between her and sister Becca, their physicality - Alma gamine, Becca womanly - all vibe Hopey and Maggie. And I speak as someone who once had photocopies of the two of them all over my walls.

Love and Rockets also operated in the liminal space between the quotidian and the fantastic and so does Undone, albeit much more quietly. There are no rockets, for a start.

There is quantum entanglement, though, and timeshifting. And pre-Columbian mysticism. Or maybe it's all just in Alma's scattered mind. A car crash, PTSD and a family history of schizophrenia might lead you to see things that way.

Upload and Undone have both been picked up for second series, just as well since they both end, if not on cliffhangers, then on open questions. This is the part of watching new stuff I don't much relish. The waiting. Then again, with things as they are these days, who can afford to leave it for the box set?

Don't Get Weird On Me, Babe: Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

I don't know about Animal Crossing in general but Pocket Camp is weird. It emblematizes cultural drift. Could something like this have existed in the mid or late twentieth century? I doubt it.

In great part, ACPC relies on and resides in the hinterland between maturity and childhood. It looks absolutely like a game designed for children. Quite small children. It doesn't read like one.

We're in a nervous neighborhood, as evidenced by the appearance of the anxious query "is Animal Crossing for adults?", tenth in Google's suggestions on how a sentence beginning "Is Animal Crossing..."might end. That's the generic Animal Crossing, though. If you rephrase the question to refer specifically to Pocket Camp the suggestion vanishes. Seems it's a question no-one's asking.

Pocket Camp is the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. Ars Technica's glowing review of New Horizons complains that "the series' identity has been sullied in recent years by the smartphone-only spinoff Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp", suggesting those of us who have only seen the mobile version might even "assume the Animal Crossing series is a cheap Farmville clone".

Of course, to do that I'd first have to have played Farmville, or at least have a much clearer idea of what it is. Did it have narcissists, fantasists and super-annuated extras from Easy Rider as mainstays of its cast? Did it exist to blur the boundaries of the real and irreal?

I like to play Pocket Camp right before I go to sleep, which often means midnight or later. Some of the animals in the campsite comment on the lateness of the hour. They allude to night-time activities that they and I might prefer to keep hidden. They express mild concern over why I might be up so late.

Yet there they always are. Juggling, reading, chatting. Night never falls on our shared world. It's always bright as noon. Their surprise at my nocturnal presence might equally be my own at their eternal wakefulness.

The private lives of these animals are a mystery. I'm not always sure even of their species. It is, I'm thinking, something about which one shouldn't ask.

There are many questions better left unspoken. To ask why a penguin, if that's what Tex is, should be both a football letterman and an enthusiast for the revival of dead languages would take Pocket Camp into areas I feel ill-qualified to enter. It's necessary to accept these situations.

Some of my animal friends maintain a certain consistency. Rosie is determined she's a star. Apollo knows he's old. Tex's speech in favor of bringing back Latin, however, turned up a few days later in the mouth of someone else, word for word.

What does that mean? I think of Californium, sometimes. Are we inside the children's novel Philip K Dick never wrote?

There's a queasy lurch to some of the conversations. Animal Crossing is a safe place, we all know that, but is it? Is it really? Do you want to imagine Rosie in a leather jumpsuit? Like Suzy Quatro, perhaps? Or Joan Jett? Or Kathy Rain? And should you, if you do?

She didn't really say it, did she? Someone put those words in her mouth. Is there a leather jumpsuit in the game? Is this a marketing suggestion? Or is it someone having fun? And at whose expense?

Apollo was the first animal to join my crew. He all but invited himself. I wasn't sure at first but now he's a fixture. I wouldn't know the place without his passive-aggressive bark and self-deprecating sense of humor.

He has a lot of lines. Last night I upgraded my cool tent to level three and he launched into a multi-screen soliloquy on the joy of the open road. It was worthy of Lana's intro to Ride, or at least a bar band cover of  Steppenwolf.

Was it the way we were dressed? Or the cool factor of the level three tent? Or was Apollo just having a mid-life crisis, like all his others?

He's an eagle with barely-suppressed anger issues, an odd combination of self-doubt and arrogance. Rosie's a narcissist, possibly delusional. Goldie, as we have already established, is agarophobic. Eugene seems to think he's The Fonz. Tia believes inanimate objects can be friends, although not with her. Freya is perhaps the most normal of campers, although even she seems dangerously brittle some days...

I'm thinking of Phil Dick again. Clans of the Alphane Moon, specifically.

Last night I dinged level 22. There are eight animals camping with me, the most the campsite can hold.

I checked today. The game currently has at least one hundred and fifty levels and there are one hundred and ninety-one animals.

I think I need to sit quietly and think this through. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is weird. And it's not about to stop.

Pale Lilac Snow: Elder Scrolls Online

Yesterday evening saw my return to Elder Scrolls Online, a little over a year since the last login, when I stuck my head around the door of my free inn room, saw how dark and pokey it was and promptly logged out again.

In all the time I've played the game (can't be more than a few hours in a few years) I've only ever tasted a single race and class, Khajiit Dragonknight, levelled, painfully, slowly, sporadically to level twelve. All I've seen of the game is the starting area for that combo.

Or maybe it is. Hard to remember. ESO hasn't made much of an impact. About all I recall are some caves, a bit of woodland, a rocky island where some orcs live. Oh, and a beach. Maybe I might have seen a strip of desert once, on a boat trip.

To be honest, it's all a bit of a blur. I do know I haven't seen any snow before, though, so the place I found myself in last night has to be new.

With cat-people off the menu, the options that faced me at character creation weren't doing much. There seemed to be a lot of elves, never a happy omen. Some rather ordinary-looking humans. One of those viking/barbarian types.

Nothing really bit. The faux-authentic gear wasn't helping.

I don't know, time was when what I wanted from a high-medieval MMORPG was armor looking like the artist sketched it through dusty glass at a down-at-heel market town museum in some central European backwater but I've been spoiled. These days I'd rather come on like the sugared-up second cousin of a Ruritanian princess, tricked out for a tour with a favorite band of glam-folk troubadours, on the run from that day job in the circus.

I like a bit of color, in other words. Not getting much of that here.

So I chose the lizard. If you can't dress exotic, be exotic, right? And they get frills on their heads. Or punk rock spikes. I went with the spikes.

It looked good in character create but in most MMORPGs no character design survives contact with the game engine. The screenshots tell the old story here. Ninety minutes of play, I really only got a good look at my character once.

That was the oddly blurred shot above. I'm not even sure how it happened. Must have hit some chance combination of keys. It's the only shot where you can - just about - see the character's face. Not that a lizard shows much expression. And the face markings and head-spikes are hidden under the rough cloth cowl.

ESO is one of those games where the graphics look better in screenshots. It's funny how often that happens. Or the other way round. I was only saying the other day how The Hammers End looks better than the screenshots suggest.

It must be something to do with settings. I confess that's something I almost never pay any attention to in any game, although given the ridiculous number of screenshots I take I almost certainly should. I tend to shy away from getting involved too closely with things like that, for my own safety. The last thing I need is discovering something like Black Desert's super-sophisticated in-game photo options. No-one needs a virtual David Bailey.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking at my character. I was looking at the snow. It was pretty good snow and I'm something of an afficionado. Snowficcionado. It's a word, now. I once wrote a piece on Good Snow Art for a comics fanzine. I may have done something similar here, on this blog.

Snow does make everything look better. There's all that blue in the palette. I know humans can recognize more shades of green than any other color but green in games tends towards the bland, except in jungles. Blue has much more resonance.

Blue, white, red. Winter landscapes, there's sometimes a surprising amount of red, bleeding into the blue, leeching pale lavenders and mauves. All these shots drip with it. It makes the cold seem so warm.

Which is probably just as well because, lizard. Cold-blooded, yes? Unless Tamriel evolution is very different, which of course it may be because, magic.

Anyway, I was surprised to find my lizard, whose descriptive background had mentioned something about swampland, waking up in a log cabin somewhere in the frozen north. A quick conversation with the nearest person confirmed no more than I'd expected: shipwreck, washed ashore, unconscious, found by villagers, now pressed into service against imminent threat. Yadda yadda and like that.

Could there be a more generic opening? Well, I guess. I mean, lizard in the snow, that's a twist. Explanation as to why or even how any of it happened, though? Not forthcoming.

Of course, I did opt to skip the tutorial. Maybe it was in there. But the game helpfully told me I'd done it before on another character so I didn't have to go through it again and I took the offer, gladly. No matter it was half a dozen years ago and all forgotten now.  No matter I'd been a tiger, then, in another place. Let's press on.

Out of the cabin I ran around some. It was daytime, for a wonder. In the time I played, night never fell. It did get a bit less bright for a while, one time. It helped a lot, the sun on the snow, the brightness. I'm losing patience with spending half my playtime in thick twilight let alone deep night. It was nice, being able to see, for once.

I grabbed some quests as I happened across them. I didn't seek them out or linger. I don't like either the font or the background. Harsh. Dark. Abrasive. These things affect my enjoyment strongly. I have these issues with print, too. There are novels I just won't read because of the way the text lies on the page.

If it's good, you'd make the effort but the writing in ESO is ponderous. No, that's maybe not the world. Ponderous suggests uncertainty and quest text here is far from uncertain. Too confident, if anything. Portentous, that could be the word I'm groping for. Or pretentious, though usually I like that. No, it's portentous, all right. Portentous and leaden. Lies heavy on the line. A common failing of fantasy, transcribed here faithfully from those endless series that stretch an author's career across decades.

Although... let's be fair. The few quests I did last night weren't all that bad. Better, or at least, less wearing to read than those I remembered from the other starting area. More perfunctory, less long-winded. Mostly "go find this guy" and, when I found him, "go do this thing".

At one point I almost felt a sense of urgency. A ship sighted, an invasion anticipated. Danger blowing in on the wind. You wouldn't know it from the voice acting, of course, still as first table-reading as ever. I have a theory about this. It applies to video game voice acting in general, not just to ESO. I don't know enough about the process to begin pontificating. Yet.

I didn't do a lot of questing, anyway. Mostly I ran around in the snow, taking snapshots, killing stuff. I ran into a bandit camp early on. Expected to die, being only level two or three. Tried to con the bandits, couldn't figure out how, so I blasted one to see what would happen. What happened was I killed him.

So I killed some more. Quite a few. Got a hat, put it on. Burned some supplies, freed a captive. Bandit Camp 101. I dinged. It occurred to me this must be the famous equalization. One zone for all.. Makes you wonder why levels at all except I guess without them there'd be none of that drip drip drip, progress. I suppose now I can go anywhere, kill anyone, like in that old joke, the one about the army. 

My lizard's a sorceror. I thought maybe it would be easier than melee, given the awful, awful controls. It wasn't, actually. If anything it was harder. More keys to press, can't just spam LMB/RMB. But I lived, bandits died. Can't complain.

And it was fun, kind of. As much fun as the horrible controls let it be. I started thinking maybe I should get a controller and use that. Could hardly be worse. I was already thinking about it. I even looked at some on Amazon the other day.  

After the bandits I went to some kind of temple, swarming with skeletons. Again, I lived, they died Or undied. Whatever the verb is. I do like fighting bandits and undead at low levels. Simple pleasures. If these count as low levels, that is.

The game was kind of busy. Really busy, actually. There were players everywhere. It seems ESO etiquette dictates you just pile on when you see someone fighting. People were always "helping" me to kill stuff. I got the loot so that worked out. I didn't reciprocate, though.

I found all my runes, opened the crypt door, looking for the necromancer. If I followed the plot I think I was supposed to kill him but I never even saw him. There was a line. I didn't bother waiting, just spoke to a ghost. He seemed to think I'd done whatever it was I'd come there to do. Fine, then.

I grabbed a bit of paper that said something or other and left. Gave it to the guy who'd sent me. He was waiting right oustside, which saved me a run. He asked me to go back to the village, tell someone what had happened, not that I really knew what that was. I did it anyway and the guy said something bad was going to happen so it would probably be best if we all ran away. More of the supposed realism? Maybe, but it's going to be tough adventuring if all the quests go "check out if something bad's happening and if it is come tell me so we can all run away".

I said I'd tell a few other people and we'd be off but actually all I did was move five feet away and log out. I'm sure he won't mind waiting although on form so far it could be another year or two.

Or maybe not. It was kind of fun. I think ESO may well be another of the growing list of MMORPGs (FFXIV, LotRO) I enjoy the more, the less I quest. Now if I could just figure out a way to make the combat not actively annoying...