I'm On A Train... I'm Still On A Train... I'm On A Different Train... I'm Still On A Train...

I finally did it!  I finally bought something off my Steam wishlist! It was the cheapest thing on there and it had to go to half-price before I'd bite but apparently I do have a price sensitivity trigger after all. Within thirty seconds of reading the email telling me it was on sale for 50% off, I'd bought it.

I can still claim I only buy games I'm going to play, at least. Within a couple of hours I'd started playing it. Or maybe I mean watching it. No, listening to it...

All of the above. The Longest Road on Earth isn't exacly what you'd call a game. Reviews on the Steam store page, where it has a Very Positive rating, albeit from just a hundred and six reviews, say things like "This game is like an interactive screensaver" and "It's hard to really call The Longest Road on Earth a game". And those are the raves.

My favorite negative comment was "Great music but I don't understand the point of this game and by that I don't mean that I'm not sure what's going on in this game but why would anyone play such games." Tibore has a point. The music is great.

It reminds a litle of The Papertiger Sound and it's so good, in fact, that if I'd heard it first as an album it would have made my Pitchfork 25 longlist. Or would it?

That's a question I'm never going to be able to answer. The whole experience of hearing those songs is so inextricably linked to watching those images and also to pressing those keys that to judge the elements separately makes no more (or less) sense than singling out the individual instruments in a recording and rating them in isolation.

Which, of course, is something we do all the time. Or I do, anyway. Like, what would Sun60's Take Me Home be without that trumpet solo? I guess I could pick the fabric apart and talk about the graphics and the gameplay and the sonics independently. I might, yet, if I ever get around to a full review.

I think I won't, though. I think I'll stick with the gestalt. I think that's what matters here.

The first comment I quoted above, the one about the "interactive screensaver", gets very close to what The Longest Road feels like to play (or play with) but what I was thinking as I watched and clicked and listened along last night was "this feels like I'm directing a music video". I'm guessing there'd be a market for an app that let you do that although I'm not sure it would need to be a "game".

Sometimes there didn't seem to be a lot of direction needed. The action (I use the word in its loosest possible sense.) is so perfectly synched to the music that even though I had no clear idea in some scenes what I was expected to do, whatever I did seemed to fit. It's strangely empowering. It feels almost like dancing, only if you could.

It's such a strong meld that on the odd occasion I couldn't quite find the rhythm it felt frustrating. There were a couple of scenes where I wasn't entirely sure whether I should be doing something or just sitting, watching and listening. 

That. It turned out to be that. One thing the game does that you only really ever see in experimental works and art installations is ask you to experience something from a perspective other than your own, for longer than feels comfortable, making no attempt to entertain you while it's happening.

I played for an hour and there were several train journeys, two of which asked me to do nothing much other than sit and wait until the train got to where it was going. Once the ticket collector came by. Slowly. Then he came back. The other time, not even that. 

In both cases I could do just one thing while I waited: change my point of view from mine to the character's. In one train carriage the character put her her elbows on the table and her head in her hands and all I could see from her perspective was the lamp on the table. In the other the character sat upright facing the other side of the carriage and all I could see through his eyes was the opposite window and the hanging straps.

Just that. For about three minutes. While a song plays. A whole song, start to finish.

When one of the Steam reviewers says "this is not a game for eveyone" they're really not kidding. Mostly I love it but in those extended train journeys even I began to feel the lack of agency. 

I'm fairly sure, though, that in those scenes lack of agency is precisely the point. The characters are trapped in situations they can't escape, doing things they find emotionally harrowing or soul-destroying. They can't change their perspective or take control of their lives so why should you think you should be any different?

Or at least that might be what's happening. It's hard to be sure. The Longest Road is not a narrative-driven experience. There are stories being told but what they are is mostly up to you, the player, to interpret. Or invent. Or imagine. 

As yet, I'm not even sure the scenes always happen in the same order. I think they do but I've only played the original demo and the first hour of what is generally reckoned to be a three-hour game. In last night's session I remembered many but by no means all of the scenes from the demo I played back in February.

Even though the demo only lasts twenty minutes, there are screenshots in the old post of things I didn't see when I played for an hour last night. I'm curious to know if there's a random factor or whether it's just that the demo is really a trailer, a few of the best bits stitched together, not, as I thought at the time, the whole of the first story.

I'll get the chance to find out soon enough. The main reason I played for an hour last night, rather than the thirty minutes I intended, wasn't because of how wrapped-up in the experience I was but because I couldn't find any way to stop. The controls are the very definition of minimal - left and right arrow to move, space (or mouseclick) to choose an action. Or, I should say, choose whether to act. The only choice, ever, is Act or Do Not. Yoda would love it.

Similarly, you either play or don't play. There didn't seem to be any way of saving the game that I could find. Hitting Escape pauses the game and gives you access to a couple of icons but all you can do with them is adjust the volume or close the game. I closed the game.

 

Afterwards I noticed that when you very first start there's an icon of an old-fashioned floppy disk. It seems to be crossed-through by default but you can uncross it. I am guessing that might relate to some sort of Save function. I cleared it for next time but as yet I haven't been back to see what effect that's had.

I'm not sorry to have to start over. The whole thing could stand some poking. I'm very unclear on just what can be done. I was wondering even as I was playing what would happen if I just let a character stand in the middle of a scene indefinitely. Would the game move on to another when the song ended? Would the song start again from the beginning? Is the music designed, like most game soundtracks, to loop indefinitely without making it obvious that's what it's doing?

And the animations and the vignettes - are they always the same or do they pull from a pool of possibilites, puzzle pieces that slot together like Lego to give an unending impression of mundane, quotidian, workaday existence? That would make the whole thing more than I imagined it was. Or possibly, as yet another Steam reviewer would have it, "Beautifully mundane... But nothing more.".

In the end, I'm not sure it matters. It's a mood piece. It's a series of images set to music. It's a suite of songs with pictures. It's a something to do with your hands while you listen to an album. It's a place to let your eyes rest while you think about the lyrics. It's an experience.

If and when I work out what that experience is I'll be sure to come back and let you know. Better yet, go try it for yourself, then come back and tell me. It's on sale at half-price (£3.99/$4.99) until November 24.

"Look What The Black Cat Dragged In!"

Don't think I even have time tonight for the promised (Or is that threatened?) Narnia mash-up. I have all the pictures but as I learned last night I'm not capable of just putting them up and walking away. I have to editorialise and in the end it takes as long as writing a proper post, so that's kind of missing the point.

Luckily I have the old fall-back to fall back on. Music videos! Got a couple and a couple of reasons for using them, too. Always good to have a reason.

The first is something I wanted to crowbar into yesterday's post but couldn't find a delicate way to do it. Delicate crowbarring. Now, there's a concept to conjure with. Conjuring with crowbars, even better. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, the video. It's Nine Stories by Hazel English. Pretty obvious why I wanted to get it in somehow. Better now than never.

It's a slice of sweet indie pop with a bubbling beat and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded through a sock. Several socks. Probably thermal. I don't want to come over like one of those fathers in a 1960s teensploitation movie but I really can't understand the words. 

Of course, by "understand" I mean "make out". I can understand what they mean, now I read them at Genius.com. They're pretty simple to understand or they seem to be. I know lyrics are seldom as surfaced as they appear but it's what I'm going with for now. 

The only conection with the book that gives the song its title would appear to be the first few lines

"You lent me Nine Stories
While you starred in mine
We talked about J.D
In your car..."

It's enough. I mean, I didn't even talk about him.

The other video is "3 Small Words", a candypop slammer from the soundtrack to Josie and the Pussycats, done live by Letters To Cleo, whose singer, Kay Handley, was the voice of Josie in the movie (Something which takes more digging to authenticate than it should.) and the always entertaining Charly Bliss, who are currently supporting LTC on tour, a billing order that surprised me. 

The result is one of the most mood-lifting spectacles I've seen for quite a while.

Seriously, if that doesn't at least make you remember what it felt like to be happy, you may want to check your pulse. I had that much energy once, you know and some of it was even my own.

Other than the sheer, innocent, exuberant joy of it, the reason (Remember, I said I had one.) for wanting to put it up is because Riverdale is back in my thoughts and back on Netflix. Last time I mentioned the show (I'd link but I can't find the post. Maybe I only thought-wrote it.) we'd just gotten to the end of Season Five and everything had gone totally telenovella. 

I wasn't sure there was going to be another season but not only is there, it's now! It's also short. Five episodes. Actually, that's just half a season. Then it goes on hiatus for a few months to return in March next year.

That would be good enough but there's more. So much more. Remember how peeved I was over the way longish-running shows seem to get cancelled these days with no view to giving the fans either the catharsis they need or the satisfaction they deserve? One of those shows was The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which ended (BIG spoiler...) with Sabrina dead and gone to heaven. It was kinda cool but kinda fucking annoying at the same time.

When it happened, I wondered why, since TCAOS and Riverdale both take place in the same 'verse and have the same showrunner, some sort of deal couldn't have been worked out to integrate the two. Well guess what!

Oh, you guessed. I kinda teed that one up a little, didn't I? The picture at the top of the post may have been a clue, too.

Season Six of Riverdale, which is "in-canon and within the continuity" features the return of everyone's favorite teenage witch. Just like in the trailer (I could give you a couple of thousand words on that trailer, by the way. Maybe just on Cheryl.) Sabrina doesn't turn up until the end but I'm hoping she'll be sticking around for the second half of the season, when it finally gets here.

That just leaves me with the familiar quandry: whether to watch the weekly episodes as they drop or to hold my nerve and watch them all in quick succession at the end. I've tried it both ways this year. I waited for The Expanse (Also soon to return.) but I watched each episode of Stargirl as it came. 

My preference is to watch one episode a day. I wish someone would try that for a cadence once in a while. Or maybe they have and it's something I don't watch. 

I don't watch everything. Just the good ones.

Nine Pictures

I did warn you this would happen. It's eight in the evening, I haven't even logged in to do my Guild Wars 2 dailies yet, let alone anything more interesting and yet I still don't want to skip a day, so here comes something I prepared earlier. Although "prepared" may  be stretching a point a little.

I was curious how Artflow would interpret some of my favorite fictional characters. My first attempt, which was more of a title than a character, came out rather well, if you think Uncle Wiggly was an elderly fisherman rather than an elderly rabbit. Also I just now realize I spelled his name wrong.

After that debacle I tried just putting in the character names but I didn't much like the results. Then it occured to me to try adding the name of an artist to use their style as a kind of filter. The AI seems pretty well-versed in that sort of thing.

I had a brief think about who I could try. I'd already done a few pop stars as they might look if David Hockney had done their portraits, as indeed he could easily have done but I for some reason the AI seemed to think Hockney's defining trope was making people look like they'd fallen asleep in the Californian sun while lounging around the pool in his Los Angelean home.

That didn't seem like it was going to work for the pasty, New York intellectuals I had in mind. I toyed with Warhol but it seemed a little too on the nose. Rothko seemed like he might be interesting but only in a metaphysical fashion. I couldn't see how it would actually bring anything to the experiment other than another color wash.

While I was trying to come up with something better, Roy Lichtenstein popped into my mind, as he so often does if I start thinking randomly about art. Not that I'm a particular fan of his work or even of Pop Art in general, although obviously I like it well enough, who doesn't? It's more that he's so brash and loud he tends to push his way to the front.

I took a couple of shots at it to see what popped up and they weren't at all bad. They might have been even better if I'd spelled the artist's name right. I sense a theme developing here...

I find it fascinating how consistent they are. They really do look as though they'd been painted by the same artist. I'm not sure that artist would be Roy Lichtenstein but I guess it could have been Roy Leichtenstein.

They didn't look anything like the versions of the characters in my head, though. Phoebe is too old and also far too sophisticated. Seymour looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag. Holden looks the best of the three but I always imagined him to be a lot thinner in the face. The hair and the sullen, defeated-yet-confrontational expression are pretty close, though.

Just then, probably because I'd been talking about her earlier that day, I thought of Cindy Sherman. At this point I'd dearly love to just let that lie there while I bask in it. I'd love to be thought of the kind of person who has casual conversations about Cindy Sherman over afternoon tea. 

What actually happened was that Mrs Bhagpuss and I watched an old episode of Pointless on YouTube and there was a question where you had to name a female American photographer from a picture. Not one of her pictures, a picture of her.  I've already forgotten who it was. It might have been Dorothea Lange. I know at the time I could only think of Diane Arbus and I knew it wasn't her. 

Anyway, it started me thinking about Cindy Sherman, who I like enough to have a picture by, up on the wall in a room downstairs, cut out of a magazine and snap-framed about a quarter of a century ago. I figured she'd be worth a try.

Yeah... kinda.

As you can see I went all out for accuracy and consistency in the seeds and I damn well got it, too. What I don't think I really got, once again, were either the characters or the artist as I'd imagined them. 

I can see a touch of Cindy Sherman in the shots of Phoebe and Franny. There's a hint of that processed color I like about some of her stuff. The backgrounds also seem to have some redolence of what I remember about her work in a certain period, although I suppose that's just pure chance.

Phoebe's too old again. I think I'd have to specify her age to get anything remotely close. Other than that, and especially if she wiped off that lipstick, she's not too far out of line. Franny looks closer to my idea of her, Cindy Sherman or not, and Zooey isn't far off, either. Seymour is at least possible. I don't have a super-strong image of him to begin with, although I see him as well-built and solid with a more traditionally masculine look than the rest of the Glass family. This version is that, at least.

I can't say I have any particular notion what Buddy might look like except he sure as hell wouldn't look like he does here, where he reminds me of Hugh Laurie playing the role of a supercilious officer in a movie about the War Between the States. Not sure which side he'd be on. Maybe he's not, either.

Holden, I think, looks less like himself than he did under Lichtenstein's influence. He looks like a young Dean Martin caught in the middle of removing his stage makeup. He's got that worn-down, ready to give up look again, which is right, but this time he doesn't seem to have the energy left to be belligerent.

Anyway, there you have it, for what it's worth. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I might just have enough time before bed to get those dailies done.

I'm working again tomorrow so I may very well have to trot out the results of my attempts to actualize the main cast of C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories. There's something to look forward to, eh?

Void When Opened

Despite what I said in yesterday's post, it wasn't until this afternoon that I found time to log in to New World to see what the Void had brought. Maybe that should be "wrought". Seems more appropriately doom-laden.

I was way the hell up in the north in Mourningdale but I remembered the patch notes had said something about "a force of invading knights currently raiding Southeastern Aeternum" so I guessed I'd better head that way. I looked at the map and figured if the Varangians had come by ship (which, since Aeternum is an island, they pretty much would have had to have done) unless they had some kind of magic portal or they flew in on dragonback (by no means out of the question) presumably meant a landing somewhere in First Light.

Although that's on the same side of the map as Mourningdale, the overland route is tortuous. Since I've never seen any good reason to change my original bind point from the Monarchs Bluff inn, over to the southwest, I figured I'd recall and run across from there. That would give me a chance to kill several crows with one rock: I had a few quests to hand in at various town boards, I'd be able to get a feel for that oh-so-generous ten per cent speed buff for running on roads and I might be able to snap a shot or two of the "updated visuals" in the starting areas.

The speed buff was easy to assess. For a start there's an icon that pops up when it kicks in so you're in no doubt whether it's on or not. I think I'd know even without the visual indicator. Somewhat to my surprise, I could just about tell the difference. 

It's very much not like getting Spirit of Wolf in EverQuest, where people would routinely refuse even to set out on a long journey until they'd found someone to cast SoW on them, even if they had to pay for the privelege. I can't imagine changing my route to stay on roads just to keep the buff, not if taking a cut across country looks shorter. It's better than nothing, though.

By the time I'd reached the beach in First Light I'd seen no signs whatever of either the invading army or the supposed new eye candy. I went right to the point where you get the first quests in case "starting area" was being used in the most literal sense but nothing. If anyone knows what the changes were, please chime in. I'm not likely to go back for another look unless I know just what I'm looking for.

I had a lot more luck spotting a couple of the new mob types. The Beetle, as far as I know, is genuinely new or at least I've never seen one before. I guess there might be some in a dungeon or a very high level area. In fact, the more I think about it, the likelier that seems. 

Either that or it's a pre-existing model they never got around to using until now. I find it hard to imagine anyone would sit down at their desk at this point in production cycle and proudly announce to their co-workers "Y'know what this game really needs? Beetles!"

The other new creature I saw was the "Lost Alligator Pet". Let me parse that because it's not what you may be thinking. It's not a pet alligator that wandered off and now can't be found. It's the alligator pet belonging to an NPC who's succumbed the overwhelming sense of existential despair that comes with eternal life and has passed into the realm of The Lost. 

I guess they could have called it "Lost's Alligator Pet" to make it clearer but that just sounds wrong. Although, now I think about it, who's to say that alligators can't suffer from existential despair? Maybe it's a pet alligator that is Lost (but not "lost"). I may be overthinking this.

Two things aren't in doubt. It's clearly an alligator and it's clearly domesticated. I spotted the first one on the porch of a cabin in the woods, not somewhere you'd expect to find a wild alligator. If there was any remaining doubt, the fact that it was wearing armor and a saddle soon cleared it up.

At least I'm pretty sure it's a saddle. It's hard to see in the screenshot, where it looks as if it could be a harness. In game, though, I definitely thought it was a saddle. That would be significant because there are currently no mounts in Aeternum for either players or NPCs. The alligator I saw looked too small to be the mount for a human-sized character (even ignoring the logistics of riding a creature with a ground clearance of less than six inches) but it could be taken as a straw in the wind.

Finding nothing in First Light I decided to do a little research. I googled "Varangian Knights" and found next to nothing of any use except this YouTube video, which irritatingly doesn't feature the obligatory map shot to tell you where it was filmed.

 

Luckily, someone had already raised the question in the thread and the uploader had replied"North West of Everfall, where it is written 'Stonereach.'" That sounded odd. Everfall is pretty much in the middle of the map, so the location would be more to the southwest than the southeast. 

I opened my map and looked and stap me! Not only is there an area called Stonereach to the northwest of Everfall but there was a big, yellow quest marker right on top of it. I moused over the marker and a helpful precis of the text appeared confirming that it was indeed the breadcrumb quest for the new content.

Leaving aside the uncomfortable fact that I have apparently had my map upside down this whole time, I had also been assuming the invaders would have been added as something to keep the bored sixties occupied for a while longer. It had puzzled me a little that endgame content would be added to lower-level areas but I had literally been musing as I ran down the road about this being a good first move toward keeping all of the map in play as people stacked at the cap.

I couldn't have been more wrong. The invaders and the associated questline are wholly appropriate to the level of the area they're in. What's more, absolutely nothing in the promotional material or the patch notes suggests anything else. I'd made the whole high-level thing up out of no evidence whatsoever.

A disgruntled Abigail Rose set me to evicting the invading army from the abandoned keep from which they'd just evicted her. I approached cautiously, not knowing what to expect, only to find a bunch of level seventeens lounging around some bright yellow tents. Even though they were all wearing full plate armor they died in a hit or two. Hard to say how tough they'd be at level, although the shield-carrying guards do have a very nasty stun.

As well as killing the necessary half-dozen I also found their not-so-secret plans. These, along with several other notes and letters I read, very strongly suggest the invasion is just the start of a new, longer narrative. How long it will be before we see any of it depends on how quickly Amazon can produce new content, I guess, but it is at least a fair indication they have something in the works.

The story moves from the Keep to the coast, where the Varangians have a gaudy encampment of the ugly mustard-colored tents they favor. Keeping a low profile does not seem to feature in their agenda, whatever it is.

Disturbingly, the camp turns out be barely a stone's throw from the town of Monarchs Bluff. Had I come out of a different gate when I ported there at the beginning, I might have spotted it from the clifftop. It seems particularly brazen that the invaders would set up camp so openly right next to a major population center but as this other note I found suggests, they are neither subtle nor entirely free to make their own tactical choices.

That raises far more questions than it answers. Who is the Lord Commander? Who is the Great Lord? Are they the same person or two, separate individuals? What are they trying to find out? What is their task? Why is it so urgent? 

And why do they call themselves so many different names begining with "V"? Varangian, Varikulaki, Vulkgard. Not to mention where the hell have they come from and how did they get here? I thought the entire island of Aeternum was surrounded by storms that wrecked every ship. Come to think of it there is a wrecked ship right next to the beach camp. And it has their banners flying from the wreckage...

In common with much of the writing in New World, it piques my curiosity and makes me want to know more. I can't yet say if the quest carries on after the first step because having finished it I noticed I was at my Azoth cap and since part of the reward is 150 Azoth I'm going to have to find something useful to do with some of mine before I do the hand-in. I really hate the caps in this game.

That's going to be something for another day, maybe not until next week. It'll be too late to carry on after I finish this and I'm working all weekend. It was a fun session, though. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes next.

Anyone Seen My Jet-Powered, Flying Death-Turtle?

 

When Wilhelm mentioned in the comments to yesterday's post that Visions of Vetrovia had acquired a firm launch date (1st December, for those taking notes.) I went to have a look at the beta forums to get a feel for how those who'd already had the chance to try it felt about what they'd seen. 

I don't imagine any of it's under NDA, since all you need to do to see it is pony up a month's sub but since I haven't taken the trouble to copy a character and check it out for myself I'll just say that, having spent half an hour reading threads, I came away with the distinct impression that people were finding less to complain about than usual. One or two even sounded... happy.

Of course, beta testers for an expansion that's going live in a few weeks in a seventeen year old game they all play are, by definition, going to be a self-selecting cadre of committed players. You might expect some degree of leniency or tolerance. Yeah, well, if you do, you obviously don't know many EQII players, then, that's all I can say. If there's something to complain about, they'll find it, trust me. And if there isn't they'll complain about it anyway.

On that basis I'm expecting something good even if, ironically after what I was saying yesterday, there do seem to be some quite significant, even major, changes to core game mechanics. A couple of things are being removed entirely - infusions and reuse speed buffs - and the adornments I was talking about are getting some kind of revamp, too. 

If changes on that scale haven't brought out the tar, feathers and burning torches then I'm guessing the rest of the expansion's probably in good shape. We'll find out in a couple of weeks, I guess. 

I'm looking forward to it somewhat more than I expected. New World remains fun for me but I'm getting to the point where I wouldn't mind a change of focus. Every session there sees slow, steady, unspectacular progress towards my two main goals, Level 60 and my first house, but while slow and steady wins the race it doesn't always make for the most thrilling gameplay. 

I think I'm getting to the point now, after a couple of months, that people who reported finding the game too slow and repetitive reached after the first couple of days. Lucky for me, then, that today Amazon dropped the first big update. 

You can tell it's a big one because it's got a name: Into the Void. That's not going to come back and bite anyone, I'm sure...

I haven't yet logged in but I have read the extensive patch notes. I won't pick through them in any detail because it's basically the same stuff I wrote about when it appeared on the new Public Test Server, which, by the way, automatically installs itself on Steam and downloads the entire game all over again unless you stop it. I'd watch for that if you value your hard drive space. 

There are a few extras that I don't remember being mentioned before, like a ten per cent run speed bonus on roads, which struck me as being at one and the same time welcome and annoying. It's great that staying on the road is going to make travel faster but ten per cent? Are we even going to notice?

I've always been something of an afficonado of amusing lines in patch notes and these had a few that I thought I might share, not least because the whole thing goes on for so long I imagine most people will give up long before the "Wildlife" subsection.

One note that caught my eye read "Fixed an issue where Elk could get stuck in doorways or inside buildings." I'm not sure how that would ever happen. I've never seen an elk anywhere near a building. They tend to run as soon they see anyone approaching. As a melee, you have to creep up behind them and hope you can stun them long enough to kill them before they gallop away. Getting them stuck in a door would have been a useful bug to exploit.

Then there were the boars. I've never used a musket so I was unaware there was "an issue that would cause Boars to behave erratically if a player shot a projectile near them". I'd like to know what they did but it's too late now. It's been fixed. Can't really blame them for getting "erratic" when people fire guns at them. I'm pretty sure I would.

My favorite wildlife-related note, however, was this one: "Disabled Cats ability to look at and track the player with their head when stunned." They do say a cat can look at a king. Not any more. Not after you hit kitty with a hammer, anyway.

There were also some previously unannounced visual changes to starting zones that I'm keen to check out. The mysterious Varangian knights have landed on the south-eastern coast so I should be able to take a look at them while I'm doing it.

I'll be logging in as soon I finish this post, always assuming the servers are up. I imagine there are likely to be any number of unforeseen issues with a patch of this size so I'm not counting on it. 

The servers were down all afternoon for the patch so I decided it might be a good time to do some more of the "Return to..." event in Guild Wars 2. Earlier in the year I was trying to get enough done to qualify for the free End of Dragons legendary weapon precursor. It was going very well, until I forgot all about it.

Fortunately, like the Panda quests in EQII, this is content that's sticking around. Better yet, unlike the panda quests, you can do the "Return to" sections in any order you like. The whole thing involves replaying the entire Living Story from Season Two onwards.

In my estimation, although it doesn't necessarily get better the nearer you come to the present day, it definitely does get easier.  On that logic I thought I'd restart at the Icebrood Saga. I had a fairly clear memory of the prologue being considerably better than the rest so that's where I began.

It turned out to be both a good and a bad idea. When it first appeared I wrote that the prologue was the "Best "Living World" episode for as long as I can remember". Having spent a couple of hours today going through it again I stand by that review - with the proviso that you do have to be very interested in Charr politics to fully appreciate how good an episode it is. 

As it happens, I find Charr politics one of the most interesting aspects othe game. I would be more than happy to have a whole Living World season devoted to the topic. Oh, wait, that was the Icebrood Saga, wasn't it? Shame it completely fell apart after the first couple of chapters and turned into an incoherent  farago of melodrama and farce, then, wasn't it? If only the whole thing had lived up to the promise of the prologue.

That was the "good" part. The "bad" bit was me not noticing that to get the necessary updates for the EoD meta-achievement, doing the Prologue means ticking nearly twice as many boxes as you would in any of the other Icebrood chapters. I ended up finishing the entire storyline without even making it halfway through the fifteen tasks I was meant to do. 

It shouldn't be too hard to finish it up. At four in the afternoon on a weekday the map was amazingly busy. Two people had tagged to draw people into events, there were people asking in chat when things started and the whole place felt alive. GW2 is amazingly good at keeping a huge number of areas active pretty much non-stop. It's rare to go anywhere and not find other people there already.

I don't really mind another session in Grothmar Valley. It's a stunningly lovely zone, one of the most gorgeous in a game full of beautiful scenery and it also has a lovely festival vibe that makes spending time there feel a lot more cheerful than the usual killing zones. Not that there isn't plenty of killing but it's happy killing, don't you know? It's a Charr thing.

Even though all this effort is in aid of the upcoming End of Dragons expansion, I can't say I'm all that excited about it. Not nearly as much as I am for Visions of Vetrovia, even though we get three EQII expansions for every one GW2 manages to spit out. I still haven't pre-ordered EoD although I will eventually, I'm sure. The whole Cantha thing does nothing for me and the promotional videos ANet are starting to release are actively discouraging.

 

The one they put out today would almost qualify as a shark-jumping moment if the game hadn't long since pole-vaulted over the Champion Megaladon (In-game reference - just ignore it.) If you've always felt what was missing from your GW2 experience was being able to ride a giant, jet-assisted turtle while your best mate blasted stuff with the turtle-laser then all your dreams are aboout to come true.

There's even some talk about letting these things loose in World vs World which, if it happens, will mark final death-knell of that game-mode. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't logged into GW2 for a couple of weeks now. I suspect if she hears about the turtle she'll never log in again.

The Ant And The Panda And Me

This week sees the conclusion of EverQuest II's "Panda Panda Panda" event. Every week I've meant to get back to it but somehow I never have. Today, I finally managed to drag myself away from New World for long enough to catch up. I still had two-thirds of the quests to do (six out of nine) but that didn't take too long. I knew where most of the locations were without having to look them up.

It's always a fun, no-pressure event.There's no particular urgency to do each week's quest as it drops because once they're in, all the Summer/Panda quests stick around forever. You can go back at any time and do them at your leisure. You also only need to do them once per account. All your characters get immediate access to the rewards as soon as you finish each stage.

Looked at from another perspective, though, the clock is ticking. Part of the reason these questlines were added to the game and why there's a new one every year is to allow slackers to catch up before the annual expansion, which should be with us in a matter of a very few weeks. If you're a casual and/or solo player and you plan on getting Visions of Vetrovia on release you probably want to makes sure whoever you plan on taking into the opening zone has the advantage of all the free panda gear.

I've always suspected as much.

Or do you? I'm not at all sure. Another modern EQII tradition is the "Tishan's Box" that sits on the ground somewhere close to the first questgiver in each new expansion. It's full of armor, weapons and adornments for every archetype and it usually upgrades whatever you just got a few weeks earlier from the pandas.

If I had the determination I'd run some kind of comparison on the two this year to see just how much better the Tishan's gear is and whether it upgrades everything or whether you need to mix and match for best effect. I've thought of doing it before but what always happens is that I'm too excited to get on with exploring the new content and by the time I've calmed down I'm already wearing a mish-mash of panda, Tishan and early quest rewards.

Another reason is that upgrading gear in EQII is ferociusly complicated. One of the reasons I've been putting off finishing the panda quests this year is that I've been dreading the moment when I have to go through every item and compare it with what I have on. 

That's a lot of slots.

It would be bad enough if it just meant checking my armor and my weapons but there are the adornments to look at, too. An EQII character doll has more than 20 equipable slots and each takes up to six adornments. 

Adornments are where most of your power and survivablity comes from so you can't just slam in anything and hope. They come in sets, too, with set bonuses that can be extremely powerful and they have numerous status effects and buffs, not all of which can be applied at the same time on the same character.

When I read, as happens most years, of returning EQII players being slaughtered by the low-level wildlife in the introductory zone of the new expansion, I know it's always due to lack of preparation, if not lack of understanding. 

For years, the game has been very soft indeed for solo players and casuals, even in brand-new content, provided those players understand the expectations that lie behind the design. They give you all the gear you need, for free. They do expect you to at least put it on.

As an illustration, when I did my due dilligence this afternoon and compared every piece of new Hua armor and jewellery with what my Berserker was wearing, I only ended up equipping a couple of rings, a necklace and a pair of boots. Even as a very casual solo player the great majority of the gear he had on was better than anything the panda had to offer.

That's quite significant. I haven't really done what a solo player is intended to do to make sure their gear is up to scratch. That would be to run solo instances until my eyes bleed in the hope of getting the rarer drops, to do all the Public Quests I can find for as long as the wider community is running them and to do all my dailies and weeklies until there's nothing left that would be an upgrade. Not to mention the summer ethereals, the collection questline and the mid-year Fabled dungeon update, all of which have solo content that gives upgrades.

If you do all of that you'll end up very nicely dressed. I didn't. I did a few bits and pieces now and then when the mood took me but other than that I just did Overseer quests for the first four or five months of the last expansion cycle and that got me to 235-240 resolve in some slots and 225 in the rest. I was lucky to get a 270 resolve two-hander and a 260 cloak as well. 

The Hua gear from this year's panda quests is 225 resolve, which means you can take that as the minimum baseline for solo and casual players. The devs are telling you that you should be at least this tall to ride by now. If you've been playing much at all, you probably already will be but if not then Panda Panda Panda!

It would have been easy to slap on those few obvious upgrades and call it a day but that would have been a serious error. Gear is important but adornments are crucial and even though my Berserker is a maxed adorner with a very good set of recipes, there are a whole bunch of non-craftable adorns that only appear each year with the questline.

I spent a good long while meticulously going through every one of the dozens of adornments the Berserker had studded into his armor, comparing them with what was available on the panda vendor and swapping out all the ones that looked like improvements. It wasn't just the quest-specific ones I needed, either. 

Even though I could have made a load of white adornments this year I hadn't. I was too stingy to use the mats I had and too mean to buy the ones I needed. I spotted a whole bunch of free upgrades on the vendor and bought them by the stack.

And then I had to fit them. Including everything, the whole process took me about two hours of which only thirty minutes was flying around the world doing the six quests I hadn't done. Most of it was spent taking adornments out of things and putting others in. 

The reason it took so long is that adornments are slot-specific in various ways that can't just be seen at a glance from their color but needs to be studied in detail. Some things will go in many slots, some in few, some in only one. If you don't concentrate you can end up putting something that could go in half a dozen places into a slot that you should have saved for another gem that only goes in one or two.

It's not a major issue if you mess up. There's a handy gadget you can get from your class trainer that allows you to take adorns out of items without losing them or damaging the armor but it takes time to do and it's annoying when you find yourself removing the adornment you only added five minutes ago because you didn't plan ahead.

All of this sounds very off-putting and it is - to returning ex-players or potential new starters. To the core EQII players, the people who pay the subscriptions and buy the expansions, I strongly suspect it's the exact opposite. EQII players love complexity. They love fiddly systems and mechanics that take up hours of their time. They like to think their game is more intellectually demanding than other mmorpgs, whether it's true or not.

Over the long years I'm sure I've seen far more complaints when the developers have tried to reduce the number of choices to make things simpler and easier than I've seen about any new system that takes a lot of figuring out. The more abstruse and arcane things become, the more people seem to appreciate it. It's that kind of game.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't like it this way, too. It's absorbing while I'm doing it and satisfying when I'm finished. There's nothing like going from 520k hit points to 650k just by standing in your house fiddling around in your bags. 

I learned a few things, too, like I really need a new mount. The one I'm using is a decent one and it's maxed but it's from the expansion before last. I hadn't realized I never got a new mount in the whole of Reign of Shadows. I also haven't been keeping up with the gear upgrades for my mercenaries. I have quite a lot of stuff they could be using but it's not doing much good in my bags and bank vaults. And don't talk to me about Familiars... 

There's a lot of work still to do and I confess I'm not sure if there's much point at this stage. Unless Visions of Vetrovia veers wildly off the path set by most previous expansions, anything that looks like an upgrade now is going to look like cast-offs in a month or two. So long as I'm sufficiently well-equipped to handle the signature questline I'm probably better off just turning up as I am and swapping stuff out as I go.

For anyone who isn't interested in setting themselves up for the expansion, I'd still recommend finishing up the panda quests anyway. There are quite a few nice non-combat treats in the slightly misleadingly named "Decoration Packs". 

I particularly like Antony, the ant mount. Like most EQII mounts he's nicely animated, presumably by the invaluable Ttobey, who Darkpaw are very lucky to have. He's very characterful and not nearly as creepy as he could be. Antony, that is, not Ttobey. 

It's a shame Antony can't fly but then flying ants don't have much of a record of airworthiness, so it's probably just as well.

It's A Girl Thing

In recognition of Ireland's all-male beat combo Girl Band sending out a press release to let us all know they'll "no longer be performing or releasing records under the name Girl Band" and apologizing "for choosing a misgendered name in the first place", I thought it might be an apposite moment for a few choice tunes by actual girl bands, although even as I type the words I apprehend the trap of my own making I'm about to fall into. And yet on I go.

Horsegirl have been on my radar for a while. I have a suspicion I may even have linked them before. They have a new single out and it just might be the most 1985 noise I've heard since I switched the radio on and The Jesus and Mary Chain's Upside Down spewed out. And yes, I realise that was 1984 and this sounds not much like it, more like the Pastels perhaps, but I know what I know.

Horsegirl say they've been "listening to a lot of New Zealand underground bands (80’s/90’s Flying Nun)" and I bet the Reids were, too. We all were, back then. 

I like Billy but I like Horsegirl's last single, Ballroom Dance Scene, more. It's luminously beautiful, mesmeric and filled with tides. I like the video too, which they made themselves.

There's some very well-shot live footage of the band on YouTube but unfortunately the vocals are all but inaudible on the 7th Street Entry gig footage and the Union Park show seems a bit "hope you like our new direction", plus once again you can't really hear the vocals.

A while back (and it was quite a while) I remember complaining that YouTube recommendations had gone all to pot for me. I'm very happy to report that they're back to their former standard of not at all bad if you get lucky. Today, off the back of Horsegirl, I got this.

Melenas seem to be one of an almost endless supply of Spanish indie bands that sound like they've been frozen in ice for various lengths of time, in this case maybe since the very early '90s. There's more than a smidgeon of Stereolab in their mix, I'd say.

They might very well be Elefant Records recording artists, in which case I'd have heard of them long ago but they're not, so even though they've been around for a decade or more they're as new to me as, I'm assuming, they will be to anyone reading this. 

There they are, giving us their version of Grauzone's Eisbar, a post-punk track whose "classic" status, I have to admit, had until now eluded me. They've helpfully translated the title from the (I assume) German into Spanish, wehere it renders as Oso Polar. I can't do less than to return the favor. It's called Polar Bear. You knew that, didn't you?

Seeing that the video for the original (if remastered) Grauzone version has more than two and a half milion views, I'm showing my ignorance here, obviously. It's a right post-punk banger, too. I prefer Melenas's cover all the same.

In these dark days, when it's much harder to just pick up and go to Spain than it has been all my life, I rely on Elefant Records to make me feel I'm there. I was thinking about it and these last two years have to be the longest I've ever gone without leaving the country. 

With so many of the Elefant-signed bands being lo-fi, low-finance collectives there's a propensity for them to shoot home-made videos around the places they live, which often turn out to be the kind of back-end of nowhere towns Mrs. Bhagpuss and I end up in when, as we so frequently do, we get utterly, hopelessly lost. At least we've never been chased down a back street by a deeply creepy guy dressed as a giant rabbit. I guess there's still time.

I've thrown in Aiko el Grupo, even though they are, by a strict numerical count (and based entirely on outdated cis-stereotype visual cues, for which I pre-apologize, just in case), only half a girl band. Their video makes the Lisasinson one look like it's shot in the modernista suburbs of Barcelona by comparison. God, I miss Spain. 

(I am half-Spanish, in case I never mentioned it. Not that I've ever lived there or can speak the language or have any Spanish family. It's just a genetic thing. Still, it's in the blood, I guess. Either that or the fact I've been going there every year since I was five.)

We could hardly finish without Let's Eat Grandma, could we? Not with the incredibly thrilling news that their third album is due early next year. January 28, 2022 to be precise and I've just pre-ordered. I have a vague idea I may have linked the unutterably wonderful first single, Hall of Mirrors, before but so what if I have? Here it is again. Not only is the song worth listening to over and over but the video is a trip. Just stare into it and see where you end up.

The second single is very different. Hard to talk about. The lyric is upsetting, the performance disturbing, the video weirdly transcendental. The first time I watched it, it took me half a minute to come back to myself afterwards. I wasn't sure if it had been a meditative experience or a hypnotic one.

 The album's going to be something, I can tell you that.