Lost In Translation: Following The Plot In Noah's Heart

There's only one reason I wish Noah's Heart was on Steam right now and that's so I could tell you just how many hours I've put in. I honestly have no idea but it has to be a lot. 

At some point I'm hoping I'll be able to say I know what I'm doing but right now that moment seems a long way off. One thing I can say is that I'm having a lot of fun. There's very little about the game I've seen that I don't like. I like the way it looks, the way it plays and the way it sounds. I even like the story.

About the only thing I don't like is the translation.

It's not terrible. I've seen much worse. I've played imported mmorpgs where the localization was so poorly done I could barely understand what the questgivers wanted, let alone follow the nuances of the backstory. That's never the case in Noah's Heart but somehow it almost makes things worse.

What irks me about the way the translation has been handled is how it offers just enough to suggest both the story and the telling were likely much more entertaining in the original version. There's a lot of plot and even more lore and it seems like it would all add up to quite a rich and detailed background, if only it was easier to follow.

As for the dialog, it's all too easy to see where the humorous asides, ironic comments and snarky backchat would go in a naturalistic, idiomatic version. I'd lay odds it's genuinely witty in the original language, which I assume would be either Mandarin or Cantonese, since the developer, Archosaur Games, is based in Beijing.

That's ironic even in the translation. I imagine it was very dry indeed in the original.

 

The game launched with an impressive five language choices: Thai, English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Bahasa. I had to look the last one up. It's "a form of Malay, spoken in Indonesia." I wonder if the other South-East Asian translations are better than the English? I hope so for the sake of the players using them but I guess there's no particular reason why they should be. An English game localized into Dutch wouldn't necessarily get all the nuances right just because the two countries are geographically adjacent and share a language group.

A bad translation doesn't put me off if the gameplay is good, anyway. One of my favorite imported titles of all time, Dragon Nest, is barely comprehensible at times but it's beautiful to look at at and wildly entertaining to play so I put up with the clunky dialog.

Noah's Heart is another game where I really wish someone had done a better job with the translation, all the same. While it might be fair to characterise a lot of SE Asian mmorpgs, particularly the anime ones, as having a certain, generic similarity when it comes to plot, I've found the narratives of many of the ones I've played to be more involving than some of their Western counterparts. 

It's hokum, sure, but it's often pacey, zippy, lively hokum that doesn't take itself too seriously. Western fantasy all too often tends to adopt a portentous, overblown style that refers back to a whole tradition I neither respect nor admire. I'd rather run around with a gang of emotional, excitable kids than trudge along with some grim hero carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Everyone we meet seems to have some kind of history with Hughes.

 

It doesn't help that I can't even work out what the central narrative of Noah's Heart is. There's a main storyline I've been following that involves Hughes and his organization, Gale Force, who also turn up in the other narratives, but I really couldn't begin to tell you what it's about.

There's a good reason for that: I haven't touched the main storyline for ages. Instead, I've been investigating a serial killer in Gulf Stream City and trying to find a missing scientist, who's been abducted by terrorists. 

Those are the two, entirely separate and unconnected (Or are they?) plots of Season Zero - Light and Shadow and Season One - Scarlet Mark Mystery. I didn't even realise there were seasons until the second one, confusingly numbered #1, turned up but fortunately you can go back and play catch-up, which is how I came to be doing them both at the same time. 

I'm going to have to get a move on with my investigations, too. As I type this, the game is down for an update, after which it seems we'll have not just a whole new zone, the Olmec Rainforest, but yet another Season, "Soul Inspired Art". As with just about everything else in the game, there's no real introduction or explanation. New things just appear, it seems like every day. If there's one thing Noah's Heart isn't short of it's content.

Ave comes clean about who she really is. There's so much lore. I wish there was a guide.

I've been thundering through the twin stories as fast as the mechanics will allow. There's a time-gated element, as I mentioned in a previous post, where you have to accrue various clues by doing unrelated dailies for story points but because I have two tales on the go at once I've been able to stagger my progress so one or the other is always in play. That's going to get even easier with a third season, always assuming one of the others doesn't vanish before I've finished it.

I hope not. I want to find out how the stories end. As the screenshot at the top of the post shows, I'm close to finishing Season Zero and almost half way through Season One. It's taking a while. They're really long, not least because of the recursive format they both employ.

In order to progress you need to make mistakes. At every nodal point in the narrative - and there are many - you're faced with a binary choice, only one option of which is available. You can see there is another but you don't have sufficient information to take it. 

The way you get that information is by taking the only available option and failing. Sometimes you die, sometimes everyone dies. Sometimes you accuse an innocent suspect and get them killed. Sometimes you just make a fool of yourself. 

Proof that not everyone in Noah is seventeen years old. Or even looks like they are.

Whatever happens, things don't work out and you have to go back a stage. Time literally resets. You click an icon on screen and there's a montage flashback in reverse, spooling you back to the bad decision you made. Then you get to do it again, making a diferent choice by using what you learned from getting it wrong.

I really like that. It confused the heck out of me to begin with but now I understand it I'm fascinated to see the alternate realities my reckless choices create. And sometimes the fail states involve huge chunks of playable content you really wouldn't want to miss.

To get to the correct result, I think I saw the spectacular air raid on Darkmist Citadel five times and the best action sequence that followed it was one of the failures. That one involved a crazy car chase, a bunch of exciting fights, a desperate race to a waiting galleon for a daring escape by sea and finally a terrible storm in which the ship went down with all hands. 

Coming from a Western mmorpg like Guild Wars 2, where you're expected to make do with a couple of hours of new story every three months or so, the sheer amount of narrative and non-repeatable gameplay involved in these Seasons is mindblowing. Any one of them would keep ANet going for half a year and we'll have had three in a month!

Tell me about it!

If only someone had taken the trouble to hire a native English speaker to turn the literal translations into the kind of language people actually speak, everything would be perfect. Any passing American or Australian student on a gap year would have done. Archosaur could have crowdsourced it, even. It's a certainty there are people playing the game who could do a better job. Probably hundreds of them 

I do think companies hoping to go big in the West are missing a trick when it comes to translations. There's often a big hoo-hah about localized gameplay or costume or gender options (Rightly so.) but there seems to be some kind of assumption that Google Translate is good enough when it comes to the written word.

It's a pity. I know the conventional wisdom is that no-one reads quest text but not reading it isn't the same as not seeing it. A bad translation probably creates more of a bad impression than you'd think.

Then again, as I say, it hasn't put me off. I just know someone, somewhere is getting all the subtleties I'm missing. It's annoying, but what can you do?

Your Voice In The Crowd - Staying Motivated Through Blaugust And Beyond

This Week In Blaugust: Staying Motivated. Oh, boy...

I've made plenty of blithe statements in the past about motivation, how I never run out of things to write about, how all I need to do is sit down and start typing and something will come, how there are no rules for any of this so all you need to do is whatever feels right. How if you really don't feel like posting today, you can go do something else instead, Blaugust or not, because we'll all be here again tomorrow and we'll still love you.

Sounds like I'm setting up to knock all that down, right? Yeah, not gonna happen. It's all as true as it ever was. There is something I'd like to add, though. 

In a weird way, blogging is, all at the same time, about you and not only about you. Having been at this for a decade and change now and having read a myriad blog posts by other people, where they turn over their motivations and intentions and examine them from all kinds of angles I'd never even have known existed, I'm beginning to see a few recurring themes, if not patterns.

My own blogging arc goes something like this: apprehensive > cautious > settled > experimental > established > confident > playful. Well, something like that. Seriously, I'm not going to go back through more than two thousand posts to put the damn thing into a graph. 

It's roughly along those lines, anyway. I've noticed a lot of bloggers who stay the course seem to go through similar stages, albeit not in the same order. 

There are others that crop up quite often. Some I've identified but haven't personally experienced include disillusioned, bored, irritated and why did I start this damn blog in the first place? Any of those would seem to be a point at which advice on Staying Motivated might become relevant, which is why I've never seen it as particularly apposite to my own situation and also why the kind of advice I freely hand out when the topic comes up each year is probably not much help to anyone who needs it.

This year, though, I have noticed a new phase in my blogging journey. (Don't you just hate it when people append "journey" to some activity or other? It's so lazy, like sticking "gate" on the end of words as though suggesting there's some kind of scandal or cover-up, when there patently is not.) 

There. That's an example of it, my new phase, that last paragraph (Which is barely a paragraph, let's be honest. I used to stick to a strict rule of a minimum of two sentences before a paragraph break but now that's not so much a minimum as an aspiration.)

And that's another. To quote one of John Cooper-Clark's favorite phrases, one which he repeats to the point of absurdity in his highly readable autobiography, "I Wanna Be Yours", give it a name: self indulgence.

Dr. John Cooper-Clark is the most apposite of references here. If there's a writer more self-indulgent than he is, I can't think of their name right now. Johnny (I can call him that. He's never going to read this.) gets away with it by way of weapons grade charm and industrial strength wit but we can't all be so lucky. 

In recent weeks, it's become apparent to me that I've been attempting something similar, only I don't have the wherewithal. Constant digressions and diversions, ring-fenced by parentheses and signed by quotation marks as they may be, all too easily find themselves wandering down conversational cul de sacs from which they barely escape with their meaning intact. It's fun to write but is it fun to read?

It'll be like everything else, won't it? To some peoples' taste but not to others. Does it even matter?

This is where I usually chip in and say "No! Of course it doesn't matter! It's your blog. All that matters is that you enjoy it!" Which is all fine and quite possibly dandy, except that, in a very unreal way, it's not just your blog, is it? 

If it was, you could have flagged it "Private" so no-one but you could read it. Then you could have posted whatever you liked, sat back, had a good old read, smiled and nodded your head, agreed with all the points, laughed at all the jokes and patted yourself on the back over just how well-writen it all was.

Somebody's doing that right now and good luck to them. We'll never know. But here we are in Blaugust and even though that means upwards of a gazillion posts published every day, someone is going to read yours. Yes, yours.

That's motivation, isn't it? Or maybe it's not. I'm in two minds if I'm honest. I mean, obviously we all want other people to read what we post because otherwise we'd keep it to ourselves, wouldn't we? And we want to hear some feedback, because without comments how do we know anyone's paying attention at all?

On the other hand, no-one wants to get bad feedback (Okay, someone does. I've always subscribed to the old theory that if you can imagine it, someone, somewhere's doing it. It's not going to be anyone you want to know, though, is it? Let's agree to pretend they don't exist, at least for the purposes of this paragraph.) 

Knowing other people are out there, reading what you write, can be exciting, exhillarating, but it can also feel, well, scary.

However scary it feels, you can't let it get to you, or you can't if you want to keep on blogging. You just have to put that thought to one side and focus on the positive: you have a platform to talk about anything you want. Why not use it?

Yes, alright, it's a very small platform. No-one's saying it's Twitter, although that's probably a good thing, isn't it? I mean, Twitter, right? It's more like Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, where anyone can get up and spout off about whatever they like. There's always going to be a few people passing by who'll hear but if you can make it interesting or exciting enough, maybe you'll draw a crowd.

If you want to draw a crowd, by the way, I suggest not posting about games no-one else plays. Just a tip, for free. If you want to talk about those games, though, and no-one in your house can bear to listen to you going on about them any more, not even the dog, then don't forget you have a blog. That's what it's for! 

Do you need any more motivation than that? (Don't look at me - I think my answer ought to be obvious...)

My point, which I did have, believe it or not, was this: remember you're not just writing for yourself, you're writing for an audience - but remember also that somewhere in that audience is you. It's your choice who you want to please the most, yourself or the crowd, but you're going to need to please someone or what's the point? 

It can be you or them but best of all it can be both. Easier said than done, of course, but trying to come up with ways to square that circle could be a motivation in itself.

I Heard A Rumour...

Mostly, when I post about music, I try to keep to things fresh. Even if the links I bring aren't new, at least they're new to me. 

Music isn't milk, though, no matter what Capt. Beefheart told you. It doesn't come with a Use By date and it doesn't go off. Let me caveat: most of it doesn't go off. An unswerving focus on the present can leave you just as blinkered as an obsession with the past.

Pitchfork, as I believe I may have mentioned before, runs a top-class feature every Sunday, in which one of the staff writers "takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible." Unsurprisingly, they only pick albums they think are worth retro-reviewing, which means all the reviews are positive but also that they're all worth reading, even if the artist or genre in question isn't one you're particularly into. You'll learn a lot.

Today they dragged out a forty-three year old album I've never heard by an artist I'd almost forgotten: Squeezing Out Sparks by Graham Parker and the Rumour. 

I'm not going to give chapter and verse on Parker. Everything you need to know is more than adequately covered in the review itself and Wikipedia has you covered if you want to go deeper. All I'm going to add is a little bit of personal history, then I'm going to play some of his tunes. Like this:

That's Heat Treatment. I remember that one. And so I should.

I saw Graham Parker and the Rumour play live twice, or maybe it was three times, in the mid-seventies. I was in my teens, still at school, and I went to a lot of gigs, mostly with my pals Chris and Paul, neither of whom I've seen since the early '80s.

We were very early adopters when it came to fast, loud, raucous rock and roll, especially the pre-punk kind we called "fast R&B". A lot of the bands playing that stuff morphed into punk or new wave acts  but we'd seen them when they still had wide lapels and flares, so we weren't fooled.

Hey Lord, Don't Ask Me Questions there, from 1976. I remember that one, too. I was going to say I'd have to remember it because I don't own any records by Graham Parker but actually I think I might have his first album somewhere. I'm not sure. No, on reflection I think it was Chris who owned it and I just heard him play it a few times.

Back in those days I drew a very clear line between bands who were good live and bands who were good on record. Not many crossed it. I saw plenty of bands who were stunning live but just sounded dead on vinyl, including

• Dr. Feelgood (Saw them live three times.)
  
• Thin Lizzy  (Saw them live twice.)
• The Downliners Sect (Saw them live twice.)

Graham Parker and the Rumour were one of the few fast R&B acts who could do it live and on record but even then it's not really the kind of music you sit down and listen to, which is a shame. As the Pitchfork piece makes plain, Parker had the same kind of wit and wordplay that made people pay attention to what Elvis Costello was saying, only set to the kind of backing tracks that made you think of dive bars, beer and sweat. Same problem Springsteen had, I guess.

New York Shuffle - Like that one, for instance. It hardly invites rigorous intellectual analysis, more like physical exhaustion and unexplained bruising.

By the time the album Pitchfork just reviewed came out, Parker had had a few hits and was on the cusp of major success. Good luck to him. I'd moved on. I never heard Squeezing Out Sparks nor saw him tour it. I guess that was my loss but I can't say it's worried me until now.

Nobody Hurts You from the US tour behind the album. Listening to that, I'm not sure I'd have been convinced. He really has the full new wave sound down, doesn't he? Could be Joe Jackson, which would be a funhouse mirror alright. Sounds a bit too brittle, perhaps?

The album didn't tank but it didn't set any sales records either. Parker's career stalled and never got going again. The Pitchfork review (I should credit the writer - it's Elizabeth Nelson.) gives several solid reasons why Graham Parker never became an enduring presence the way Elvis Costello did but in my opinion it misses out one salient point: the guy's really short.

Protection, also from that tour. You can see how short he is in that clip. I know it shouldn't matter but if you're going to be frontman for a dangerous-sounding, kick-ass rock and roll band it kinda does. And don't talk to me about Bono. U2 are none of those things. 

Reasonable or not, his height, or lack of it, was always an issue. It got mentioned by the press a lot and I remember my friends and I talking about it after we'd been to see him. Didn't stop us going to see him again but it did affect how we placed him in our teenage pantheon. Shame, but teenage boys can be shallow. If he'd been eight inches taller, who knows where he'd be now?

Probably not playing The Turning Point in Piermont ("The place can't hold more than 60 people" - TripAdvisor.) that's for sure. Still, it beats pumping gas in Deepcut!

Also, on that evidence, he's still got it. I'd go see him. Again.

Come Over Here And Say That! PvP In Noah's Heart.

Since it's the weekend, no-one will ever read this, which means I can write about whatever I like! And what I want to write about is... Noah's Heart. Of course it is.

Also, if no-one's going to read this post, I don't have to bother about any of those difficult things like structure, purpose or coherency. Not that I have been bothering much about any of those, lately. Blaugust tends to do that to me. I wonder if anyone's noticed? I doubt it. Blaugust's probably doing the same to us all.

Let me think. There's a ton of odds and ends I've been meaning to to mention but couldn't find a neat way to stitch together into a post that felt like it was going somewhere. Which shall I pick? I know! PvP.

Yes, Noah's Heart has PvP. Are there any mmorpgs these days that don't? It long ago became one of the boxes any mmorpg had to check to be taken seriously, whether it makes any logical sense for the setting or not.

Begining with the usual caveat that, where Noah's Heart is concerned, I have no idea what I'm talking about, it's my current understanding that there's no open-world PvP at all, consensual or otherwise. As far as I can tell, everything happens in instances, under the Arena umbrella. 

(That's not literally under an umbrella, of course, although it could be. One of the most charming things about Noah's Heart is the way NPCs take out umbrellas and open them every time it starts to rain. That's the kind of attention to detail that raises a game to another level.)

There's an Arena tab on the Adventure screen (The other two types of adventure are Exploration and Challenge.), where you can choose from half a dozen different fighting options. I'd list them but you can read the details in the screenshot so it would be a bit redundant, just like the word "bit" is, in this sentence.

Of those six, I have so far only tried two: the two which don't yet exist. Stay with me; I'll explain.

The first I tried was Honor Arena. It's a straightforward death match against a single opponent in which you fight as your own character, using the abilities of whichever phantom currently possesses you. (Just go with it.)

The second was Fantasy Arena. That one's an automated battle between your choice of Phantom team and another player's. (Do you need a glossary? Tough. You're not getting one.) 

As you can see, both of those are flagged "Coming Soon" but for once, soon is now. They're each not only available but have Seasons running.

The reason I did the pair of them was for the dailies. The reason I'm doing dailies is because dailies give Active Points. The reason I need Active Points is because Active Points give Mystery Case Clues and Midnight Intel. The reason I need Mystery Case Clues and Midnight Intel is because that's how you open the next chapter of the Scarlet Mark Mystery Season... and now I'm lost, too.

I was mildly apprehensive about going into a PvP arena, as one is, but it turned out to be fast, simple and fun. Also surprisingly successful, given I have no real idea how to play my character or my phantoms and have made next to no effort to upgrade any of them.

The thing about PvP dailies that reward items needed for non-PvP content, something I've encountered in other games as well, is that they necessarily attract people who don't give a whit about PvP. All those folk want is to get in and out as fast as possible with the least hassle. If that means standing motionless while you kill them then that's what they'll do.

Four wins as Ave. Two wins as Charlie. Four Losses not shown.

 

Honestly, I've done it myself, although not in Noah's Heart. And so far, in ten matches I've only run across one person who didn't fight back. My own record, on this admittedly miniscule sample, is surprisingly good: 6/10 in fact. 

Absolutely none of those wins involved any skill on my part. I wouldn't even say I'd been lucky, other than in drawing opponents weaker than me in the random matchmaking. If there's any weighting in the algorithm I must be too low in the mix to see it because some matches are against players the same rank as me, others higher. 

I'm currently Bronze II and the highest player I fought was, I think, something like Silver II. I have no idea what these ranks mean other than Silver has to be better than Bronze. Also that the Silver players I've fought very clearly know what they're doing, while most of the Bronze players have either been even more clueless than me or were just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.

No match so far has lasted more than about twenty seconds and matchmaking has been close to instant, so what sounds like a daunting five match requirement for the daily actually takes about three minutes. For that you get a massive 30 Active Points, which means I'm definitely going to keep at it, but there's also a decent reward for the Season Mission that I quite fancy, so I may do more than just the dailies.

Some people whose asses I kicked. I hope none of them see this!

 

That was Honor Arena. Fantasy Arena is even faster, easier and absolutely unscary in any way, even for PvE players who find the very mention of PvP makes them come over all peculiar.

In Fantasy Arena the only "skill" I can see is in the single choice you make before each match. Unlike Honor, where you have no say in who you get to kill or be killed by, in Fantasy you get to pick your opponents from a list. 

The screen shows you everything you could want to know about your opponents, namely which phantoms are in the four-person team, what levels they are, what elements they use and what the overall Strength of the team is. If you just want to win, all you have to do is pick a team that's weaker than yours. If you want to get as many points for the win as possible, obviously you try to choose the toughest opponents you think you can beat. If you don't like any of the options on offer, you can refresh the list until you get what you want.

Once you've made your choice all that's left is to sit back and watch as your four phantoms battle your opponent's four. You have no control over anything. The little NPCs dash about, dodging and blasting and hacking and dying until one team has no-one left alive. It takes maybe twenty seconds, if that.

I have no idea what most of that means but whatever the scale is, I'm not on it.

 

I deliberately picked the closest Strength team below mine every time and so far my win/loss ratio is 5/0. The fights appeared to go pretty much exactly as the relative difference in numbers would suggest. The one fight that was touch and go was the only one where our numbers were almost identical. It might be possible for there to be unexpected results but I have no evidence to that effect - then again, I've only had five fights. It's not a statistically meaningful sample.

This one also has Season rewards and they also look interesting. As usual, even after I read the details of what was required, I didn't fully understand them but the Fantasy Arena is so easy, fast and genuinely entertaining I might just do it over and over and see how far I get.

That leaves... well, most of the PvP in the game. There are no dailies for the other four types of Arena so I haven't even looked at them. I probably should do that now... 

Okay... I don't really understand any of them. One involves taking a four person team to "a new planet", one looks like it might be a Battle Royale, one looks like some kind of three-round Phantom v Phantom affair that could be similar to the way I understand Pokemon battles to work, not ever having played Pokemon, and the last is an elimination battle between four-person teams, which I think means four players, not four Phantoms.

I'll have to give them all a try and see if I'm close. I'm confident now that there's little to no chance of any PvP in Noah's Heart turning into anything scary, disturbing or tediously long and drawn out, so what have I got to lose?

Only my dignity and that I lost long ago.

Embrace The Future!

I've been thinking a lot recently about the old "One Game to Rule Them All" trope. OMG! A Lord of the Rings reference! Get out of here!

Way to go to derail your own post in the opening paragraph, Bhagpuss, but did everyone see that news item yesterday? Of course you all did. You could hardly miss it. It was everywhere, even in the mainstream press. Tolkein is a globally bankable name.

Embracer Group though? Not so much, although I guess we're starting to get familiar with it. It does keep cropping up, doesn't it? And doesn't it sound sinister? Reminds me of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner or maybe Omni Consumer Products from Robocop.

Who the actual hell are they, though? According to Wikipedia, they're "a Swedish video game and media holding company based in Karlstad", which I have to admit doesn't really sound all that terrifying. 

Whoever they are, they seem to be on some kind of pop culture buying spree right now. It seems to have begun with a whole load of companies I'm fairly certain most people reading this have never heard of - I certainly hadn't - but last year they started making raids into our hinterland, acquiring Gearbox, Perfect World/Cryptic, Dark Horse Media and Asmodee.  

If you missed all that, you probably sat up when, earlier this year, Embracer Group scooped up a bunch of stuff Square Enix had lost interest in, a bumper bundle that included IPs like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and, I believe, Oxford University's current focus of interest, PowerWash Simulator. 

It's an impressive line-up but they all seem like opening acts compared to the headliner, Middle Earth Enterprises, which "gives the company IP rights to Tolkien’s literary works related to The Lord Of the Rings and The Hobbit" including "movies, tv shows, games, theme park rides, board games and merchandising". 

The NME article includes a quote from EG that specifically refers to "the mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth" published by Electronic Arts but Lord of the Rings Online doesn't get a mention. LotRO is, of course, owned and operated by Standing Stone Games, who, as we only recently learned for sure, are owned by Daybreak Games, who were acquired by Enad Global 7, another expanding Scandinavian media aggregator, who may themselves have been reverse-taken-over by whoever the fuck it is that really owns Daybreak...

Vic! I've fallen down a conspiracy rabbit hole and I can't get up!

I'm no expert on LotRO (I'm no expert on anything...) but it's always been my impression that there's some kind of grey area around what part of the Tolkein legacy rights ownership it falls under. People always seem to have some get-out clause they throw around to make everyone feel safe when, as often happens, talk turns to rights renewals and possible repercussions for the game. 

If so, maybe none of this directly affects either the mmorpg or SSG but I can't help wondering just what it means for EG7/Daybreak. The whole thing is more than confused enough already without factoring some kind of slap fight between Scandinavian would-be media giants.

Who would win in a fight between Embracer Group and Enad Global 7? Um.... I think we can guess.  It'd be like a fight between a wolverine and a lemming. (Both Scandinavian animals. I checked.)

I'm not honestly sure I care all that much. To loop back around to where I started, before all this research took over (I wish there was a typographical convention for expressing sarcasm or contempt - italics don't always cut it.), I'm beginning to think that getting all wrapped up in a single game for months or years isn't necessarily the universal good we always believed.

We all do it, don't we? Some of us more than others, naming no names (Points at self.) One minute it's Valheim, Valheim, Valheim, then Lost Ark is the best game ever made and no-one's ever going to need anything else (Yeah, that wasn't me.) Game after game, month after month, year after year, individually and collectively, we get obsessed, talk about nothing else, play every hour we can snatch, then...

Silence. The toy goes back in the box. Once in a while we get it out, play with it for a few minutes, put it away again. Eventually it disappears, lost, no-one remembers where, or cares.

I forced myself to play EverQuest II yesterday. I didn't much want to but I felt I ought. I hadn't finished the Oceansfull dungeon (Still haven't. Can't beat the second boss.) or even filled my bags with freebies from the clams (Still not done that, either.) and there's only a few days left. 

What I wanted to be playing was, of course, Noah's Heart. It is literally the only game I've played since I got it apart from things I've logged into out of a sense of duty or for a blog post. I was in the middle of several single-player titles on Steam as well as at least three mmorpgs I was actively playing and now I've abandoned the lot of them. 

I haven't even logged into New World to check out the Summer Medleyfare or the music system. Guild Wars 2 has the long-promised Steam launch and the tenth anniversary celebrations incoming and I have no interest in either of them. There's that new game, Tower of Fantasy, that everyone's talking about (Actually, surprisingly few people seem to be talking about it...maybe just Belghast). 

It almost feels like a dereliction of duty  to ignore it all, particularly because of an obsession with a game I know for certain I won't be playing in a few weeks. (Do I know that, though? Do I really?)

Or maybe it's a sign of good mental health. Video games are meant to be fun, aren't they? Not work, not responsibility, not duty; fun. And it's got to be a good thing, not getting too emotionally attached to any of them. It's not a marriage. Play the field, as they used to say in the godawful '70s.

If the putatively evil Embracer Group (I'm sure they're not evil. I'm sure they're all lovely, really.) guts LotRO like a fish (Has anyone ever gutted a fish? It's a disgusting analogy. Why do we keep using it?), ought that to be a tragedy? Or is it just entropy rolling ever onward towards the heat death of the universe, another Ozymandian signifier that all, all is vanity?

Well don't look at me! I'm not Alain de Botton, thank the Lord. I just know it'd spoil my week if LotRO closed down and I barely play the game.

It won't happen though, will it? I'm sure everything will be fine. Game companies are our friends, right? They wouldn't do anything bad...

New York Groove

Since we're doing Creative Appreciation for Blaugust this week and we've broadened the definition from games to pretty much anything, I thought I'd give a call to someone I've mentioned previously only in passing: Jarret Wolfson. 

I have no idea who Jarret Wolfson is, although I have to say if that's their given name then wow! Lucky! 

All it says in the About section of their YouTube channel is "Just a fan of live music." Okay, that's not all it says. There are a couple of paragraphs about methodology ("All videos taken with the phone that I own at the time.") and intent (If there's a video of your band up and you'd rather it wasn't, just say and it'll be taken down but don't be a dick and start issuing takedown requests because the rest of the bands on the channel would like their videos to stay up, thanks very much.) 

I paraphrased that last part, obviously.

Couch Prints - Horsepower

What Jarret does, as far as I can tell, is go to a hell of a lot of gigs in and around New York City. Instead of just getting drunk or fucked up on molly like everyone else, he meticulously films the performance on his phone, then comes home and puts a selection of the highlights on YouTube, probably the same evening.

 Groupie - Poor You

Some of the bands are national or international acts on tour but plenty are famous only locally, if at all. Jarret's channel might be the only place anyone outside their neighborhood is ever going to see them. Nearly every bloody one of them sounds like they could be from nowhere on earth other than NYC.

The Lovenauts - Title Unknown

It's an amazing public service. Loads of people upload shaky, mobile footage of gigs they've been to but most of them are either unwatchable, unlistenable or both. Sometimes you find a club or a venue that publishes a video record of the bands that play there but mostly what you find is random and unconnected. 

Foyer Red - Slander

Jarret's uploads are coherent and contextual. Okay, sometimes you can't hear the vocals too well or the bass is too far forward in the mix but that's as likely to be the sound engineer. It probably sounded like that on the night.

 JessX - MFL

Jarret's channel offers an amazing insight into the independent music scene in one of the biggest, most innovative and influential cities in the world. Or it might. How would I know? I don't get out a map and mark the locations of the venues so I can check there's representative coverage of all five boroughs. Jarret may never travel more than ten blocks from the appartment for all I know.

Daisy Grenade - Are You Scared Of Me Yet?

I don't care. I'm not Simon Reynolds. I'm not working this up for three thousand words in the Quietus ffs. (By the way, since this is for Blaugust, the festival of blogging, guess how many active blogs Simon Reynolds has going right now, according to his bio? Forty! Forty separate blogs. That he writes. Himself. Imagine if he joined Blaugust...)

Razor Braids - Megachurch

No, all I care about is that Jarret Wolfson lets me feel like I'm there, in New York, on the scene, going to cool gigs in trendy clubs, seeing great bands and living that life. Plus I get to discover music I really enjoy that otherwise I'd almost certainly never have heard. Or even heard of.

Nation Of Language - This Fractured Mind

I wish I knew of a whole network of people like Jarret, putting the world in touch with the invisible world of musical micro-scenes all across the globe. I could name at least fifty cities whose scenes I'd love to explore. There probably is such a network. If I find it I'll be sure to let everyone know.

Ecce Shnak - Internet

For now, I'll have to content myself with New York, which, frankly, ought to be enough for anyone. Thanks Jarret. I know you'll never read this but you're doing good work and I'm grateful for it.

 SUSU - Title Unknown

And if you're taking requests, could we please have some more Mary Shelley? 

 Mary Shelley - The  Nursing Home Jig (feat. Laura Galindo)

Mary Shelley - Democracy Is Alive

Thanks!

Raid On Darkmist (Could Have Gone Better...)

I'm probably going to write a whole post about the really excellent Light and Shadow event in Noah's Heart but I probably ought to finish it first. In the meantime, here's a compilation of two of the cut scenes I stitched together.

I couldn't help thinking of the airship raid at the start of Guild Wars 2's first expansion, Heart of Thorns. I think I like this one better.

And now I'm off to try again, This time we've done our acclimatization training and we've split into two teams. Here's hoping it's enough...