Friday Grab Bag - For Realz This Time

Yes, for once I am going to stick to the plan and fire off a bunch of pithy observations on things I've watched, played, listened to or read about this week. I am not going to spiral off into long-form essays about any of them. Nope. Definitely not going to happen.

The Peripheral

I'd had The Peripheral in my Amazon Prime watchlist for a while but it wasn't until Wilhelm mentioned it in his Binge Watch post back at the beginning of January that I realised it was an adaptation of a William Gibson novel. I'm not a big William Gibson fan - I read Neuromancer and Count Zero back in the eighties but I can't think of anything else of his I've read since - but he does give major name recognition to a project, enough to bump the show off the watchlist into "Currently Watching". 

I finished the season a few days ago. Wilhelm described the story as "somewhat choppy", which I think is an understatement. "All over the bloody shop" is my take. I should make it clear that I really liked the show. It looks great, the script is sharp, the characters are well-drawn and engaging and the acting is uniformly excellent. The problem is pretty much none of it makes any sense at all, particularly the final episode, which is total gibberish from beginning to end. 

Added to that, the tone lurches and yaws from one extreme to another. At one point, early on, the whole thing was so freighted with the possibility of sadistic violence I had to question whether I was going carry on watching at all and then, when I did, pretty much nothing unpleasant ever happened again. The violence shifted to the level of a Marvel movie. Which I prefer, so I'm not complaining, but it's not what you'd call consistent.

As well as lots of sub-plots not being resolved, the first season ends with a set-up for the next that I frankly do not understand at all. I hope they get a second season just so I can find out what the hell I just watched.

Velma

No, I haven't seen it. I'd like to but it's not available on any platform in the UK. Well, it might be. The results of a Google search on the topic are confusing, to say the least. Suffice it to say it's not on any service I have access to and I don't want to watch it enough to sign up for a VPN. 

Of course, if I took advice from the reviews, I wouldn't waste my time watching it anyway. For a while Velma enjoyed the unique privelige of being the worst-rated show of all  time on IMDB. In a follow-up article, NME attempted to explain why everyone hates it so much, the answer apparently being that it manages to piss people off pretty much equally on both sides of the culture wars with its hamfisted, box-ticking attempts at diversity recognition. 

As a long-time Scooby Gang fan, all of this just makes me keener to check it out so I can make up my own mind. I've seen the trailer and it doesn't look that bad. I'm happy to wait until it finally turns up somewhere I can watch it without having to pay money or jump through hoops. And even if it turns out to be as awful as everyone says, I'm sure the franchise will survive the hit. I mean, we got past Scrappy-Doo, didn't we? Eventually.

If anyone's seen it, do please tell us what you thought.

All Hail Our AI Overlords #1

Seems like every week brings news of another frontier down. Every day, sometimes. There was the the endless iteration of Seinfeld on Twitch for starters. I'd link directly to it but in a hilarious turn of events, worthy of the iconic show itself (He says, as someone who never found Seinfeld in the least bit hilarious...) the supposedly never-ending broadcast is currently off air following an unintended violation of Twitch's community guidelines.

It seems there was a hiccup with the GPT-3 Davinci model that was generating the never-ending stream of non-sequiters and wisecracks and in moving to the less-sophisticated Curie model to cover the outage, some "homophobic and transphobic remarks" found their way into virtual Larry's stand-up routine. The actual content, as per the clip linked above, is so back and nuanced as to be more of a reference to a reference of the concept of a violation than an actual violation in progress but hats off to Twitch's algorithm for being so intolerant of intolerance.

The strangest thing about this story is that, as someone who never really got the point of Seinfeld, I could immediately see the point of Watchmeforever. As soon as I found out it existed, I straightway checked it out and I found myself watching for almost half an hour. I found it almost exactly as amusing as the actual show. I laughed twice, which would be about par. 

Curiosity satisfied, I can't imagine sitting and watching the AI Seinfeld with any more enthusiasm or attention than I ever watched the real one but I know exactly what I will be using it for when it comes back on line - as a replacement for Test Match Special. 

I used to have the equally endless, self-generative chatter of the cricket commentary on in the background while I played mmorpgs but changes in the way the game is played has put paid to all that. These days, even Test cricket is supposed to be fast, vibrant and exciting and all the other, shorter forms are positively manic. The days when you could have some old buffer droning on about busses and pigeons in a desultory attempt to fill the hours of dead airtime as the bowler slowly ambled back to his mark for the hundredth time are long gone, sadly. The AI-generated waffle of Seinfeld and his pals should make a fine replacement.

All Hail Our AI Overlords #2

For all Nick Cave's protestations, I suspect the dawning of the age of the singing robots is at hand. Which would be fine with me if it was all the robots' own work. I'm very much in the market for genuinely artificial performers. When it's more of what we already have, though, I'm starting to see Cave's point.

This week we had the dubious pleasures of Poe the Passenger's "viral AI generated TikTok hit ‘Hologram’". According to NME, the band “Programmed a bot to listen to 1000 hours of Imagine Dragons / Linkin Park music & then make a song like it.” The result notched up almost four million views on TikTok before being muted. The same tune was released to YouTube for the first time four hours ago. At time of writing it has 190 views, which seems about right.

Meanwhile, David Guetta made headlines with his live deep faking of Eminem. It seems there are already plenty of places you can go to have your favorite songs covered by your favorite singer, even if they haven't yet found the time to go into the studio to record them and Guetta has been experimenting with the possibilities. 

I'm not quite sure how I feel about all this but I do know that how I or you or Nick Cave feels about it isn't going to figure at all in how it rolls out. As David Guetta went on to say in an interview with the BBC, AI is going to be the future of music whether we like it or not. Also the future of a lot of other things but let's stick with music for now. 

Guetta is spot on when he says "every new music style comes from a new technology". That is demonstrably true, going back at least as far as the invention of the piano and probably back to the first time some smartass kid thought to stretch a goathide over a pot, thereby putting the guy who banged two rocks together out of a job. Whether he's also right about the role of AI as merely a tool in the hands of human creative artisis, I'm not so sure. I imagine record company execs all over the world are salivating right now at the prospect of having all those juicy performances on tap without the nuisance of having to deal with any of those pesky performers.

I just hope if we're going to be deluged with virtual copies they're copies of people I actually like. I'm not in the market for any more Linkin Park or Imagine Dragons tunes.

Something About A Game I Used To Play

I'm really happy I no longer feel honor-bound to cover every development in Guild Wars 2, the way I did for the best part of a decade. It's freeing, I can tell you. If I did, though, I'd have had to post something about the recent changes to World vs World, in which ANet thrash around some more, trying to get PvE players interested in the RvR game mode they've consistently avoided for most of the lifetime of the game.

As the slow-motion train crash of the full rebuild of WvW rumbles on, the devs appear to be trying to divert attention from the lumbering, wheezing locomotive that is Alliances by throwing new shinies.onto the tracks. The idea, as usual, is to "incentivize battles", aka start more fights, which is what PvP players and devs always think is the solution to everything. This they propose to do both by making players work harder to take objectives and by giving them bigger rewards for trying, even if they fail.

There are two problems with this: 1) the rewards are still crap and 2) PvE players are never incentivized by more fights. They're PvE players. They're incentivized by fewer fights, which is why the meta over the lifetime of the game has always leaned towards the lowest level of engagement with the enemy possible, otherwise known as KTraining or PVD - Player vs Door. 

Fortunately for me, I neither have to play the game to see if any of this is actually having the intended effect, nor to write about whether it is or not. I can just forget about it, which is what I intend to do.

I'm also going to avoid raising my blood pressure to a dangerous level by refusing to engage in an in-depth analysis of the latest brilliant wheeze from whoever's wearing the Producer's hat these days, namely giving up on the whole concept of the Living World. It seems someone finally noticed that expansions make money and please players. Who would ever have guessed?

In the future, we'll be getting "smaller expansions more frequently at a slightly reduced price" and "additional content for those expansions through quarterly updates". If I was still playing, I'd be cheering just for the implied admission of failure, although on past record I'd want to see at least a couple of these expansions actually happen before I believed the change was going to stick. I mean, how many iterations of the content release cadence have we been through, now? Still, at least this is one that's been proved to work so maybe we can give re-inventing the wheel a rest for a while.

Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop

And finally, a song. Just the one, this time. I don't want to canibalize my "What I've Been Listening To" post from next week. But if we're only having one, let's make it a good one. In fact, let's make it the best song I've heard this year. Hearing it for the first time earlier this week wasn't an experience quite on the mind-altering level of the first time I heard Venice Bitch, but it was damn close. 

There's no official video yet so we'll go with one of the many unofficial lyric videos instead. I should warn the words are very NSFW and deserve a trigger warning on top of that but don't let it put you off. 

And that's Friday all wrapped up.

Enjoy your weekend!

You Must Come Over Sometime And See The Place. Only Not Right Now.

When I began writing about Noah's Heart last summer, one of the recurring themes of my posts was how little of the game I understood. Now, more than six months later, after what has to be at least a couple of hundred hours played, I'm not convinced I know all that much more than when I started.

Some of that bafflement is down to the game itself. Despite having some of the best in-game documentation I've ever seen, many of the systems still manage to retain an enviable air of mystique. I've been battling away in the Fantasy Arena for months, for example, but I still have no clear understanding of how the matchmaking works. I've slowly developed a sufficient degree of intuition about my opponents to be able to take on teams rated only fifteen per cent weaker than mine, a huge improvement from the fifty per cent margin I used to need to be sure of a win, but how those ratings are calculated still escapes me.

Most of the blame, though, if you even want to call it that, lies with me, not the game. I long ago settled into an extremely comfortable groove, where I log in every day to do much the same thing.

I work through the list of recommended Activities to earn the maximum two hundred adventure points, which in turn gives me the daily limit of three tokens towards the total needed to move the current Season forward. Each stage currently asks for twenty-two, so it takes just over a week to earn them all. When I've collected enough I play through the next part of the story, then the whole pattern repeats until I get to the end of the Season, something that's usually timed to happen right as the next is about to start.

As well as working on the Seasons, I do some of the regular events as they come up. I particularly like Planet Traveller, which seems to refresh about once a week. It only takes about fifteen or twenty minutes. If the fancy takes me, I might also do some exploring or clear a few side quests out of my journal. Once in a while I even do some more on the main quest, which I still haven't finished. If I'm not feeling it, I just log out after the dailies.

Maybe once or twice a week I buckle down and do some work on improving my character. I might craft some enchantments or spend some points on Refinement. I check if any of my skills or abilities are ready to upgrade and generally go through the various menus to see if anything's flagged. 

By now I have a vague idea how most of those systems work but whatever knowledge I have is shallow, at best. That's why the huge majority of all the upgrade components I've earned are still in my bags; I'm not confident I know how to use them to best effect and I'd rather save them than waste them.

In this lazy, haphazard fashion I'd guess I average somewhere between thirty minutes to two hours a day playing Noah's Heart. It's more of a habit now than a thrill but I can honestly say I look forward to my daily session and enjoy my time with the game.

What I don't often do there is anything new. I'm peripherally aware there are substantial aspects of the game I've never really touched, like the instances, realms and training grounds I keep getting quests for, or catching, taming and breeding horses or collecting birds, fish and insects... I dabble in some of them, as the mood takes me, but the mood doesn't take me often and even when it does, it doesn't take me far.

I'm happy enough to play the dilettante but there is one part of the game I always planned on exploring to the full: housing. Back in August of last year, I was very bullish about the possibilities, claiming "it has the potential to be one of the better mmorpg housing systems I've seen". I did temper that with a proviso, saying I'd probably need to be a little further up the housing ladder than I was at the time before I could be sure my initial judgment was sound.

Now that I am considerably more experienced in that aspect of the game, I'm glad I added a get-out clause. Housing in Noah's Heart is impressive but it also has some limitations and drawbacks I hadn't appreciated when I wrote my gushing review last summer. Which is not to say I was wrong. It's a very solid entry in the mmorpg housing stakes. It's just that, like much of the game, it's appeal is mostly on the surface. There's less depth than perhaps I'd like. 

That, however, can be put down to the age of the game and its relative lack of success. The housing system is largely unchanged from launch, at which time it represented a very solid foundation indeed. Many other mmorpgs I've played have had much less flexible, useful, atractive and engaging housing offers at launch and the ones that ended up with the best housing spent years building it up.

That aside, there's one major design flaw with housing in Noah's Heart and that's the scale. It's a problem we often see in NPC housing, where all the doors are fifteen feet high and the ceilings would easily accomodate a herd of giraffes. The peculiar thing about Noah's Heart, though, is that the NPC houses you can enter - and there are many of them - are on a much more human scale. Positively cosy, in fact. It's the players' homes that seem out of proportion.

It makes decorating a lot more challenging than it ought to be, even though there's a good choice of furniture and soft furnishing to be crafted. I had every intention of fitting my house out in a style fit for a cover feature in the Gulf Stream City edition of Homes and Gardens but after a few attempts at filling the yawning, cavernous spaces inside my mansion, I found my enthusiasm waning.

Until a couple of days ago, that is, when for no particular reason, I noticed yet another feature of the game I'd let lie fallow until then. It's one of the more unusual, not to say original, elements of gameplay. I knew it existed because it comes up somewhere in the tutorial quests but even so, other than that one time, I hadn't ever bothered to find out how it works.

In Noah's Heart, you can visit the houses of your friends whenever you like simply by clicking on their names in your Friends list. In most games I play this would be supremely irrelevant because my Friends list would be empty but from the start in Noah's Heart I've made a practice of accepting every Friend request I've received. The maximum number of Friends you can have is sixty. At time of writing I have sixteen.

When I took it into my head to visit one of them, just to see how the system worked, I was very fortunate in that the person I picked turned out to be very houseproud indeed. I wandered around their home, gazing in envy at the way each room looked like somewhere someone might actualy live. It wasn't so much that they had better furniture than me - it was the way they'd laid it out.

But they did also have better furniture than me. They had a lot of stuff I didn't have the recipes to make. Which is where another unusual and highly attractive feature of Noah's Heart's housing design comes in: if you can see an item of furniture in someone else's house, you can copy down the details so you can make it for yourself.

To do so requires a number of blank blueprints but you can buy those for a few diamonds from the Mall. There is a limit of two hundred a week, though, so you still need to restrain your enthusiasm and not just copy every damn thing you see while snooping around other folks' homes.

As a direct result of my visit, I made a couple of very nice pieces. Placing them in my house immediately gave me an upgrade, taking it to Level Twelve. That opened another room, so now I have even more space to furnish.

Having seen the possibilities, I'm eager to get back to cranking out fixtures and fittings but before I get started there's yet another little wrinkle I need to iron out. One of the reasons I'd stalled on decorating my house was that I'd made several high-value items and then found myself unable to place them. They were all things I already had one of but the system wouldn't let me place another, insisting in mysterious fashion that my "warehouse" was full.

After some fairly tortuous googlng, I thought I'd worked out that this meant these were one-of-a-kind items you couldn't duplicate in the same instance. Since I couldn't figure out which recipes it applied to without actually making two of the objects and trying to put them both down, it put me off trying. 

Now, though, I've spotted multiple copies of pieces I was refused permission to place, sitting side by side in the houses of people I've visited. Clearly they know something I don't. Since they're all my Friends, I guess I could just ask them. Yeah, that's not going to happen...

What I will do is experiment a little. See what works and what doesn't. Try to spot a pattern. I do feel I ought to make some kind of effort to spruce the place up, now I know people are looking at it. 

And I don't mean you, dear reader. None of the screenshots in this post was taken in my house. I'll be saving that for when I'm happy with how it looks, which as of now I definitely am not. 

No, another thing I discovered while fiddling with the housing interface is that my friends have been visiting me. In fact, according to the Visitor Log I didn't know I had, in the last week alone all sixteen of my Friends have dropped by. 

I don't know whether that means they just clicked a button or whether, as I've been doing, they were actually wandering around, taking notes, but it wouldn't do to assume no-one's looking. Not any more.

I guess I'd better go do some housework, then. You never know when someone might drop by.

The Look Of Love

I was thinking of doing a little something for Valentine's Day and I had the fine idea of searching my archives, looking for "Love"... only I couldn't shake the nagging feeling I'd done something similar before. So I checked.

Okay, that's out, then. Now what?

As it happens, I'd also been pondering the possibilities of posting something to mark the passing of Burt Bacharach. As Simon Reynolds wryly observed in his own tribute to the great man, there's no shortage of musical icons to honor, sadly: "...colossi collapsing left right and centre. One a week at least, and at one point back there it was one a day more or less." I decided a while back I wouldn't attempt to mark the passing of every interesting figure from our collective cultural past. I'd need a whole, separate, balck-edged blog for that. Every now and then, though, there's one that really shouldn't slide by uncomemorated and Burt Bacharach qualifies. 

His music has been as much a part of the weave of my life as the sound of the wind in the eaves and often as haunting. It's the sound of longing and loneliness and existential dread.

Of course, much of that comes from Hal David's lyrics but, as with Elton John and Bernie Taupin, who Mrs. Bhagpuss and I were discussing the other day, one name may as well stand for the other, so closely are they bound. When Hal David passed a decade ago this blog didn't even have a music tag so he's just going to have to share an obituary with Burt. As in life...

I don't suppose every song Bacharach and David wrote was about love but it certainly seemed that way. That's why I had the startlingly unoriginal idea of combining my notes on Bacharach's death with a celebration of St. Valentine. Listening to some of the best-known Bacharach and David numbers this morning, I'm not quite so sure how good a fit it is, after all. It's remarkable how extreme they all are; either love is the world and everything in it or it's loss is the void made manifest. They're songs of obsession and madness as much as love.

The individual elements of the songs are all strong but I beleive the reason they've become so inevitable resides in the astonishing gestalt created between songwriter, lyricist and performer. Have any songwriting teams ever been so blessed by their interpreters as Bacharach and David were by Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield or Karen Carpenter? Well, yes, probably, but it was a rhetorical question.

For this reason, and perhaps unusually, Bacharach's genius is best-represented by the versions of his songs we all already know. It's much harder to discover revelatory new interpretations when you move away from a heartbeat as strong and steady as this. Still, we can but try.

But before we deviate from convention, let's peer behind the curtain to see how the magic was made. This is an absolutely fascinating snapshot of the creative process, Bacharach, David and Dionne Warwick in rehearsal, working on the phrasing and interpretation of Say A  Little Prayer. It looks maybe a little staged - I'm sure they didn't always have a camera crew in the rehearsal studio - but it's revelatory all the same. 

Say A Little Prayer - Dionne Warwick

Wives and Lovers - Cécile McLorin Salvant

From the raw to the cooked, to quote the Fine Young Cannibals, not something I do every lifetime. This a song I've always loved for its loose, loping pace but until today I couldn't have told you what it was called. I think I've only ever heard it on the radio or in snippets on the soundtracks of movies. This version, by Cécile McLorin Salvant, is manicured almost beyond perfection. It wouldn't be my definition of a boombastic jazz style but it has its allure.

 I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself - Marcia Hines

There was a song I wrote, once, where I interpolated the title of this next one into a break between verses. I've always had a fancy for songs that quote other songs. It was back before the days of sampling so when we played it live, which probably only happened two or three times, I had to carry the melody myself. Since, once again, I'd only really ever heard the original coming out of a transistor radio, my phrasing was necessarily approximate. I'd only needed to hear Dusty Springfield sing it the once, though, to realize even a hint would trigger a memory of the sublime in anyone else whrecognized it. It always will. Here, Marcia Hines sings it beautifully, but you can still hear Dusty inbetween the lines.

Walk On By - Isaac Hayes

Isaac Hayes is a force of nature. When he covers a song he rolls it over, guts it, and wears it like a skin. He never sounds like anyone but himself. His take on Walk On By, as it appears on the seminal album Hot Buttered Soul, lasts just over twelve minutes. This sawn-off version from an unidentified TV performance hacks it down to three and a half but still manages to sidestep pretty nearly the entire melody. And yet Burt Bacharach apparently liked it well enough to recommend it in his autobiography, at least if the YouTube comments are to be believed.

Close To You - Frank Ocean

At which point Frank Ocean could be heard to mutter "Hold my beer..."

Me Japanese Boy, I Love You - Pizzicato Five

And finally, as a very special treat for anyone who's stuck with me all the way down to the end of the post, a Bacharach song you most likely never heard of, far less heard, performed by a band we could all do with hearing far more often. In 1964, Bacharach and David somehow came up with a song called "Me Japanese Boy, I Love You", which Bobby Goldsboro took to the dizzy heights of #74 on the Billboard Hot 100. How and more importantly why this happened is a story I'd very much like to hear but the World Wide Web is keeping its counsel. If anyone knows anything, plase do tell.

Having briefly scanned the lyrics, I'd have to say they swerve being outright racist mainly by their sheer, mindblowing naivety. Clearly I'm missing something, though, because Pizzicatto Five deemed it worth the full, straight, reverential performance and they assuredly know what they're about.

And with that, let me wish you all a Happy Valentine's Day until next year, by when I'm sure someone else suitably inspiring will have had the grace to join that great gig in the sky, thereby affording me the opportunity to do this all over again.

Until Next Next Fest, Then!

Steam's latest Next Fest ends today and I've played all the demos I chose, except for that one that won't run. The last two are both point and click adventures of a sort but they look, feel and play very differently. They're both professionally produced, written and programmed, with no bugs or technical errors that I encountered. One of them I really liked and the other... not so much.

The one I wasn't so fond of was Splittown. I should have known when I chose it that it wouldn't really work for me but I was intrigued by the thumbnail description: "Cold War has split the world in two. The Great Divide spans across the globe with an impenetrable wall between the two blocs. You are Leonard Nimby; stone-faced agent of IM5, hot on the trail of a shrink gun stolen from you by a villanous mayoral candidate on the eve of a fateful election."

Sounds interesting, if highly unoriginal, but if you're looking for originality, the point and click adventure genre would be a very poor place to start. The premise promises a nice mix of retro-SF and detective action, two things I like, which is why I decided to give the demo a try. I should have read on into the full write-up on the Steam Store page, where the true nature of the game is revealed: "Splittown is a point-and-click adventure game inspired by 90s classics such as Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit The Road." 

 What's the point of a demo if it's not representative of the game?

Ah! It's one of those adventure games. The ones I find awkward to the point of embarassment. The ones with jokes I don't find funny and characters I find actively annoying. I would probably have given the whole thing a pass had I known it was aiming to follow in that tradition.

It does, and very accurately, at least from the perspective of someone who's always tended to abandon those games in the opening stages out of boredom and irritation, the very same reaction I had about twenty minutes into Splittown. It's by no means a bad game. It's probably a good game of its kind. It's just not a game I wanted to spend any more time playing.

It didn't help that I found the graphic style it employs jarring and ugly even back when it was new. Whatever the opposite of nostalgia might be, that's what I have for that harsh color palette, those fish-eye lens angles, those jagged edges. I'd be very happy never to see any of them again, especially in ersatz recreations like this. 

This made me laugh, although almost certainly for the wrong reason.

I also find, increasingly, I don't enjoy the gameplay. It sounds odd, considering how much I enjoy many other point and clicks, but this iteration is just too purist for my dilettante tastes. I much prefer the more contemporary take that brings in elements from visual novels to create a more fluid narrative experience. The classic style is just too herky-jerky. It has the same effect on me as listening to certain sixties' pop songs, with which, in a weird, indefinable way, these kinds of games seem to share a spiritual kinship.

Another thing I could really do without, from any style of game, is the locked room opening. I am very much more than done with starting off in a location I can't just walk out of. The methodology for escaping the locked room in this instance was reasonable and logical (Videogame-logical, anyway.) but the fact I was able to make my escape easily didn't make the experience in any way more entertainining or enjoyable.  

If your pun needs a hyphen to work, it probably isn't worth making.

The main reason I decided to give up on the demo twenty minutes in, however, was none of the above; it was something much more fundemental. It was because I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of interactions available. Like one of those frustrating RPGs where every box, barrel and crate can be smashed or opened, pretty much everything on the screen could be moused over to be examined, used or talked to. When I made my way out of the second location into the third and found myself faced with a whole new room filled with possibilities, my patience evaporated and I bailed without a moment's thought.

Since then, I've felt not the least inclination to go back. The plot was solid enough but I never found myself caring what happened next so I'm happy to leave it in limbo and move on. That's no criticism of the game itself, which I'm sure will find and please an audience. It's just not going to be an audience I'm a part of any more, if ever I was. 

The plot, in a nutshell.

By contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the oddly-named Zid Journey. I'd tell you just how long I spent there but I had to get up from the keyboard suddenly in the middle and I left the game idling. Steam tells me I spent nearly three hours playing. It was probably closer to an hour.

Like Splittown, Zid Journey describes itself as an "adventure game with a strong, classic 90's vibe" but it looks and plays so completely differently I find it hard to place the two games in the same tradition at all. Where Splittown is the visual equivalent of crumbs in your bed, all scratchy and uncomfortable, Zid Journey is a comfy, faux-fur throw, soft, curvy and warm.

You play as "Zid, a yellow dinosaur... as he goes on a journey to find the lost parents of a small Daspletosaurus hatchling." The specificity there gives you a hint of what to expect. This is another game that feels as likely to have its roots in educational software as in gaming. You'll meet a number of dinosaurs as you play and all of them come with detailed descriptions. Maybe there's a test at the end.

Will this be in the exam?

Not being a six year old child or a paleontologist, I wasn't interested so much in the taxonomy as in the anthropomorphism and the gentle, involving narrative. The dinosaurs you get to meet in the demo range from grumpy to manic by way of obsessive. It's not what you'd call deep characterization but it's idiosyncratic enough to make each of the dinos come across as individuals rather than stereotypes.

Star of the show, other than the eponymous Zid, is Zid's kid, the fresh hatchling he has to conceal in a backpack because the mere sight of such a major predator, even in miniature, would send every other dino into a tailspin. The baby Daspletesaur is there as more than a mcguffin to drive the plot; you get to play him, too.

Oh, sure. He looks cute now...

When the plot requires it, you can swap from playing Zid, who has full use of his paws, complete, it would appear, with opposable thumbs, to the hatchling, who can only pick things up in his mouth. And spit them out. Mechanically, I found this very satisfying. The puzzles were also fairly easy to solve and the solutions felt pleasantly tactile.

The gameplay, then, feels good, the characters are charming, the plot chugs along nicely, the graphics are appealing and you might even learn something. Anything else? Well, there's the world-building, if you can call it that. I did find the hints and clues about how this society of intelligent, articulate, tool-using dinosaurs operates more than a little intriguing. The demo ends with Zid and his infant charge on board a boat taking them from the countryside to a dinosaur center of civilization. I would have liked to stay on that boat with them to see what it was like when they got there.

Before we set off, I have some concerns about the draft...

I guess that means I'm going to wishlist Zid Journey, although if I'm realistic, I'm probably not going to buy it, a prediction that says a lot more about my attitude to spending money than it does about the game. On the basis of what I saw in the demo, it definitely looks worth buying.

And so concludes my skim through Next Fest for February 2023. There were around 900 demos. I played seven of them, which I'm sure gives me some perspective to talk about how good the event was, overall. I'm on safer ground when I say there'll surely be another along in a few months, when I'll enjoy doing it all again. 

Back From The Dead

Considering how less than impressed I was by my first impression of the current Steam Next Fest, the standard of the demos I've picked comes as something of a pleasant surprise (Although I'm sure not everyone would agree.) So far, I've played five and had a good time with four of them. The fifth still won't run.

This morning, I spent a very enjoyable seventy-nine minutes with The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker, described in brief as "A story driven medieval fantasy adventure inspired by oldschool RPGs of the past." Not oldschool RPGs of the future, then. However you choose to express it, here it is again. That familiar phrase or, if you'd rather, compound noun - "oldschool".

Honestly, at this stage, the mere sight of something calling itself "old school" or indeed "oldschool" is enough to make me move on, in search of something new. What is it with the past that we think it's worth revisiting so obsessively? I'm old enough to remember when something being "old", as we called it then, having not yet learned to append an educational qualifier to add gravitas, was the very opposite of a recommendation. Back then, what we wanted was something new; something modern; something up-to-date. 

Ah, but that's oldschool thinking, isn't it? Get with the program, grandad, as the kids used to say, back in the day, another bygone phrase I'm sure no-one under thirty uses in these modern times. 

Hang on. I seem to be caught in some kind of etymological time paradox. Give me a moment...

Okay, that's better. Where was I? Oh, yes, the game...

It's good. Well, what I saw of it in the demo was good, anyway. And there's quite a lot to see. There's a perfunctory and wholly irrelevant character creation process, in which you get to choose the hairstyle and skin color of the predetermined protagonist, one Rothar Aercrest. 

You can also pick up to four Background Traits from a list of a round dozen, something which seems significant until you get into the game itself, which is when you discover just how fast these skills can be raised. Still, every point helps, I'm sure.

Next up comes the traditional oldschool opening, complete with fantasy/dream sequence, mysterious ghostlike figure and a sense of ominous foreboding. At this stage you'll be able to see the peculiar aesthetic of the game in all its muted, melted glory. I won't attempt to describe it further; just look at the screenshots. 

At first I thought this indicated a lack of polish or an indifference to appearances but I soon realized it meant nothing of the kind. Yes, all the characters look like Plasticine figures left too close to the radiator overnight, but who needs eyebrows, anyway? I quickly grew to appreciate the semi-abstract, almost painterly look of the thing.

The game proper begins with a fairly lengthy sequence in Rothar's castle, where he's entertaining guests and settling disputes in the manner of liege lords from times immemorial. There's absolutely no pressure to get on with the plot. You can take your time to explore the castle's many rooms, most of which are simply stuffed with items you'd be well-advised to tuck away in your backpack or use immediately.

The bookcases contain many tomes that will add points to the traits you already chose and most of the others besides. There are weapons and potions and armor and who knows what-all else. A few minor quests pop up as you explore. I highly recommend completing the one where you give whiskey to a passing mage - and make it your good whiskey, too. I'm not sure how things turn out if you miss that opportunity but I'm guessing not well.

This peaceful interlude also allows you a chance to familiarize yourself with the slightly left-field controls. I found them very comfortable after a few minutes but I must say WASD to rotate the camera, combined with click-to-move seems an idiosyncratic choice.  

After a while you'll make your way downstairs to chat to your guests, whereupon you'll be tasked with making a decision. Surprisingly, I really liked this part. 

The full description on the game's Steam store page boasts "Permanent choices that affect gameplay" and "quests with deep writing". I'm normally all for making the fewest choices possible and having those I do make affect gameplay scarcely at all and I'm deeply suspicious of the literary ability of anyone willing to employ a term like "deep writing" but all my doubts were quickly confounded. The choices did indeed seem meaningful in a readily comprehensible manner and the writing, if not actually "deep", was certainly fluid, competent and skillful.

It shouldn't spoil things too much, I hope, this being a demo after all, to reveal that the outcome of whatever choice you make leads to a big fight. This is where you'll be very glad you let that mage see the inside of your drinks cabinet. Combat at this stage is extremely basic - you don't really have any skills yet, this being an RPG - but it's a bit of a moot point given what happens next.

This really is a spoiler but I don't think we can avoid it. It's basically part of the extended tutorial. Let me not sugar-coat it: you're days of lording it over the locals are over. You can forget about all your wealth and status, your magnificent castle, your beautiful (If low-born.) wife, your snazzy armor and magic weapons. You won't be taking any of that with you into the next part of the game.

That's because, after you keel over on the banqueting-hall floor, following another visitation by the Mysterious Entity, next thing you know it's a hundred years later and a Necromancer has summoned you back from the grave to be his lackey. Yep, you're an undead servant now. Get used to it.

I have to say I like the plot. I'm not saying its original but I am saying it's not one that's been done to death. No pun intended. After a debriefing session with the bastard who brought you back (He's not a nice guy but he doesn't have to be; he's a necromancer. It's in the job description.) it's off to the crypts with you as you search for a) a way out and b) the means of making a potion to save the life of the caretaker your new employer left bleeding out in the graveyard.

Following the "choices matter" paradigm, I imagine there are consequences to saving the guy or letting him die. I chose to save him because I'm like that and also I wanted to find out how alchemy worked. He was suitably grateful and told me to look him up if I ever got to the town where he proposed to hide out from the Necromancer. 

I foresee a conflict of interest there, but it's not going to be resolved in the demo, which concludes when you find your way through the crypt (A few puzzles to solve, many undead to send back to their unquiet graves.). There's a guard stationed at the exit to stop the zombies and skeletons spilling out into the streets but he doesn't seem to notice your undead status. After a brief conversation, he happily lets you pass. Or he did me. Maybe I made another meaningful choice without even realizing.

The Necromancer is waiting to show you to your hideout, a cottage on the edge of town, and after a bit of business with some vagrants who've taken it upon themselves to move in, you find yourself the proud owner of a one-room shack. More importantly, you also now have a fixed respawn point to which you can teleport and a big chest to store stuff in. Which you'll need. My inventory was full long before I got out of the crypt.

Along with a roof over your head, you get a pop-up to say the demo is at an end. Or the story part is, anyway. You can carry on exploring and working on your skills if you want. And you might, at that, because progress carries over, should you buy the full game when it appears, something I would certainly consider doing.

At the very least I'm going to add The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker to my wishlist. I had a great time playing the demo and as for the story, I'd kind of like to see how things turns out for old Rothar. I'm betting he'll turn the tables on that pesky Necromancer sooner or later. 

Or he will if he makes the right choices...

Say Hello. Wave, Goodboy!

Next up in Next Fest this month - Hello Goodboy. Apart from a truly inspired pun for a title, what do we have here?

"A wholesome, non-linear adventure game, where a lost soul and his dog set out on an otherworldly trek through the afterlife. Pass into the world beyond, commit acts of kindness for other souls, and mend mistakes from a forgotten past life. All with a very good boy by your side!"

 Well, alright then. Let's get started.

The intro confused me more than a little. I hadn't at that stage read the description above so I didn't know for certain the game was set in the afterlife but when the very first screen I saw was this...

... I did have my suspicions. 

The following cut scene, though, left me uncertain whether the boy in the picture was meant to be dreaming or if he'd somehow died in his sleep. I'm still not sure. Maybe it's all explained at the end of the full game or maybe I misunderstood something. Or maybe it's a problem with the translation.

Let's talk about the translation. It's good but it's not perfect. The occasional line stands out as not being quite idiomatic English. Partly from that but also from the general tenor of the game, I got the impression it might have been developed in Japan - it has that almost indefinable, know-it-when-you-see-it, off-kilter charm that's helped to make Japanese video games a gold standard around the world. 

In fact, the developers, Rolling Glory Jam, are based in Bandung, Indonesia. While I've watched a fair number of Indonesian bands on YouTube and been mightily impressed a few times, I definitely couldn't claim to know anything like enough about the culture to say how typical or otherwise Hello Goodboy might be - but if it's in any way representative, I look forward to seeing a whole lot more games from Indonesia in the future.

By which, yes, you can take it I had a good time. I found the demo entertaining, accessible, involving and surprising, all of which are good things. The controls felt natural in moments, the graphics were universally delightful, the characters were endearing and the soundscape soothing. 

Gameplay, which consists of a great deal of explanation and exposition, as befits a demo, but also plenty of exploration and action, zipped along handily, punctuated by a number of mini-games that were, for once, actually fun. I particularly enjoyed the one where a hen and a goose ask you to fill a suitcase with packs of seeds resembling Tetris tiles. The frequent interludes when you have to use your magic toolbox to repair things by tapping the space bar at the correct moment were fun, too.

There's a narrative throughline concerning some kind of corrupting force but the demo doesn't do much more than introduce the concept then tell you not to worry about it for now. Mostly what you have to do is familiarize yourself with the Journey you're on, something you do by discussing it with Coco, your canine companion.

Coco is a typically friendly dog, whose role is neatly inverted from sidekick to mentor, a relationship beautifully encapsulated in the way he (She? They?) refers to the protagonist, Iko, as a Good Kid. Coco has a better idea of what's going on than Iko but neither of them seem to have the whole picture. I can't say I was all that much clearer by the end of the demo either but so long as I was being a Good Kid I didn't much care.

Being a Good Kid involves making the right choices, this being one of those games where choices matter. How they matter or what happens if you make the wrong choices is less clear. I'm not even sure you can make a wrong choice. There was one time when I had to decide which of four drinks to bring to a picnic and every time I chose one, Coco gently suggested it might not be suitable. The right one turned out to be the last one I picked but there didn't appear to be any penalty for getting it wrong the first three times.

By and large, that leniency reflects the gentle, relaxing nature of the game but if that sounds a touch too twee for your tastes, I wouldn't write the game off just yet. What appears to be the fluffiest of sequences, involving two young people on a picnic date, takes a very unexpected turn into some dark psychological waters towards the end. Thankfully, all is resolved happily, although I was left wondering whether, had I made different choices, the outcome might have been a lot less cosy.

Hello Goodboy is unusual in other ways than its emotional timbre, not least in the way it occasionally delivers an infodump of real-world statistics for no discernable in-game reason other than the character speaking is, according to his girlfriend, a bit of a geek. It left me wondering whether the game had its origin in educational software. If not, that's some serious characterisation they have going on there.

Playing the demo through to the end took me just under an hour, by which time I'd completed one of the Seasonal zones; Spring, as it happens. Completing it lit one rune on a panel in the central atrium. There are, naturally, four. Assuming all the zones are about the same length, I guess that implies a four hour running time plus however long it takes to do whatever happens when all the runes are lit.

In other words, I haven't a clue how long the game is likely to be when it releases in Q2 2023, as is currently planned. I'd certainly be up for a few more hours, though. So I've wishlisted it.

Of course I have. I'm a Good Kid!

Next Fest : MMORPG Edition

As I was saying only yesterday, my selection from the current Steam Next Fest bucket of demos includes a couple of mmorpgs. Until then, I'd never heard of either of them and nothing I read in the descriptions led me to believe I'd missed all that much.

Of the pair, the one I felt looked marginally more interesting was Grace Online, "a 3D fantasy MMORPG featuring an immersive experience that allows the players to forge their own paths through exploration and discovery". A bit vague but might be worth a look...

Outside of the demo, the game is currently in semi-closed testing, with access being available on request "when the developer is ready for more participants". Early Access is imminent, scheduled for next month. The EA phase, described quite pragmatically, even off-puttingly, on the Steam Store page, is estimated to last a year or two, although "...given that it's a one person team this time is subject to change". When people talk about soloing mmos, that's not usually what they mean, is it?

Still, respect for trying. And the screenshots make the game look not unattractive. I was curious to find out how it might play. 

I still am. I can't get it to run.

It downloaded without problems and it fires up when I hit play but every time I get to Server Select, I get this:

I checked my antivirus wasn't blocking it. It wasn't. I googled. Nothing. I joined the game's Discord to see if anyone was complaining there. 

At first I couldn't find any mention of anyone else having issues getting into the game. On the contrary, there were plenty of ongoing discussions suggesting people were indeed playing. 

Eventually I came across the following exchange:

It seems the demo is just too popular for its own good. Nice problem to have, although since the OP talks about "getting continuous "cannot connect" " and I've had the same message half a dozen times over two days, I'm not wholly convinced that the "29 minutes" overload is the whole story.

I'll try again at what might be a less congested time, maybe tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll get lucky. If not, there's always Early Access in March.

Since I couldn't try a demo I wasn't sure I wanted to try anyway, I decided to double down and try one I was pretty sure I didn't. In for a penny...

 Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore describes itself as "a hardcore, old-school MMORPG for players not afraid of challenge, risk, and adventure." I guess one out of three will have to do. I do like an adventure.

I realize there's a demographic for whom the words "hardcore" and "old-school" sound a dog whistle but for me they ring an alarm bell. The phrase "too old for all that" comes to mind, along with "got more sense" and "life's too short". When you factor in come-ons like "Teamwork is a must", "Death is not an inconvenience" and "High risk gameplay" they might just as wel have put up a big sign saying "Not for Bhagpuss".

It's just a demo, though, I can put up with a little hardcore, ffa, full loot ganking in the name of getting a post out, surely? I mean, it's all about the stories, right?

So I logged in. Smooth as butter. No problems at all. Then I made a character. Ditto. Well, if you don't count what the character I made looks like.

Character creation is slick, detailed and entertaining. The design is solid, the illustration rich and bold, the writing lucid. The whole things oozes professionalism. Given the strength of the ancillary elements  the character models themselves come as quite a shock. They seem almost nominal, placeholders, perhaps, for finished artwork to come later.

I spent a while reading through the numerous classes and specializations, a somewhat fatuous enterprise seeing there was literally no possibility of my ever needing to specialize during the demo the demo. I'm not saying it's not possible. I have no idea whether it is or not. I'm just saying it was never going to be possible for me, especially given all the other demos I have to get through before Monday.

All the classes looked interesting but in the end I plumped for the Fighter because fighters are generally the easiest to start with in any game. Why make things harder than they have to be? I mean, it's not like the game won't do that for me, is it?

Except that's not what happened. Very much the opposite, in fact. I had a jolly good time playing Ethyrial for nearly two hours, until I had to drag myself away to take Beryl for her evening walk. By then, I'd learned two things: 1) No-one ganks you in the Tutorial or the starting city and 2) That old mmorpg magic still just works, somehow.

The first thing to say about Ethyrial is the graphics are W.E.I.R.D. Seriously, they are very, very strange. The whole thing takes place in a kind of top-down, over the shoulder 3D that I found utterly disorientating at first but surprisingly comfortable later. 

The buildings all do that cutaway thing, where you can see inside them from the outside. Every mob and NPC has a massive nameplate like a signboard. Conversations type themselves out word by word in what looks like a cross between a speech bubble and a printed flyer. If an NPC walks away while you're talking to them, as several did, the speech bubble slides along at a slant and changes perspective, almost as if its actually supposed to be a physical presence in the world. Also you have to either type in your side of the conversation or trigger keywords, which is truly old school, but that's another topic altogether.

It's hard to see much detail, using the default settings but I did eventually figure out how rotate the camera and zoom in and out. Neither option uses what I would consider traditional controls. You have to right-click the hotbars rather than left-click, too, which is back-assward to my way of thinking. And I had to invert the camera controls to get them to feel comfortable. 

When you can eventually move and see properly, the aesthetic is convincing, within the parameters of the graphics, which are otherwise not the most sophistiated or up-to-date you're going to find. It certainly doesn't help that the entire Tutorial takes place both at night and in heavy rain. Since the clock never moved, I assume this is a narrative choice not just my unfortunate timing. When I finally made it to the world proper and the clock began to tick again, it was still night and it was still raining but at least the sun did come up eventually.

The storyline, what very little I saw of it, and especially the quests, definitely qualify as "old school". No-one asked me to kill ten rats, although I killed several on my own recognizance, but I had to carry  things from one townsperson to another, rescue pets for children and turn ore into metal bars, just as I've done countless times before.

And it was fun. That's the oddest thing about it. 

I got jumped by ruffians in an alleyway, killed them, got complimented by the Guard and deputized to go kill the dead men's boss, just as would surely happen in real life, if real life was a fever dream. I got chased into a house by poisonous spiders and bitten to death and the last thing I saw as I was dying was the spiders turning on the houseowner, who'd been standing in his living room, minding his own business. I climbed a ladder into an attic and took an old man's leather pants and put them on, with his blessing. I found a cluster of mushrooms growing on a wall and picked them all, then ate them, and it  didn't kill me but made me feel much better.

Just normal, old school stuff like that, all wrapped up with some moderately witty, always grammatically correct dialog. I played for a couple of hours but I could have gone all night. Or at least I could if it wasn't for the nagging feeling I'd done it all before. 

And of course, I have. That's the problem. Even leaving aside the post-Tutorial, post-demo room-hogging elephant that is ffa, full-loot PvP, why would I want to do it again? I wouldn't. At least, I don't think I would.

For anyone that does still hanker after the old days, though, the level of quality present here bodes well. I've played a few of these things and most of them don't have this amount of heft. Didn't run into any bugs, either. Well, unless you count the spiders.

On the other hand, few modern games have such awkward graphics, controls and movement. Yes, I got used to all of it quickly enough but a moment's consideration could hardly fail to bring up unfortunate comparisons with just about any other modern mmorpg you care to name. A potent cocktail of novelty and familiarity carried me through but I fear it wouldn't carry me far.

That said, Ethyrial is definitely now on my radar. I'd say that means the demo did its job.