Identity Crises

I've gotten into the habit of bookmarking anything I see that might be worth a paragraph or two in a portmanteau post. It's surprisingly organised for me and it might even be useful if I ever remembered to use any of it before it goes horribly out of date. 

In a vague attempt to salvage something before it all goes off and has to be junked unseen, I've slapped together a few thoughts on a couple of MMO-related news items I thought might make a post (Not a whole one, apparently.) plus something about a musical sub-genre that was already over by the time I heard about it. Do I really need to bring out that Ferris Bueller quote again?

I've even somehow managed to find a theme that links them all. Kinda. Close enough, anyway.

Entitled

Trove is a game I've never much liked. I tried it when it was in beta or when it first launched or something like that and never really made much progress or found anything there I'd call fun. It seems strange such an apparently gimmicky, throwaway game should have turned out to have broader appeal and more staying power than any of Trion's more serious MMORPGs.

It did, though. It's still here, people still play it and it still gets meaningful updates, which is more than can be said of either Rift or whatever that other Trion game was called. Hang on, I'll google it... Defiance! That was it. I never even got around to playing that one although I always meant to. Too late now. 

Last week, MMO Bomb reported the latest addition to things you can do in Trove. Now you can collect titles, apparently. They were kind of sniffy about it because some of the titles are only for sale in the cash shop and even then you have to buy loot boxes for a chance at getting the one you want. I guess that could be annoying although heaven knows we all ought to be used to it by now.

I was more surprised the game didn't have titles already. What MMORPG doesn't have titles? They've been around just about as long as the genre itself. Trove came out in 2015 ffs!

I used to be pretty sniffy about titles myself. Not because of the delivery method, which was usually some in-game activity. I just thought they were silly. And distracting. Of course, I was a po-faced killjoy back then. I'm waaay more chill now.

And I really like titles. I use them whenever I get the chance, the sillier the better. I got a couple of new ones for Mitsu in EverQuest II last night, while she was digging up graves for the Halloween event.  If you want to talk odd delivery methods, getting a title out of a present with your name on it that you dug out of an occupied grave beats lootboxes all ways up.

My favorite titles, though, are in Noah's Heart. I've been meaning to do a post on them forever. This isn't that post but it is an opportunity for me to show off a few of my favorites.

I particularly like Cute Boy for a female character, although of course you can gender-swap at will in Noah's Heart so maybe that's not its intended purpose. Also, who wouldn't want to run around in an MMORPG with a big sign saying "Residual Aroma" hanging over their head?

That's just a selection from the ones I own, though. Ones I don't yet have but would like include such gems as Aroma Wafting, Academic Rigor, Meticulosity, Brain of God, Not Greedy and Dark Night Crow, not to mention the unbeatable teen trio of Unruly Teenager, Mixed-Up Teenager and Teenage Fighter.

Y'know, I think I may have been paying too much atention to the outfits in this game. I need to be working on my titles. I think I'll start right now!

Jam Today

There's been something of a kerfuffle over the leaked/datamined and now officially confirmed news that Visionary Realms, the developer behind would-be unofficial EverQuest sequel Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, is working on a second game before getting to alpha with the first one. The new title, rather amusingly named 247, is going to be a "survival, arena match-up" or a "marriage between MMO and Extraction", whatever the hell that means.

This comes hard on the heels of a graphical revamp that radically alters the way the game looks, something that had already frightened some of the horses. For what it's worth, I think the new look is a huge improvement but not everyone agrees. More significantly, the combination of these two very significant developments so close together has prompted a lot of speculation that the developers must be running out of money and/or losing faith with Brad McQuaid's original vision™ for the game.

And that's probably not too far off the truth. Pantheon isn't Star Citizen. It can't generate hundreds of millions of dollars by selling virtual mounts. It doesn't even have a persistent, publicly available version that anyone can buy into and play, although supposedly one's not too far off.

As the MassivelyOP article linked above points out, trying to fund an in-development MMORPG by using the same assets to spin up a much less ambitious game in another genre has been tried before and so far it hasn't worked. Experience suggests it's more likely to be a distraction than a lifeline for a struggling studio.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's not going to be of any interest at all. I played Apocalypse, the Battle Royale version of Ashes of Creation, and enjoyed it somewhat. It was quite good fun but far more importantly for me, it offered a very limited peek at the game I'd Kickstarted about a year and a half before. I was mildly to see anything of the game at all.

Of course, what I didn't know at the time (December 2018) was that five years later I'd still be waiting for my first real look at the actual MMORPG. Sure, I get detailed newsletters every month or so, most of which try to sell me something, but what I actually signed up and paid money for was access to the Phase 2 Closed Beta, which was estimated to open in... December 2018. 

Pantheon and AoC are almost exact contemporaries. The posts I was writing about Ashes back in 2017 and 2018 all also mention Pantheon. At the time I was seeing the two as direct competitors for the position of My Next Forever Game. 

Five years later, neither looks remotely close to any kind of openly available build, not even Early Access. I don't honestly care. I'm no longer looking for that next big game. I'm happy to play a bit of this, a bit of that, and not get too heavily involved in any of them. 

The way I see it, I had a punt on a Kickstarter or two and that was quite exciting at the time. I feel I got my money's worth just by being part of something new and zeitgeisty. Making those memories is worth a few dollars. It's just as well I feel that way because all the signs are that crowdfunded MMORPGs either never launch at all or, if they do, they end up looking, feeling and playing almost nothing like their backers imagined they would.

For that reason, I'm kind of pleased to hear about 247, the Pantheon spin-off. I'm not interested in the extraction gameplay but I am interested in a chance to explore the world and goof around there for a while, especially if it doesn't cost me anything. And I strongly suspect it could be the only chance I get. 

I can see why Pantheon loyalists are pissed off right now, though. It's becoming clear the game they signed up for probably died along with its creator.

Shouldn't It Be Janecore? Or Is That The Joke?

Names are important, as any hedgewitch will tell you. If you want my clickthrough you really don't want to be calling your band... well, obviously I can't give an example. If I could, it wouldn't be much of an example, now would it?

An interesting exercise might be to try to quantify just what sort of name does pique my curiosity. Well, it would be interesting to me, anyway. Maybe I'll do something about that sometime but, again, it won't be today.

I just wanted to open this section with a brief note on how I came to be listening to something that already doesn't exist any more, even though by most rational definitions its pretty much brand new. What happened was, I clicked through a link to a song called Census Designated purely on the basis that it was by Jane Remover, which I thought was an intriguing thing to call either a band or a person.

 I guess it could be someone's actual birth name. Not likely, though.

It turned out to be a bit of a fuzzed-up, post-grunge epic. I liked it enough to see what else she'd done. Among many other things it seems she started, then ended, something called Dariacore, now a footnote in hyperpop history. I may have mentioned Dariacore here before. I've certainly heard of it but if I ever knew Jane invented it, that I'd forgotten.

Of course, when she invented Dariacore she was going by the name Leroy, which certainly wouldn't have inspired me to click through. Neither would her other identities, C0ncernn, or dltzk, both of which are admitetedly less inert than plain Leroy but also kind of uninviting. To me, that is. Which is probably as it should be. I'm really not the target audience here.

The start of Dariacore was in 2021 and the end was the following summer, with the release of Dariacore 3​.​.​. At least I think that’s what it’s called?. Yes, that's the title. All of it. 

I'd go into it in more detail but I can't because I'm old. You need to be either under twenty-five or some kind of internet archeologist to unpick these things, let alone understand the sequencing. 

Fortunately, you can be any age and still enjoy listening to them, which is what I've been doing while I've been writing this. Just as I've arrived, Jane herself has moved on, from both the more sombre, moody digicore of her lauded debut album, Frailty and from the ultra-glitchy Dariacore, which she claims to have invented as something of a lark. She's also retired her several previous names along with their associated internet identities, all of which now go to dead links. 

Her new album, also called Census Designated, is available from Bandcamp , along with a selecttion of her previous work. I suspect we may be hearing more of her but then I suspect that about a lot of people and I'm often wrong.

Breakthrough or not, I kind of hope she sticks with Jane Remover for a while. It's a good name.

Hunting Horace For Halloween

What with all these Next Fest demos, I haven't been playing all that many MMORPGs lately. About all I've managed has been a couple of logins to Noah's Heart just to keep my guild from kicking me for inactivity and a couple more short sessions in Dawnlands to do pretty much nothing of note. 

And yes, I know Dawnlands isn't an MMORPG. It just feels like one when I'm playing it, just like Valheim did. All the survival games do, when your normal MMORPG playstyle is mostly to solo in mostly empty areas of low-oppulation games, like mine is.

One thing I did get around to doing was the new "quest" Darkpaw added for this year's Halloween event, Nights of the Dead. I put the word quest in inverted commas there because I think it's arguable whether From Regions Beyond is a quest or a collection.

Oh, alright, it's not a winnable argument. Technically, it's defintiely a quest. It goes in your Quest Journal and the NPC you have to talk to to get your reward isn't one of the Collection guys so, yes, it's a quest.

Mechanically, though, it might as well be a collect. Here's what you have to do....

... normally, at this point I'd just link to the Wiki or EQ2 Traders or some other website with a full walkthrough except, in what I can only consider an ominous and worrying non-development, five days after the event went live, no-one's done one. 

To be less panicky, EQ2 Traders does have a full and comprehensive write-up of this year's Nights of the Dead although naturally it only concerns itself with the elements that directly involve crafting and decorating. The new quest gets a mention and there's a picture of the rweard but it's just bundled into a two-line section headed "New From Gravedigging", which covers changes to a pre-existing part of the event.

Of much greater concern as a straw in the wind for the future of the game is the full entry for the Halloween event at EQ2i (AKA the wiki.) This is where I'd normally go to read a full, in-depth rundown of everything that's been added this year. If you try that today, closing in on a week after the event began, this is what you'll find:

It probably hasn't escaped your notice that it's not 2022 any more. No-one has bothered to update the entry for this year at all, let alone to add a write-up of the new quest. I don't believe that's ever happened before and it cannot be a good sign.

I got the basic inforomation on how to begin the new quest from EQ2 Traders, where I learned that "a
"Mystic's Crystal Orb"" would eventually drop for me if I got out my shovel and started digging up graves, as you do this time of year. 

Examining the orb begins the new quest, From Regions Beyond, which is when I begin to question the nomenclature, although Tunare only knows why since we've had plenty of "get a load of drops and call it a quest" quests before. I'm just being nit-picky.

All you have to so is keep on digging. Inbetween the presents with your name on them, the ghosts who want to fight, the ghosts who want to dance, the angry rats and vicious undead, both of whom need a damn good clout with a shovel, you'll eventually find two (Or maybe it was three?) more drops that update the quest.

I'm not sure now whether all of them were drops off creatures that had to be killed or whether one of them came out of a present. If I'd known at the time I was going to be doing a guide I'd have made some notes. In the end, it doesn't matter anyway. You'll just have to keep digging and dealing appropriately with whatever pops up until finally you have everything, at which point the quest will tell you to go speak to Horace Tobin in Antonica.

Antonica, as anyone who's played EQII will know, is a big place. I could really have done with a little more information. Fortunately, in the modern game and especially as an All Access Member playing a max-level character, getting around isn't the time-consuming process it used to be. 

I used my map to insta-travel to the Antonica docks. No sign of Horace there. I had a tracking scroll already running so I started tracking him by name and set off to fly what I thought was the most likely route - along the road past both Qeynos gates then out to Windstalker Village, which was where I thought he was most likely to be hanging out.

Tracking got me nothing. I stopped at Windstalker and walked around. Nothing showed on my map or on track. I googled Horace by name. Again, nothing.

I flapped my wings and carried on, making a full circuit of all the salient points - the McQuibble Farm, where the Scarecrow King spawns, all the various named keeps and towers, the Thundering Steppes zoneline (A popular neutral spot all factions back in the day), Archers Wood, the Claymore...

After fifteen or twenty minutes of that I got fed up and logged out. I was annoyed. It seemed like a lot of unecessary effort for a fluff holiday quest. If the blasted halfling (I was betting he'd be a halfling with a name like Horace Tobin.) couldn't put himself somewhere I could find him then he didn't deserve to get his stupid stuff back.

I left it a couple of days in the hope someone would post his whereabouts online. Then last night I checked and found this. Apparently the little bugger had been spawning under the world, making him impossible to find. 

As someone in the thread points out, there is a way to get NPCs in that state to communicate but you do have to know they're there in the first place. Even after reading the thread, I still didn't know where in Antonica Horace was. Luckily for me, someone else hadn't done their due diligence and searched the forums before posting. There was a second thread made by someone who couldn't find the guy and in reply someone had finally revealed the location - Windstalker Village!

Right where I started. I knew that was where he'd be! 

Off I went again, this time forewarned that a) he might be under the world and b) he was inside one of the buildings. When I got there this time I could easily see the big, red book on the map that indicates a quest hand-in. It was somewhat obscured by other map icons, though. It's possible I might have overlooked it the first time.

I checked track and Horace wasn't showing up. I went inside the building and stood next to him. Still no sign of him on track. That's probably why I missed him the first time. He may have been under the world but since I didn't go into the building I can't be sure. 

What I do know, which I'd forgotten, is that not all quest NPCs show up on track. Why, I have no idea. It's worth remembering you can't just expect tracking to do everything for you, though. Sometimes you actually have to use your eyes.

Heavily enhanced image so you can see Horace's "outfit" in all its glory horror.

I had a brief chat with Horace, who turned out not to be a halfling after all. It was dark in there but as far as I could tell he was a human, wearing a ridiculous floppy wizard hat, pantaloons with voluminous lace turn-ups and lime-green cosy slippers. He gave me some ridiculous spiel about a seance and some angry ghosts. I assume they were incensed by his dress sense. Who wouldn't be?

He also gave me his Mysterial Spirit Board, basically an off-brand Ouija board with a planchette that actually moves. I put it on a table in one of my many dens and it looks pretty spiffy.

Amateurs!

While I was in Windstalker Village I happened to notice another guy standing around with an exclamation mark for a hat and when I spoke to him it turned out to be Professor Heribert for the final stage of the aforementioned Scarecrow King questline. Apparently I'd done the rest years ago, then bailed at the stage where you have to fight the Epic X2 king himself.

I checked that one with the wiki and as I suspected, even though it theoretically scales to level, anyone much over seventy, the original level cap when it was introduced, is a shoe-in to solo it. I flew over to the McQuibble Farm, waited a few minutes for the Professor to show (Someone else just having done the quest.) then one-shotted the King when he popped.

From that I got a nice floaty, glowing skull pet and the satisfaction of having finally completed a quest I probably started more than a decade ago. No need to rush these things. With the very nice Phantasm Witchcraft Cloak I got from one of my gravedigging presents, I thought it all went rather well.

All I really need to do now is buy the latest Nights of the Dead crafting book and I'm done for another year. Although I might wake Mitsu up and do a few Halloween-themed quests with her. It's often more satisfying to do holiday content on characters on servers where I don't have everything already stashed in the bank.

While I'm there, I might do some of the expansion prequels with her too and maybe the Panda quests. I was enjoying levelling her up a few months back and I forget now why I stopped. I imagine something else came along. 

It usually does.

Smashed Blocked or If Only They'd Stayed Hidden

As Redbeard reported yesterday, Google has finally tired of giving stuff away for free. A few months ago the internet juggernaut began experimenting with ways to stop people opting out of seeing ads while watching amusing cat videos on YouTube. 

Oh, wait... my Dated Reference alert just went off! Apparently it's not the noughties any more. Dang! There it goes again. No-one's said noughties since... well, the noughties.

I never watched cat videos on YouTube. The only reason I know people did is because it constantly turns up as a lame-ass joke in sitcoms and comedy novels. I'm reading a comedy novel right now and it's pretty good but even in 2023 it has at least one reference to funny cat videos. Maybe people really do still watch them.

As an aside (No, really?) I was reading something a while back about how many of those early-days internet phenomena, the viral videos that racked up millions of views for no apparent reason, have vanished without trace, although ironically I now can't find where I read it. 

I do remember, however, that the article gave "Charlie Bit My Finger" as an example without mentioning that the reason that one disappeared from YouTube was that the family who owned it sold it two years ago, as an NFT for three-quarters of a million dollars, and as part of the deal removed it from YouTube.

Despite all that, you can, in fact, still watch Charlie biting what I assume is his brother's finger on YouTube. I just checked. I clicked it off after the first second, once I'd established it does indeed play, because I have never seen the clip and fully intend to keep it that way. If you want to check, you can go find it for yourself. I'm not facilitating such behavior.

Getting back to the point, over the last week or so, Google's anti-freeloader faction ramped up the effort to make sure we all do our share in keeping the wheels spinning on the speeding express train of insanity that is the global advertising industry. Back when I thought I was really cool because I'd read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, I used to see advertising as both a valid artform and a fascinating social phenomenon but that feels like a very long time ago, now.

As the Parallel Context post I linked succinctly explains, YouTube viewers using Ad Blockers, which would be all of them with the sense they were born with, have been receiving some very aggressive notifications from Google that they'd damn well better stop! Naturally, this being the internet, the hive mind has been fighting back.

It's a fast-moving and ongoing battle. In the last twenty-four hours my YouTube access has gone from warnings (Three strikes and you're out.) to blackout (Can see everything except the actual video I'm trying to watch, which is weirdly useful and in some ways an improvement. Certainly saves time.) to working "normally" with ads running (Making it unwatchable by any sane person, so good work there, advertisers.) to back to the status quo ante as the combined might of reddit and every anti-corporate coder on the planet strives to wrest back control of their own eyeballs.

For the moment, I'm using YouTube like I was last week but I don't expect it to last. I also don't expect free stuff on the internet to last. This is just the start. Not even the start. The middle, maybe. 

The end will be exactly what every sci-fi author ever has been predicting since I was a child, namely a world filled with wall-to-wall, 24/7 advertising, driving an unavoidable, non-optional, hyper-commercialised culture for the consuming classes, defined as all of us except for a miniscule, mega-rich hyper-elite, most of whose names will be unknown to everyone but their vanishingly tiny peer group.

I am not Tobold (Who'd be having a jolly good laugh at my expense right now for all the times I've chided him for not using an Ad Blocker to watch YouTube, if he ever read anyone else's blog, something I've never seen anything to suggest he does.) so I'm not about to turn this into some kind of political statement. I merely mention it to warn that, depending on Google's success or lack thereof in imposing its will in this regard, I may or may not have to alter the format of my music posts. 

It'd be nice to think I could move to linking to Bandcamp or Soundcloud instead but clearly that's going to present its own issues going forward. Still, I'm sure there'll be some workround I can try. I'm certainly not just going to stop sharing new tunes because Google tells me I'm not doing my bit to keep Keith Richards in Chivas Regal.

And of course they haven't done anything of the kind. That's just me being melodramatic, something to which I've always been happily prone. In fact, for the time being, one of the easier ways to avoid having to watch advertisements for things you wouldn't want if they gave them to you is to view the videos you're interested in on other websites, where they've been embedded. Like this one.

For now at least, embedded videos do not carry advertising, although how long that will last I wouldn't care to guess. It means a couple of things; firstly, the half-dozen or so of my readers who actually check out some of the videos in my music posts should be able to go on doing it without fear. Well, without fear of seeing any adverts. Might be as well to have at least a little fear of what the videos themselves might contain.

It also means, as I discovered yesterday, that I can simply watch the videos on the sites where I find them (NME, Stereogum, Pitchfork etc.), then right-click to get the YouTube URL, paste it into Blogger (Another Google product.) and voila; embedded, ad-free videos. Add as another data point the fact that Chrome (Google, again.) stocks Ad Blockers in its Web Store and they work on YouTube (I just installed one and it works fine.) and you can see there may be parts of the vast Google corporation that don't exactly talk to each other.

Maybe one day all of this will be smoothed out to the point that Google gets exactly what it wants and the rest of the world has to accept it but despite the company's overwhelming commercial success there's precious little evidence of anything even approximating a coherent, structured plan for global domination. It looks a lot more like a hell of a lot of over-excited technicians rabidly making things that interest them with the aid of the giant Scrooge McDuck money pit they've somehow fallen into, while the handful of responsible adults in the building try to firefight the fallout.

Google famously abandons, forgets about or cancels things all the time. Until recently, YouTube has been one of the parts that they've been largely letting get on with making them money, undisturbed. I can't recall a lot changing there for a while. 

Now there's this, which suggests maybe the flood level from the money hose has started to dip a little but there's also the news that they're on the verge of a deal with the recording industry (Now there's a black hat if ever there was.) to facilitate legal AI voice masking. What with that and the runaway success of AI-assisted search under the Bard brand, I think we can all agree our digital future is in safe hands with Google.

In honor of the obvious need to keep feeding the corporate maw, as you'll have seen I've chosen this week to concentrate solely on already known, successful performers. The YouTube warnings do make a point of stressing how using an Ad Blocker impacts the income of artists and creators. I'd hate to see Mick and the boys go hungry, let alone Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, who helped them out on that track.

Fortunately and by a lucky happenstance, a great number of well-known musicians who've featured on the blog many times before have chosen to release quality work this week so I haven't needed to compromise my own, impeccable aesthetic standards to comply. Since everyone knows who they all are, not least because I've told you all more than once already, it also means I haven't needed to include my usual explanatory gloss on every video. 

I'm sure if you need any more information, Bard will be happy to fill you in on the details, some of which it will probably make up especially for you. And all free of charge. For now.

I have a large and ever-growing number of tunes by people I'm willing to bet will be new to most of my readers. (Ha! "My readers". That's presumptious, pretentious and proprietorial. Triple threat! Go me!) so don't be too disheartened by the populist, crowd-pleasing nature of this post. Normal service will, no doubt, be resumed soon enough.

It has also occurred to me in the past, when I've been watching YouTube on handheld devices where I hadn't bothered to install an Ad Blocker yet, that maybe YouTube doesn't place many - or any - ads on videos almost no-one watches. This may be the time to test that hypothesis. 

Unfortunately it won't get rid of the often really quite offensive static ads at the top of the Recommends list but those are quite easily ignored or even blocked physically with a Post-It note. The upside of all of this could be a refocusing on genuinely new and obscure music instead of - as I sometimes worry mildly it might have become - a self-satisfied litany of comfort listening. 

See? There's an upside to everything, if you only look hard enough!

 

 

A note on AI Imagery used in this post, which was just the header this time. 

The prompt was "Ad Blockers drinking and laughing. Futuristic." The AI was Dreamshaper XL Alpha2, my current go-to choice at NightCafe. The image was extended to fit the space available using Uncrop because I always forget to change the aspect ratio from 1:1 to 4:3. What Uncrop added were the left and right figures, their speech bubbles and nearly all the text along the bottom.

I did ask Dreamshaper to give me another version of the same prompt, this time using the correct aspect ratio and it produced something that looks more like the Google Security Team celebrating their success in blocking Ad Blockers than the blockers themselves. It's pretty good, though and I'd hate to waste it so as a little treat for everyone who's made it this far, here it is:

R.I.P. Keith Giffen

As I've said before, I don't like to do a lot of obituaries here on the blog because if I got started on that, I'd never stop. Someone worth remembering seems to die pretty much every day; musicians, writers, artists, entertainers. All the people that make up a life of the mind. Once in a while, though, I hear news that makes me think I maybe should at least mark the date. 

It's not remotely predictable which celebrity death is going to trigger a sense of loss, either. Obviously, almost none of us knows any of these people personally but knowing the work sometimes makes it feel that way. Other times, it's just the name is so familiar, it feels weird to hear they're gone.

I had that momentary frisson this week, when I heard Keith Giffen had died. He's not the biggest name but there was a time when almost everyone I knew would have known who he was and what he did. Not that they'd all have liked it. He was a controversial figure in his prime.

Keith Giffen drew, wrote and did some mysterious thing that seemed to be both and neither, that made him responsible for several of my favorite comics of all time. If I had to pick a single comic-book run to take with me into space, where it would be the only thing I'd have to read for the rest of forever, I might go with Giffen's forty or so issues of The Legion of Super-Heroes, published at the cusp of the 'nineties.

Known as "5 Years Later" it wasn't so much a reboot of the longstanding teen title as a complete rewrite. It was the classic audience divider. People either loved it or utterly loathed it. As a quondam nihilist and lifelong Legion fan, I thought it was the best version of the title I'd ever seen. I still do. It still is.

It would be fatuous to go into expositionary detail about the plot or the characterization or the setting and how every expectation was confounded. If you aren't a fan you won't care and if you are you'll already know. The point is, Giffen tore up everything and started over and still kept everything and carried on, which is a hard trick to carry.

He didn't do it alone. Comics is a collaborative medium. Most of the dialog was handled by husband and wife team Tom and Mary Bierbaum, who did an exemplary job of it. Keith Giffen handled the plotting and initially did the pencils, later moving to layouts. I guess if it'd been a TV series, he'd have been the Showrunner.

5YL was Keith's second stint with my favorite super-hero team. He'd penciled The Great Darkness saga for Paul Levitz in the early 'eighties, another high-water mark for the title, He also worked frequently with another of my favorite comic-book professionals, writer Robert Loren Fleming, co-creator of what I always used to say was my favorite comic, Thriller, and he penciled another of my all-time favorites, the Defenders, one of the first series I collected on my return to the fold, having briefly dropped the medium when I was "too old for comics" in my mid-teens.

I didn't just like Giffen's ideas; I loved the way he drew and I especially loved his layouts. He was an exponent of the nine-panel grid, a rigid format that turned a lot of readers off but that I found exhilarating and weirdly stimulating. I just had to look at the shape of those frames to feel the chaotic energy dammed up behind the restraining frames. It felt electric.

One of the things that continues to surprise me about modern life is the way people who used to be utterly unknown to all but a small cadre of obsessives now merit mentions on the national news and lengthy obituaries in the quality press when they die. At the time Keith Giffen was doing his best work, I don't believe there would have been a single newspaper, television or radio program in the UK that would have marked the passing of a comic artist of his stature with so much as a single word.

That said, Keith never attained the stature of an Alan Moore or a Grant Morrison even within the industry. He was a comic fan's favorite more than any kind of breakthrough artist and even among comics fans he was always something of an acquired taste. The dark and disturbing direction in which he took the LSH was atypical of his work in general, which tended more to the comedic than many super-hero fans found comfortable.

He was responsible for bringing Ambush Bug into the world, an act for which there are many who'll likely never forgive him. He gave us Lobo (Ditto.) and Rocket Racoon, thanks to the movies now the best-known of his amoral, anarchic, anti-heroes. 

He also turned the Justice League of America into a sitcom, something he'd previously helped do to Marvel's Defenders when he penciled that excellent series from Steve Gerber's idiosyncratic and irreverent scripts. Strangely, for an artist with such a gift for visual discipline and intensity, he probably leaves us with a reputation as a humorist above all else.

Most of what I've been talking about happened quite a while ago although Keith was still working in comics until fairly recently. I need to catch up with the comics he wrote and drew in the first decade of the new millennium. I bet they're great. Everything of his I've ever read was at the very least good. Most of it was excellent.

Not everything we once loved stands up to re-examination but Keith's work does. I re-read the whole of 5YL only a couple of years ago. It was even better than I remembered. 

I think I might read it again. And those Justice Leagues, too, if I can find them.

I Am The Captain Of My Fate, Gawd Help Me.

Not to spoil the ending but please read this post all the way through before forming any judgment on the demo or the game as a result of anything I might have written...

And finally, the demo I only chose to make up the numbers, Captain Pawsome. It's very much not the sort of game I usually play but I had a great time. 

The game's Steam page describes it as "a cozy 2D fishing game where you play as the cat", which makes it sound as though there's always a cat in games like this, only sometimes you don't get to play them. For all I know, that may be true. As I said, it's not my regular kind of game.

Not my first cat. Also I'm pretty sure they mean "Button" not "Bottom".

The first surprise was that there's a form of character creation. I was expecting to play a specific cat, the eponymous Captain Pawsome, no less, and indeed I did but you get to choose a variety of Pawsomian features such as the color of his fur, the way he styles his whisker and what his belly button looks like.

I made him into a blue-black cat with short, straight whiskers and a quirky, half-amused smirk. Then, as is all too common with most games where you get to fiddle with the appearance of your character, I barely looked at him again.

That wasn't because I couldn't see his face. Unlike the MMORPGs I'm used to playing, where character creation could more usefully concentrate on offering options for the back of your head than the front, given that's what you'll mostly be staring at for several thousand hours, Captain Pawsome is a 2D side-scroller. 

This place sure isn't going to get a Blue Flag.

I used to think I didn't like those much but I've had to re-assess my opinion of late. The format is actually very comfortable both to look at and control. It certainly gives you a good view of your character, albeit not in the round.

The Captain Pawsome demo seems to be yet another where all they've done is cut the Introduction and Act One away from the rest of the game and send it out into the world alone. I want to say it includes the tutorial as well but for once, honestly, I could have used more instruction. Such tutorial tips as you get don't go nearly far enough in explaining some of the basics.

You start on your boat, which is falling apart. It's patched and leaky and overgrown with weeds. There's a cabin and a bedroom and they're both inexplicably made of brick. Why? No idea. How? Never explained.

Does that look like the inside of a ship to you?

You'll learn later that Act One mostly consists of repairing and refurbishing your ship to meet maritime standards or at least to satisfy the Commander, a cat four or five times the size of any other cat in the port, who stands about on the dock 24/7 telling you what to do. By the time that happens, though, there's every chance you'll already have begun fixing the place up for yourself.

Before I even met the Commander I'd fished up a whole load of tin cans and wooden planks. I started out to go into town and see what was what and along the way I naturally pressed LMB for some reason or other and next thing I knew I was fishing. Nothing in the game told me how to do it. 

Nothing told me how to cast or reel in or anything. To be fair, instruction really isn't necessary because the controls are highly intutive and immediately satisfying. It's one of the better implementations of fishing I've tried and I've tried a few. Still, you'd think a game that's all about fishing might begin by explaining how to fish, wouldn't you?

I didn't actually take any shots of me fishing so here's one of me jumping instead.

I say "fish". At the start it's fishing only in the metaphorical sense of the word. On the end of your line there's no hook, just a magnet. The extremely polluted harbor is awash with tin cans, old floorboards with nails sticking out of them and clumps of general detritus, all of which are handily magnetic. 

I quickly worked out how to get them to tag on to the end of my line and how to reel them in, an activity that becomes more compusive the more you do it. At this early stage it's quite hard to lose something you've caught, although not impossible. Soon I had a bag full of rusted metal, sodden wood and sundry garbage.

I also had a roller skate and a tennis racket, both of which sparkled and glowed underwater in a way that made it obvious there was something special about them. There was. They were worth money!

Pretty sure that wouldn't float.

Once I'd found the Commander and had a chat with him I discovered I needed seaweed to catch actual fish. Seaweed grows on the seabed or on underwater rocks and has to be tugged free, which makes sense. What makes less sense is that you can do that with your magnet and that fish want to eat it when it's attached to your line. 

Do fish eat seaweed? Hang on... I'll google it... oh, yes, some do! Okay, I'll give them a pass on that one. 

With bait, you can catch fish. The Commander wants you to catch five. I did that. It was easy. Then he wants you to sell them. That's got to be easier still, right? I mean, in video games when you want to sell something you just offer it to any shopkeeper and they buy it. They all have unlimited funds, never sleep and buy whatever crap you want to get rid of. It's how it's always been.

This is what happens if you let cats become town planners.

I'd already been to the shops. There are several and the Commander sent me to one for something. I can't remember what. Bait, I think, although since you can catch fish with seaweed and it's free that doesn't make much sense either. Maybe I should have made some notes.

Whatever it was, I knew where the shops were - on the upper levels of the town, where you have to climb up ropes to get to them because obviously all sailors love climbing ropes and anyway everyone is either a cat (Also known to love climbing.) or a bird (Can fly.) so why would anyone live on the ground?

I went to all of them and none of them was buying. There wasn't even a sell option. I stumped around a bit, fuming at the iniquity of it all, then I tabbed out to look up "How to sell in Captain Pawsome".  I found nothing. Either no-one else had a problem with it or no-one's playing the demo.

Don't end a sentence a preposition with.

Eventually, entirely by chance, I happened to notice that the vendor who sells furniture for your boat has an aquarium for sale that he describes as "A place to put your fish for sale in!". He doesn't want any money for it, either, which is just as well because until I was able to sell my fish I wasn't going to have any.

What he did want were five tin cans and five old planks. He didn't say why. Maybe he makes his furniture out of them. Luckily, I had plenty of both from when I was teaching myself how to fish so I bought an aquarium. Then I spent a frustrating few minutes trying to figure out how to place it on my ship. Or anywhere.

I tried the deck, the cabin, the hold, the dock, the main street and anywhere else I could go. Everywhere said "Cant Build Here". Yes, without the apostrophe. As I was trying various spots in the hold, however, I noticed there was already an aquarium there. 

Well, where can I build then? Just tell me!

Funny. You'd have thought I'd have spotted that the first time I went inside. And there was also a sort of stand or display cabinet right next to it. And some strange cats were wandering about my boat, too. And going inside!

I was very vague about what was going on at this point. I though what might have happened was that reaching the stage in the tutorial where the Commander asked me to sell the fish might have made the aquarium and the stand spawn in the hold. Or maybe it happened when I bought the aquarium. Maybe you just needed to have it in inventory for it to appear in the boat. 

Or maybe the aquarium and stand had been there all along and I hadn't even noticed. I'm not playing through the whole demo again to revisit all the possibilities but that last one, at least, I can check. Hang on again while I make a new character and see if the sales counters are there from the start...

Wait a minute... what's going on?!

 

Oooookay....

Let's start again. Disregard pretty much everything I've said up to now. It's nonsense. I'm an idiot.

Here's the thing: when you very, very first log in after character creation, you don't appear, as I said, on your boat. There's a very important part I forgot: you appear on a bare stretch of rocks with a door (Screen left.) and some boxes blocking the path (Screen right.)

When I played the first time, I simply went through the door and appeared on my boat, after which everything above happened just as I described except for two things:

1. The Commander, whose full name is Commander Tuna-Breath, does explain how your boat got wrecked (A huge storm.) and tells you he's going to help you get it fixed up. That part I completely forgot.
2. The sales stands, aquarium and display case, are already in the hold of your boat. That part I just missed altogether.

You may well look surprised, Captain. Try paying more attention to your surroundings.

If, instead of going through the door, you jump over the boxes and carry on along the rocks, there's a whole fricken' TUTORIAL that explains absolutely everything I've just complained about not being explained, including how to fish, how to shop, how to sell and one very important detail I never discovered for myself, namely that if you press TAB it opens your inventory! I was wondering why I didn't have anywhere to put my stuff!

Geez. What a maroon.

At this point I think I'll just extend my deepest apologies to the developers, Chicken Launcher and the publisher, Awaken Realms, and sidle quietly away. 

I will just hang around long enough to say Captain Pawsome seems like it will be a really good game and that most of the problems I had with the demo were entirely my own fault. 

Don't think I'm meant to be all the way up here.

Not all of them - there was a bug where I got shot into the sky and had to restart from the last autosave - and I think the Tutorial could be made a little more obvious, with maybe an "Are you sure you want to skip the tutorial?" when you blithely try to walk through the door. Also, I still don't see why the interior of the ship is made of brick...

Anyway, I've wishlisted the game. It looks like it'll be a lot of fun. 

And that concludes October's Next Fest. The overall choice wasn't great but I thoroughly enjoyed most of the demos I picked and even when I didn't I learned something useful about the games so I guess that makes the operation a success. It also made for some really enjoyable and easy-to-write posts. I hope they were amusing/informative/useful (Delete as applicable.) to read, too.

Looking forward to the next Next Fest already.

The Other Side Of Sky

I could review the demo of Sky: Children of the Light but there doesn't seem much point. It's not a new game, just new to Steam and the PC. It's been out for years on iOS, where it launched in 2019. Since then, there's been an annual conversion to a new platform, with the game coming out on Android in 2020, Switch in 2021 and PS4 last year. 

This year it's the turn of PC gamers to enjoy this "open world social indie adventure game ". I guess XBox users will have to wait until 2024. 

Anyway, it's been out for long enough that anyone who wants to know what it's about can find all the information they need easily enough. There's a lengthy Wikipedia entry and Metacritic (Where the game scores a healthy 82 from critics although only a mediocre 7.4 from players.) has links to more than enough reviews for anyone.

Even so, I might still have added my opinion to the pile if I thought I had anything of value to contribute but I don't. I played for forty-nine minutes and for the whole time I was there I never really understood what I was doing or cared very much about finding out.

The graphics are very pretty. On the running theme of whether these demos look better in game or in screenshots I'd have to say Sky looks equally impressive in both. I certainly enjoyed looking at the expressionistic scenery, although it felt more like wandering through the Rothko room at Tate Modern than travelling through an actual landscape.

There's some kind of storyline or narrative but it mostly washed over me along with all the pastels. There were stars and constellations and elders and spirits and lot of similar new age tropes. It was like being back in the early 'nineties (Which, of course, was like being back in the mid-sixties.)

The mechanics were straightforward enough although I didn't find the controls entirely comfortable. Again with "E" for Use Object? What's wrong with "F"? My index finger drifts across to F a lot more naturally than it stretches up to E but maybe that's just me.

Movement was okay but not as smooth as I'd expected. There's a common practice of game designers that I don't much like; using movement as a form of progression. It's off-putting to have to do everything clumsily and awkwardly just because you're new. I mean, it may be more realistic but what does realism have to do with any of this?

Again, I wasn't paying the instructions as much attention as I should have been but I'm fairly sure there was some kind of progression tied to flight, which is a key feature of the game. I remember my wings  levelling up a couple of times and there was an energy mechanic I never understood. I'm very much of the school that believes if you can fly in a game you should just be able to darn well fly!

The subtleties of movement were just one of the things I never got to grips with. Mostly I just brute-forced my way around, hammering the Space key repeatedly to jump over small obstacles on the ground and veering from side-to side as I leaned hard on the "A" and "D" keys in flight. 

Other than my issues getting from one place to another and not really following the plot, I didn't figure out how to use the shops or the "Shared Space", which seemed to be a form of housing. I failed to save my work there, somehow, so all my decorations whipped back into my inventory when I left.

A big part of the game is communicating non-verbally with other players but I had a certain amount of trouble working out who were players and who were NPCs. I did eventually manage to swap candles with someone or whatever it is you do but I had no idea what it meant. It certainly didn't create any feelings of togetherness, just a sense of mild confusion.

As with the Moomin game, I'm happy to have had the chance to try Sky: Children of Light, if only to discover that it's not a game I'm likely to enjoy. My feelings about it are quite similar - it's probably very good for someone but that someone isn't me. As Sheldon Cooper might say, I'm not a hippy.

Above all, while playing both games I found myself thinking "Why am I doing this?" Neither of them were sufficiently tactile to be fun to play for the sheer exhillaration of the experience; neither had a compelling storyline; both had mechanics that felt awkward and repetitive. 

I realise I've played a lot of games over the years and enjoyed many a lot more than this, even though they were objectively much worse. I do wonder sometimes if perhaps I'm just beginning to experience a kind of gamer's ennui. There might be only so many times you can go to the well and hope to draw fresh water.

Then again, I didn't have the same concerns in any of the other demos this time around so perhaps it's just that these two games aren't that great. A lot of contributors to this reddit thread seem to think that's true of Sky.

I don't think I'll de-wishlist Sky. It is free to play after all so it's not like there's money to worry about. De-wishlisting seems kind of rude, anyway. I haven't removed Snufkin yet even though I said I was going to. It feels a bit harsh, somehow.

Still, I don't think there's any real chance I'll play either of them again, free or not.

Shrouded In Familiarity

Three down, three to go. Next up: Enshrouded.

I hadn't heard of Enshrouded before this week but clearly I'm out of the loop because it was - and still is, at time of writing - top of all three of Steam's Next Fest lists: "Trending Upcoming", "Most Wishlisted" and perhaps most importantly of all, "Daily Active Demo Players".

It's not hard to see why. Firstly, it's coming from a developer with a pedigree. Keen Games is the company that gave you Portal Knights. With a Very Positive rating on Steam (Although only a mediocre 71 rating on Metacritic) it's a well-known and successful title across several platforms.

The game begins with you waking up
in what looks disturbingly like a large oven.

Secondly and probably more significantly it's an obvious hybrid of Valheim and New World with the "punishing" bosses from Dark Souls thrown in for good measure. The developers themselves cite Valheim and Zelda as influences. Something for pretty much everyone, then.

The demo is time-limited to eight hours, which PC Gamer's reviewer thought was insufficient. I agree and also disagree. It's too short to make any real progress but paradoxically far longer than anyone needs for a demo. 

If you've played any of these kinds of games before, you can tell if a new one is worth wishlisting after no more than  a few minutes. They're basically all the same game with a different skin so it just comes down to whether you like the way it looks and whether it plays smoothly enough for your patience level.

I lasted an hour but not because I wasn't enjoying myself. I definitely was. I've played enough of these survive-explore-craft-build guided sandboxes now to know that it takes dozens if not hundreds of hours to get anywhere. Putting a lot of effort into an eight-hour demo would be the very definition of a waste of time.

Also, I wasn't really making much progress, anyway. Mostly I was finding new ways to kill myself.

In the sixty-four minutes I played I managed to die four times:

• Jumped off cliff to see if there was falling damage. There was.
• Jumped off a barricade to fight a mob that turned out to be two levels higher than me. Took damage from falling and then the mob finished me off.
  
• Tried to power through a fight with another higher-level mob. We both died on the final hit.
• Tried to jump over a barrier blocking a bridge over a ravine. Landed on the wooden spar I was aiming at, which turned out not to have collision. Fell to my death. Again.

You leave a corpse when you die and much of your inventory stays with it until you go pick it up. I couldn't be bothered with that so every death was pretty much a restart. After four of them I took the hint and quit. 

Wheeeeeee!

Leaving those Souls-like bosses to one side, Enshrouded looks to be towards the more easy-going end of the survival spectrum. Gathering is instantaneous, mobs drop weapons and there are tools lying around so you don't have to start out punching everything. There's no starving to death or dying of thirst. 

Food and drink are more like buffs than essentials. You can sleep safely in a bed in an abandoned tent until you build a shelter, which was something I never managed to do, anyway. 

That's a lot of mats for the first thing you have to make.

That was because to claim a building plot you first have to craft a Flame Altar. I couldn't find all the necessary materials and I kept losing the ones I did have every time I died. Crafting the altar to secure your foothold in the world is pretty much the first thing the game asks you to do so I'm sure it's not meant to be as hard as I made it. I was probably just looking in the wrong place for Resin and Shroud Liquid.

Ah, yes, the Shroud. It's what gives the game its name. It's a blight that's spreading across the land and it's everywhere, even at the start. It makes itself known in a number of ways - giant, glowing fungi, thick mists clinging in the hollows, a choking miasma that will kill you if you breath it for too long. 

"Too long" is five minutes. There's a timer. Again, nothing much seems to happen while it's ticking down. I don't know what happens when it hits zero. I never let it get that far. Five minutes was plenty for me to do whatever it was I needed to do - open a chest, read a book, find a way through the fog to cleaner air. 

Any of this sounding familiar to you?

The shrouded areas are very atmospheric. Visibility is occluded but you can see well enough to pick your path through the mushroom clusters. It's possible to extend the time you can stay in the Shroud. I found an hourglass on a table that does exactly that. It's a consumable so I'm guessing at some point you can craft something similar to stay in the Shroud for as long as you need.

The similarities with New World, which seem quite obvious, come in the look of the world itself, with its brooding towers, dilapidated bridges and deep, barely-explored forests but also in the way the lore is presented by way of books, letters and diaries found lying open on tables in deserted camps. With the absence of towns and NPCs, at least at the start, it reminded me of the earlier New World builds, when Amazon thought they were making a survival game not an MMO. 

That's where I'm going to build my house. Not like I get a choice.

Given the attention its already getting and the very viable state of this relatively early build, I'd say we're going to be hearing a lot more about Enshrouded. I haven't added it to my wishlist yet but only because I'm not in the market for another survival game while I still have Dawnlands on simmer and Valheim on the back burner. 

I'll keep Enshrouded in mind for when and if any of that changes. The idea of intentionally difficult boss encounters is a turn-off for me but apart from that it looks like another eminently playable and enjoyable variation on what is fast becoming a well-defined genre all of its own.