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https://bhagpuss.blogspot.com/
This was going to be a Grab Bag post but the first item ran away with me so now it's just a review of a movie that came out a year ago. And not even a proper review at that. It's the Superman movie I'm talking about. I posted about it several times in 2025 but I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts and link them. No-one would click through anyway, so what would be the point? I mean, hell, what are the Labels for, if not for anyone to find stuff, if they're interested? Not to mention the very efficient search function. Anyone ever use that? No. Thought not. Ahem. So, Superman... I said before the movie came out last summer that I'd probably go see it at the cinema. I was hyped for it after the excellent trailers. Well, that didn't happen. So then I said I'd put the DVD on my Birthday/Christmas wishlist. I did and I got it and I still didn't watch it because apparently owning a movie on DVD is exactly the same, psychologically at least, as watching it. Either before or after I got my own hard copy, the movie turned up on one of the streaming services I subscribe to and I didn't even watch it then. Often I do end up streaming things I own on DVD, sometimes things I've owned for years and never gotten around to watching, because it's just easier that way, isn't it? But I didn't stream Superman. We got to 2026 and I still hadn't seen it and all the Supergirl trailers started rolling up and they looked even better than the Superman ones and we got closer and closer to the release date (Which is June 26, I just checked. I knew it was this month.) and I made a " firm decision " to go see that one in the cinema, for real this time, which made me think I probably ought to get around to watching the first one, since they kind of fit together somehow. And I probably still wouldn't have done anything about it, had Redbeard not felt the need to post about the rotunda at the Cincinatti Museum Center and to include in that post a clip of a scene from the Superman movie and that was what finally tipped me over the edge. Sidebar: Material to my decision to watch the movie, I should say that, following the death of my mother earlier this year at the age of 93, we've acquired a very good 4K Sony TV. I was left " the chattels " in my mother's will, one of which this was. " Chattels " means literally everything in the house except the house itself, which has to be sold and the proceeds split 50/50 with my step-brother, although now we're getting into too much detail for a post about the Superman movie, I think. My mother came up with the chattels thing because a few years back, when her sister died at the age of, I think, 91, she left my mother her chattels, none of which my mother wanted or kept, except for a copper bedpan, which is now in our house but which I believe may have come from my aunt originally. Why we have it? That you'd need to ask Mrs Bhagpuss. I seem to have drifted a long way from the Superman movie. I only mentioned the TV because the arrival of an actually good set in this house for the first time in at least twenty-five years has led directly to me going downstairs and sitting on the sofa for the specific purpose of watching things. (We live almost entirely upstairs for what are, I'm sure, perfectly good reasons, if I could remember them.). That's how I came to watch The Burroughs , the first seven episodes at least, and having watched the final episode on the laptop I can say with certainty that it does, in fact, make a big difference, watching it on a big screen, after all, something I never really believed before. Not that I watched The Burroughs in in 4K. It was in HD on the TV and the laptop because you have to pay Netflix more money for 4K and I never have yet and don't have any plans to start. HD seems like more than enough detail to me, anyway, at least on a screen as good as this one. Probably on a better laptop than mine it would, too. And that's eight paragraphs without a single word about the movie itself so here's my tl:dr for the rest of the post in case you're feeling like you've already put in the work: It was great! I loved it! Four stars (Out of five). Maybe not a classic but definitely a must-see. As good as I was hoping and better than I expected. Best Superman movie I've seen and I haven't seen them all. Which is a bit surprising, really, even to me. Why haven't I seen them all? Let me think. I saw the first, with Christopher Reeve , on release at the cinema. The best thing about it was that it was Superman ! In the cinema! Hard to imagine what a total novelty that was at the time. I saw the second in the cinema too but the third and fourth only on TV. They went downhill a bit but they were not untrue to some of the comics. Just mostly not true to the good ones. Then there was a big gap until Superman Returns , which I'm pretty sure I've never seen anywhere, so I should probably do something about that, and next there was Man of Steel , for which I returned to the cinema to catch it on release although why I thought it was worth the effort escapes me now. Clearly I didn't think enough of it to bother with the follow-up, the awkwardly-titled Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which I may or may not own on DVD ( I genuinely don't know if I do or not.) but have definitely never watched. Is it technically even a Superman movie, though? I mean Batman's name comes first... So, I've seen six of the eight Superman movies and the latest one is the best by a wide margin. Best for a DC fan, that is. Maybe not for a general audience. Probably can't beat the first one for that. Or maybe you even need to be a long-time fan for this one. I know the Snyder movies were fan favorites with some fans but then I believe there's a cadre with a much deeper belief in Zack Snyder 's vision for the franchise than I've ever had. I bet every one of them is at least a couple of decades younger than me, too. Apart from having a coherent plot for a change and the acting being excellent throughout, neither of which can be said about all, or even most, of its predecessors, Superman (2025) is the one that feels most like the comics to me. It feels like it was made by a fan for other fans without ever resorting to actual fan service. One of the very best things about it is the way James Gunn gets all the backstory out of the way in a few lines of text over the opening sequence. As a lifelong superhero comics reader, I am so fed up of every superhero movie feeling it has to start by explaining who the leads are, how they got their powers, what their powers are - all that basic stuff that surely to God anyone who cared enough to buy a ticket already knows. I mean, if you watch a sports movie, they don't generally begin by telling you how the game got started and explaining all the rules... If that's good, though, the way the movie pretty much never stops to explain who anyone is is even better. It's just so refreshing. All the nods and winks to the at least half a century of comics' history are there, in profusion, for anyone who wants them but if you don't know, you don't need to know and neither the writers nor the director is going to tell you. As a longtime fan of the Daily Planet newsroom as much as I am of Superman, I was stoked to see not just Lois, Jimmy and Perry but also Steve Lombard and Cat Grant . And they were just working there, saying things people say when they work in an office together. Just so good to see and hear. There was one more Planet staffer I didn't pick up on, too, although I thought maybe I remembered him from the Eliot S Maggin days. I just looked him up and it was Ron Troupe , a character who actually wasn't introduced until the early '90s, by when i think Maggin had moved on and just around when I was slowly drifting out of the fandom myself. But I do remember Ron now I'm reminded and I did know I knew him when I watched the movie, even if I couldn't quite remember who he was, so that's exactly the kind of rich textuality I'm talking about. It's always interesting to watch the various interpretations of Lois and Jimmy. Lois Lane seems to be an almost indestructible character. I've seen more versions of her than I can remember and I can't think of a bad one. She's always well-cast, all the actors who play her look like the woman in the comics and she's almost always written as a competent, skilled, professional with a sharp wit and a fast mind. It must be a popular part to get, I'd think. This Lois, though, also felt likeable, which is by no means one of the character's core traits. Some Loises have been stinkers. I prefer a softer Lois to a harder one but I'd have to admit the hard ones are probably closer to the four-color archetype. Speaking of colors, what is with it Jimmy's hair? Why is it almost never ginger in the movies the way it always is on the page? I mean, Lois and Clark never go blond, do they? So why does Jimmy so often have nondescript brownish hair on screen? Or at least that's what I was thinking this time, until that scene near the end, when they all run up to the roof of the Planet building so Lois can fly them away in Mr Terrific 's ship (Don't ask...) and the sun hits Jimmy's hair and you can clearly see the auburn tint. So he is a redhead after all! Jimmy doesn't have a big role but he still manages to give a really good impression of the kind of bumptious, chance-taking personality that got him his own comic all those years. He sees trouble and he runs straight at it. And in this case the trouble is Lex Luthor 's girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (A great call-back to the first run of movies.) who, impossibly and yet somehow inevitably, turns out to be seeing Jimmy on the side, something that would totally happen in Jimmy's comic, if nowhere else in the universe. Gunn appears to know these characters and their history so much better than most Hollywood people who've had the use of them in the past. They said he'd be a safe pair of hands and on this evidence, they were right. Talking of Lex... this is probably the most evil version I've seen on screen. Usually he has at least one redeeming feature. Sometimes he's positively sympathetic. Not here. Here, he's a sociopathic, sadistic megalomanic with a very, very thin skin and absolutely no tolerance for personal criticism. Putting this Lex up there on screen is making a statement. He's code for... well, we all know what and who he's code for, I'm sure. When Krypto throws him around like a chew-toy at the end, I bet half the audience is cheering. I was laughing too hard or I would have been, too. Obviously, Krypto is great. He steals every scene he's in. How much of it is dog acting and how much CGI is hard to say and also I could not care less. I just want more of his antics. Looking forward to much more Krypto in Supergirl. As she says in her cameo at the very end, he is her dog, after all. And finally, in what appears to have turned into a round-up of the characters rather than an actual review, there's The Justice Gang (Not their real name...) That was an unexpected pleasure, especially since it's three characters I either know little about or wish I didn't. Hawkgirl is severely underused but she really makes the most of her few scenes. Her deadpan tone and expression are devastatingly effective. The bit where she demonstrates just exactly how much not like Superman she is was sheer joy, even if I knew it was coming from the moment the fool she was carrying opened his mouth to taunt her. Mr Terrific , a character I've barely even noticed in the comics, was so central to the plot he could have demanded co-star billing. Again, he was deadpan as hell and it worked beautifully. The movie as a whole does a great job of balancing action, pathos and humor, which I guess is James Gunn's super-power. I know it's not going to work for everyone but it's right on the money for me. And finally, Guy Gardner . I would have said it was impossible to put a version of that character on screen that would both be true to the original but wouldn't alienate most of the audience - but they did it. Just about. They have softened him up some. The movie Guy is a lot less stupid, arrogant and abrasive than the one in the comics I read. He comes across as blunt and abrupt, a bit like Batman probably would if he wasn't so keen on presenting as cool and mysterious although, unlike Batman, he does have a noticeable sense of humor, albeit not a very sophisticated one. On the plus side, this Guy did seem like he was at least competent and willing to compromise, two things no-one ever accused the Guy Gardner in the comics of being. Anyway, so, I liked it. A lot. And apparently I have nothing meaningful to say about it beyond that. So I'll stop. Let's come back in a few weeks and do this all over again. For Supergirl next time.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
9 hours ago
I'm almost embarrassed to post this after last time but if I'm going to be straight about it, I'm more embarrassed about how much I wanted to post about it yesterday evening, right after it happened. It's how they get you, isn't it? Hah! Well, Hotta ! You may have got me but you didn't get my money! Not sure why I'm crowing about not having paid the company that's given me so much great entertainment this last month. It's not exactly putting it to the man, is it? More like stiffing the waitress on her tip. Sidebar: Do we still say " waitress " any more or is it like " actor " now, where the old, male-gendered version becomes the new, non-gendered preference? Although I have noticed " actress " coming back a little of late and doesn't universalizing the masculine to replace the feminine bring problems of its own, anyway? Then again, there's the way officers of all genders are addressed as "Sir" in the military and how Nanally calls Daffodil " Master " in the game... This stuff is just weird, sometimes. I can see why people try to use completely ungendered terms like " Chair ", awkward though they sound. I have seen " wait staff " used instead of waiter and waitress but that's clunky and awkward and anyway " staff " itself was superseded by " colleague " a good while back, at least where I work, although that never really stuck either. This is what you come here for, isn't it? This sort of acute social insight. Admit it! Also Sidebar: I really like these sidebars I've invented. I think there might be a lot more of them coming, at least until I get bored and lose interest. Can we please get on with the post now? Ok, getting back to the point, yes, I rolled on Lacrimosa as soon as the opportunity arrived and yes, I won her with the handful of Solid Dice I had left. I was unfeasibly pleased with myself, too, considering I had no control over anything that happened. Still, they do say you make your own luck. Whoever " they " are. Lacrimosa is the featured character in the new banner that came with the big update yesterday. It has a version number - 1.1 - but also a nice, catchy name: Dreamwalk Corridor . The full details are here but the highlights are a new playable character (Lacrimosa, of course.) plus associated glider skins and outfit (" Sold seperately ", as it would say in tiny print at the end of the commercial if Lacrimosa was a Barbie , which, come on, let's face it, she is.) and a new chapter in the MSQ, which takes place in a new location, Sunward Island . And a ton of other stuff, which you can read for yourself at that link above. The new storyline and location I'll get to in another post but I will say I just started it and it's very good so far. This post isn't about that, though. It's just me, gloating explaining how I came to add Lacrimosa to my team, what she brings to it and what the implications are. First of all, the mechanics involved in rolling for a new character. I explained some of it last time but I'm learning as I go and they're peculiarly over-complicated compared to other gacha games I've played. What I've been used to until now is a fairly simple system, where you accumulate a specific currency then spend it on " pulls " that play a flashy animation and then reveal what you've won. You can suppress the animation when you're bored of seeing it and just spend the currency for an instant result if you prefer. For some reason, Hotta decided to gamify that a little by replacing the animation with a full 3D representation of a board game and showing an actual six-sided die rolling for each pull. The currency itself is literally dice - Solid for the board where you win the good stuff in the Limited Banners (That's " Limited " as in " time-limited ", meaning they come and go.) and Fabricated for the permanent banner, where the regular characters are. When you roll a dice, your little figure moves along the board that number of spaces, exactly as if you were playing any traditional board game. Every space has something on it so you always get a reward. Most of them are just upgrade materials but there are some decent odds and ends there as well as the Big Ticket Prize you're after. There are no squares where anything bad happens so you can't actually lose. You just win a lot of things you probably don't really want. The huge difference between this system and all the ones I've seen in other gacha games is that you can see the S-Class character you're after, right there on the board. As far as I can tell, there's absolutely nothing you can do to influence the route you take towards them. There's no skill involved, purely the luck of the dice, but as in any board game, merely being able to see the layout adds a huge amount of interest to every roll, something that doesn't figure at all in the lucky dip pulls of other games. The whole " it's a game " aspect is enhanced by things that happen on certain squares, like bridges that pop up and let you change direction or skip whole sections of the board. Again, there's no way you can control any of this. There's no tactic you can use to improve your chances, but neither is there in Snakes and Ladders and people still play it like there is. That's psychology for you. Every roll costs, naturally. That's how Hotta makes its money. Well, one of the ways. But you can have a few rolls for nothing because it wouldn't be much of a Free To Play game if you couldn't. You can get a small number of Solid Dice and large number of Fabricated Dice for free by playing the game. I noted in my post about winning Hotori that I had a dozen Solid Dice back then. It took me just five pulls to win her and I haven't used any since, so when I came to roll on Lacrimosa I had seven Solid Dice left. It took me around twenty pulls to win Lacrimosa and now I have one Solid Dice left. Wait? What? That's not right! Does mathematics work differently in Hethereau or something? Nope. Let me explain because I had no idea about any of this until I did it, either. This is how it went: I decided I'd roll five of my seven Solid Dice because five is my favorite number and I don't like to go down to zero. I threw my five dice with no luck so... no, wait, actually that's not entirely true. I got an S-Class... something. I took a screenshot: That looks like I won a car, doesn't it? After everything else was over, I remembered I'd seen this come up so I searched my bags for whatever it was but I couldn't find anything. Vehicles are an actual token that sits in your inventory and there wasn't a new one. I went through every tab, item by item. Nothing. I have no clue what I'm supposed to have won, if anything. It also has nothing to do with the Porsche collab that's happening in the game right now as far as I can tell. If I hadn't taken the screenshot, I'd have assumed I imagined it. That aside, I hadn't won anything and I had just two Solid Dice left. I was going to stop but then I noticed an option to buy ten rolls for just one Solid Dice and about 1400 of some other currency. Hmm. There are quite a few currencies in the game already (I'm sure there will be more soon, too. There always are.) and I haven't paid much attention to any of them. I didn't recognize this one but I had a look and I had about 10,000 of them. It's called " Analith ", which Gemini tells me is " The game's free premium currency, which can be farmed through open-world gameplay, achievements, and City Tycoon modes, and can be converted into limited Solid Dice. " I probably should have known that. Ten rolls for not much more then 10% of my stash seemed like a good deal so I took it. I didn't win anything good. That left me with one Solid Die. Well, what can you do with just one? So I took another ten. The Analith charge went up a little but it left me with about 7k of the stuff so that seemed okay. And on the fourth or fifth roll I got her. Winning was unreasonably satisfying but the run-up to winning was even more unreasonably exciting. Thanks to the board game conceit, I could see my little character token getting closer and closer to the square where Lacrimosa was waiting. When I got within a single dice-roll of her it was exactly like rolling in an actual board game. You know how many you need and you're willing the dice to land right-side up. And it did. I forget what I needed to roll. I think it might have been four. Whatever it was, I got it and with it, Lacrimosa. I still had five or six rolls left from the ten I'd bought so I used them as well. I don't think there's a way to save them for later. How much it cost me to win Lacrimosa depends how you're counting. I had seven Solid Dice and I used all of them so she cost me seven Solid Dice. That's clear. She also cost me something like three thousand Analith on top of that. And it took about twenty rolls to land on her. I didn't keep an exact count. As for real money, it cost me none at all. I also won another Adler , which is useful because duplicates let you do some upgrading of the original, and Edward , who I wanted. I like Edward as a character and he's a healer, which I didn't have on my team yet (And haven't figured out how to use, either.) All in all, a very successful Limited Banner for me. I'm now two-for-two. Can't beat that. And since there's always a few weeks between banners, I ought to have enough Solid Dice for a few more rolls next time. If I'm sensible, I'll save them all for when Akane arrives, which everyone assumes she will at some point. Everyone wants Akane. I don't think there's anyone I want more, now I have Hotori and Lacrimosa and I have the unopened box that would let me choose Sakiri . All of which brings me to the issue of what to do with Lacrimosa now I have her. You can only have four characters in a team but you can set up multiple teams and swap between them out of combat whenever you like. I immediately made a team featuring my character, Flora The Appraiser , Lacrimosa, Edward and Aurelia , who I have but had never used. Then I got into a fight with an anomaly my regular team could handle in their sleep and although we beat it we all ended up half health except for Aurelia, who was dead. This is the problem. If you get new characters and want to use them, you have to level them up and Ascend them and get them the right weapons and all that nonsense. That's how you end up having no upgrade mats or money instead of having far more of both than you know what to do with. And then you might consider spending some real money to get out of that hole and once again, that's how they get you! Except that in Neverness to Everness there are plenty of good reasons to have lots of characters even if they're all still Level 1. I might do a whole post about this because it certainly deserves one but the short version is that every character has at least one special ability that can be used out of combat. Hotori, as I mentioned in the previous post, can literally stop time. Nanally can run up walls. And Lacrimosa can fly. Okay, she can't fly very well. She turns into a cute but rather pathetic bat and kind of bobbles about. It's not hugely practical. If she moves in bat form it uses stamina, too, so it's of limited value as a means of transport. If she doesn't move, though, she can hang in the air indefinitely, which is interesting and possibly useful. She can also shoot out the tires of vehicles with her other out-of-combat ability but I'll save any more details for that other post, if I ever get round to it. If anyone wants to get ahead on that, here's where I found out about it all. . After the disastrous fight, I took time out to get Lacrimosa up to the level of the rest of my regular team. I'm thinking about whether to level up Edward but until I know how to get his healing into play I'll hold back on that. As for Aurelia, I think she's going to stay on the bench, for now anyway. Another question is whether I want to start schmoozing Lacrimosa so she can come live in my apartment. I haven't really done much with the Affection system yet but I'm mildly interested in it. There are some attractive perks to be had there. Before any of that, though, there's a mystery to investigate on Sunward Island. And let me just say right now, I did not trust that teddy bear from the moment I saw him. I literally said so, out loud. But all that's for another time and another post. You have to pace yourself, don't you?
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 day ago
In a vain attempt to prevent this blog from turning into All Neverness To Everness ! All Day! Every Day!, something it could so very easily become, seeing as how I have so many ideas for posts - posts about what I'm doing in the game, what I'm thinking about the game, what the hell is going on in the game (Big mystery there and I don't mean the plot because - erm - what plot?), I thought I'd post about a TV show I just watched instead. And for once it's something current! Not an old show from the nineties I finally got around to catching up with or even something from five or ten years ago. No, I actually watched a new show on Netflix while it was in the Top Ten. It was at #1 for a short while in the UK so I guess at least a few people reading this might have seen it too. If that's you, feel free to carry on. If not, you might want to know up front that the whole of the rest of this post is going to be SPOILER CITY!! Ah, yes. Spoilers aaall the way down from here on. At least I didn't use that flashing gif for the warning this time. That can be really annoying. Okay, that's probably given everyone who wants to leave enough time to skedaddle. On with the post... Didn't mention the name of the show yet, did I? It's The Boroughs . Let's see if I can do a quick precis of the premis: A bunch of old, rich people settle down to enjoy their golden years in a full-service, luxury retirement village somewhere in the desert only to find creepy monsters are sneaking into their condos at night and sucking out their brain juice. Shenanigans ensue. Yeah, that about covers it but I left out the immortality, the sociopaths and the sentiment. Stir those in and you're good. So, what actually happens is grieving widower, Sam. ( Alfred Molina . Excellent.) gets dropped off at his new condo that his dead wife insisted they get before she died. (I'd say " obviously " but actually it's not so obvious as all that, as it turns out, since she keeps turning up after she's dead. In dreams. On the TV. In the kitchen.) Sam does not want to be there but if he leaves he loses all the money he put into buying the place. Or renting it. Or however it works. It's never explained, just like nothing in the whole damn show is ever explained. All he wants to do is get out of the contract and leave but he'd lose all his money (Seems unlikely but there it is.) so he's stuck with it. Until he has the great good luck to be attacked in his own home and lightly stabbed by the previous occupant, Edward ( Ed Begley Jr . Great as always but wasted in a such a small role.) Despite being offered all his money back if he'll just keep quiet and leave, the grumpy old git has started to make friends so he decides to stay. Bad idea. The very next day he finds one of his friends ( Bill Pullman , good but brief.) dead of a heart attack because a nightmarish creature has been visiting him in the night and sucking out his cerebral fluid. Unsurprisingly, no-one believes this. More fools them. They'll learn. I won't rehash the entire plot, although I could because I can remember it all, something that suggests it was quite vivid. It was that, alright. It just wasn't coherent, believable, convincing or sane. None of those. It was fun, though, which is the most important one. The whole show is fun. It's so high-concept you could sky-dive off it. If you did, it'd be a bad idea to stop and think about it on the way down because you'd be none the wiser when you hit bottom and you'd have missed the great view. If you're the kind of person who likes things to make sense or be explained then you might not have such a good time with it as I did. I don't always mind if things don't make sense so long as I'm having a good time. It's like riding a roller-coaster (Not that I like those. I do not like those.). It doesn't matter how the car stays on the tracks so long as it does. A thrill ride is a thrill ride so long as you don't come off at the corners and The Boroughs always manages to make those tight turns, somehow. A lot of that is down to the cast. It's an impressive line-up. If you wanted to get a bunch of old people together for a TV show, you could do a lot worse than this. As well as the aforementioned Molina and Begley and Pullman you get Geena Davis , who does not look even close to being old enough to be in a retirement village. (I just looked her up and she's two years older than me. She looks twenty years younger in this and I look good for my age, let me tell you!) You also get Alfre Woodard, Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters and a bunch of other people you absolutely will know from big shows and successful movies. These people know what they're doing and watching them do it is probably enough reason in itself to go with it but the script is pretty good, too. It doesn't have a whole lot of zingy one-liners but it's frequently wryly amusing and rarely feels awkward, which is quite the achievement if you stop to think about some of the things these people are doing, which honestly you really should not, not if you want to stay in the story. Some good meta bits, too, like the whole Thelma and Louise riff the writers have going on for a while. Not that any of that makes a whole lot of sense but then what does? This post could so easily become one long litany of " Well, that wouldn't happen... " because even if you accept spider-like monsters that come out of your microwave oven at night to suck out your spinal-cerebral fluids through your open mouth as you sleep then go back to pump it into their mother-monster, who's being farmed by hundred year-old psychopaths for her blood because it makes them immortal, then The Boroughs is still hard to believe because of the way every single person deals with it when they find out. It's like they think they're in a TV show or something! I mean, for one thing these people aren't prisoners. Okay, yes, eventually they are prisoners but not for most of the run of the show, they're not. They have cars and phones and families in the world beyond the gates. You're not telling me they don't go on vacation or on trips. They're clearly all pretty damn rich. They can leave if they want. We actually see one of them drive in and out and wave to the guard several times. It's only much later, when everything's already gone to hell, that they're trapped inside. If you found out there were brain-sucking monsters in tunnels under your condo, monsters that were coming into your bedroom while you slept, sticking their feeder tentacles down your throat, making holes in you that can still be seen the next day if you just shine a light down there and look, would you stay another night to see if it happens again? I bloody wouldn't! Of course, if anyone ever behaved rationally or logically in any supernatural horror show, there would be no supernatural horror shows. Just a lot of aerial shots of jammed roads as everyone tries to leave town at once. This is a supernatural horror show, in case that wasn't immediately obvious. It's from the same stable as Stranger Things . Well, the next stable along, maybe. The Duffer Brothers had something to do with it, anyway, although I suspect it may not have been that much. They're listed as " Executive Producers ", which means nothing. Netflix is keen you should know the show bears their imprimatur all the same, obviously hoping that'll be enough to grab your interest. It works, too. That's how I came to start watching. But The Boroughs is nothing like Stranger Things. Except when it kind of is, which now I come to think about it, is quite often, really, what with all the tunnels and monsters and men in suits stepping out of big, black cars... The pacing, though. That could not possibly be any more different. The Boroughs positively zips along. As soon as anyone has any kind of idea or plan they're on it the very next minute. No discussions. no arguments. No making diagrams or taking notes. Straight to the execution. Events and even set pieces that would have filled a whole episode of Stranger Things barely manage a couple of scenes. Oddly, it doesn't make things feel rushed, probably because what's been left out is all that character stuff Stranger Things was so big on. Those countless hours when what we mostly got to see was people getting to know each other. Slowly. The Boroughs has none of that. It takes everyone two days, max, before they're best buds. Partly it's crisis bonding but mostly it's because there's no time for anything longer. They're old! They don't have much time left! Everyone's painfully aware of their own mortality, evil immortals included, which is ironic, isn't it? As for our heroes, it's a bit rich considering how fit, healthy and good-looking they all are compared to actual old people but then the definition of " old " in the show is hazy anyway. Wally reveals he's only 62 at one point, not even state retirement age where I live, let alone where the show's set. That looks like it might be Nevada. Where the atom tests were, which might explain the monsters, although it could also just be me, trying to retrofit some kind of origin story onto the whole affair since the writers can't be bothered to come up with one. Wally does have terminal cancer though so, yeah, mortality is knocking harder for him than the rest, even if the years aren't. They all make friends fast because they have to get in there quick before one of them dies, I guess. They do go on about it a lot, that's for sure. And they need to get on with it, too, whatever they're thinking, because friend-bonding is what this show is all about. That and romantic love, which apparently saves some people and damns others. You may remember me citing sentiment as a big factor in the show, up there at the top of the post. The entire motivation behind the insane enterprise that is The Boroughs can be summed up in five words: We Did It For Love. Well, one of the two big bads Did It For Love, anyway: Blaine. (Played by Seth Numrich . Numb, scary, nuanced, good.) He just wants to make everything perfect for his beloved wife. Forever. At any cost. Sideabar: Blaine? Really? He was supposedly an adult in the 1950s. Who was called Blaine in the '30s? Did the name " Blaine " even exist before the 1980s, when it became Hollywood code for " slick, rich, guy who looks cool but everyone knows is hollow inside "? Which is what he is, I guess. So, fair. (Also, edit for truth, I looked it up and Blaine was popular in the 19th century. Peak year for babies called Blaine: 1884 . My bad but don't say you never learn anything on this blog.) His wife, Annelise, ( Alice Kremelberg. Plays her like a robot, presumably intentionally but it's hard to be sure.) never gets enough lines for us to work out what the hell she's in it for. She gets to be really, disturbingly, Evil with a capital E. Cartoon evil, that is. She makes as much of the part as she can but she's never playing anything you could call a real person. She's like the wicked witch in a Disney movie. Her polio backstory that's presumably supposed to explain her fear and need is so under-sold you could miss it if you were eating popcorn when it's revealed, which you very well might be because this is a total popcorn show. And even if you're paying attention, it explains nothing about her pathological cruelty. Was she like that before? Did her pain turn her evil? Was it the alien blood? Who fucking knows? Not me. And not the writers, either, apparently. Where The Boroughs is like Stranger Things is in the whole chosen family thing. Most of these people have an actual family outside the Boroughs - children and grandchildren that they occasionally mention - but we only ever get to see Sam's daughter ( Jena Malone . Excellent and underused) and her annoying husband (And very briefly, at the end, their children, who don't get anything much to do or say.) There's occasionally some talk about family but as in Hawkins , in The Boroughs your family ends up being the people who'll fight monsters with you. If you're related to them by blood, great, but it's by no means obligatory. There's a good deal of front-loaded irony, what with time running out for the good guys because they're doing the right thing ideal butting up against the immortals being really, really evil and possibly getting to live forever. Some people waver and try to fudge or even change sides but it's the kind of show where you always know who the good guys and the bad guys are. Sometimes they wobble on the line but they never fall over it. Not to mention the ever-popular " But who were the real monsters, anyway? " It makes the whole thing kind of heart-warming. Everyone who isn't an out-and-out villain is kinda-sorta nice. There's a bit of the grumpy old geezer thing going on but under the crusty exterior or the selfish spend-it-while-you-still-got-it indulgence, you know there's always a good heart. The villains are far more underwritten but it makes some of them quite interesting for the space that leaves. I'd have liked to know more about the woman who shows new arrivals around the homes or the doctor who manages Mother. And especially the Police Chief, who looks confusingly like a fatter, slobbier David Harbour playing Stranger Things' Hopper 's evil cousin. He gets a weird moment near the end that almost humanizes him, which is very odd. I could have done with a little more of that. Mostly, though, everything wraps up very neatly in eight episodes, so long as you're happy to accept that absolutely nothing about any of it is ever going to be explained to anyone's satisfaction, yours or the cast's. (What are the monsters? Where did they come from? How did Blaine find out what they could do? What was that peach all about? And that weird goo bath? Why do old cathode ray TV sets have such a devastating effect on the immortals and why not the same effect on all of them? How could those tunnels have possibly been constructed without hundreds of people knowing? And on and on and on...) You'd think it was a mini-series, never intended to continue, except... Oh, yes. Except. There's always that one hook, right at the end in every mini-series, isn't there? just in case it goes really well and they want to come back for an encore. In this one it happens just before the final credits, when Sam's image glitches in the mirror. And that final shot, too, the one where it looks like the stars go out. That's a door being left open. I hope there is another season. And if there is, I hope it doesn't explain anything any more clearly more than the first. Mysteries are intriguing but solutions are often disappointing. Leave it all out there in the desert. With the dead crows.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
2 days ago
When the promo videos for Neverness To Everness started popping up a year, two years ago, it looked like nothing I'd seen before. I couldn't entirely figure out what the game even was. I just knew it was cool and I wanted it. Then it arrived and it was as amazing as I'd hoped it would, juste not exactly what I'd imagined. It felt a lot more relaxed, laid-back and less intense and it had the most remarkably detailed representation of an actual city I'd ever encountered in any video game. Hethereau isn't just a few detailed areas amid some spectacular buildings for a backdrop. It's a completely convincing urban environment with districts and suburbs and parks and commercial residential districts and a full transport infrastructure that actually works. In many ways, in numerous locations, it reminds me quite specifically of actual cities I've visited and stayed in. I thought that would make it the benchmark for game cities for a good while to come, always excepting GTA6 , as all video game discussions must, just now. If NTE made bank then, sure, I'd expect to see clones and copies cropping up all over but even at the highly accelerated production rates of the game mills in China and South Korea, it takes a while to build a city like Hethereau, let alone to fit a game around one. I certainly wasn't expecting to be writing about another this summer or even this year. And then Nimgimli left a link in a comment on the last post here, pointing to a video on YouTube for a game called Moon Gaze , a name entirely new to me, either in that English version or under the original Mandarin title, Wang Yue . I watched it immediately, of course. And here it is, so now you can, too. It's an " Exploration " promo so it mostly shows movement around the city. There's not much in the way of gameplay per se. Or narrative. Or anything. Looking for some context, I also watched a " Character and Scene " video and " Gameplay " trailer. The former doesn't give much away and the latter is both untranslated and also made before they completely redid the graphics, which they appear to have done to such an extent that it barely looks like the same game any more. That's why I'm only linking them, not embedding them. They may be misleading. The new graphics do look extremely impressive. They're closer to photorealism than to the rather flat, cartoony look of the previous version or even the more polished, anime-inflected style of NTE. Tianyue City looks astonishingly convincing and immersive, visually at least. I certainly wouldn't say no to a few hours exploring it, when the game releases, which presumably won't be at least until next year. There's no date set and the game is still in closed testing, in China only. Beyond that, I can't say I'm all that interested, let alone excited, by anything the developer, who goes by the unwieldy name of Guangzhou Shiyue Network Technology, has shown so far. Icy Veins seems more impressed, suggesting it might be " the most unusual gacha rpg " so far although how they figure that out beats me. Their bullet-point list of features is mostly a reiteration of what's already in NTE, except for the creature collecting, something I personally could do without, having had more than enough of it in other games by now. There's also mention of " construction and building systems ", which I admit does sound intriguing. It's apparently along the lines of what you can do in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom , although that doesn't help me any, since I've never played. Still, building options are always welcome. The problem is, regardless of the features, I don't get any sense of the vibrancy or zest that infuses everything that comes out of Hotta as they promote NTE. Everything they show just oozes individuality. For example, just take a look at this recent short, featuring Lacrimosa . It's a small work of art, hugely enjoyable even if you have no interest in playing the game. The Moon Gaze material seems bland and generic by comparison, other than the character movement of course, which is breathtakingly well-done in places. I'd love to have a go on those roller skates. It doesn't help, of course, that the only narrative content on show hasn't been translated but I get no sense there's anything happening I'd be likely to care about, anyway. And if Moon Gaze doesn't come up to snuff against Neverness To Everness, imagine how it does when you put it up against this : That's Ananta , another urban open-world RPG, developed by NetEase and Naked Rain. You may have heard of it. I didn't think I had but as usual I was wrong. If you're getting a slight sense of deja vu, it'll probably be because I wrote about Ananta last September , in a post that included that same, seven-minute video along with another, even longer. If you don't remember, I forgive you. I didn't, either. I make no apologies for embedding it again, partly because if nothing else the soundtrack is great but mostly because I've just had to re-write four paragraphs when I finally realised Ananta was not, after all, a brand new game to me that I'd just discovered. Not only had I posted about it eight months ago but at the time I had to remind myself it wasn't new to me then, either. That was the second time I'd written about it. This is the third. It's like Groundhog Day around here sometimes and I'm not Bill Murray . Tipa talks about having trouble remembering people. I can't even remember what I've posted, even when I've done it three times! Some of us need to be reminded about stuff as often as possible. I count this repetition as a public service. More than just good taste in tuneage, Ananta would appear to have strong characters with distinct personalities capable of engaging in snappy repartee while carrying some kind of interesting plot. Not to mention an intriguing backstory. And then there's that stunning megalopolis to explore. You wait decades for a proper city and then three turn up at once! Except not quite at once, I guess. NTE made it out the gate first and Ananta was supposed to be following close behind, with a projected release date of Summer 2026 but now that doesn't look like it's happening. If it was coming out in a a month or three, I'm pretty sure they'd be telling us all about it but there's been radio silence from the developer since I last wrote about the game. I pre-registered on the official website back then but I've heard not a single word since. As this report by Gamesphere suggests, that release date may have slipped into next year. If so, it's a shame but at least it means not having to make a hard choice between Ananta and NTE just yet. Yes, obviously I could play both. At once, even, in theory. But I'm having a hard enough time right now, keeping up with just the one urban open world rpg. Two might be more fun than I could handle. Also, in a more practical sense, a 2027 release date will give me time to upgrade my hardware to something capable of playing even the most demanding titles with ease. Not the best timing, perhaps, given the way the entire gaming hardware industry seems to be disappearing into the all-devouring maw of the AI leviathan but assuming there's still something left to buy later this year, I should be coming into a little money about then, so it could still be good timing for me. If not, it shouldn't matter too much. Looking at all these games, you would think you'd have to have state of the art equipment to run any of them but no, apparently not. Leaving aside my recent technical issues, which I now think may have been initiated by running NTE from an external SDD via USB, it seems even a mediocre rig can cope. How that's even possible, when you look at the graphics and the gameplay, beats me. But then, I don't need to understand it. I just need to enjoy it. And I plan to.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
4 days ago
I've been having an interesting conversation with Mailvaltar in the comments to his recent post on Neverness To Everness . I had too much I wanted to say to fit into a comment thread so I told him I'd probably spin it up into a post of my own. And then he pointed out he'd already posted something very much along the same lines five years ago, back when Genshin Impact first came out. I had a look through my back pages and it turned out so had I. It's quite hard to remember what an... er... impact that game had when it arrived. How strange and unfamiliar it seemed. In my own First Impressions piece, I said " just about everything in the game I've seen so far, is confusing ". I'd never played a game quite like it although apparently millions of players, who'd made their way through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , saw things a little differently. Breath of the Wild wasn't an MMO, of course, but then again, neither is Genshin Impact. Probably. There seem to be varying opinions on that. It was one of the things I was confused about. I'm not sure it's much clearer now. All of these games seem to live in a nebulous, undefined hinterland, somewhere in the liminal spaces of a Venn Diagram overlapping MMOs, RPGs, Visual Novels, Life Sims, Co-Op, Single Player, Open World and a bunch of other genres and playstyles. I'd say it's indisputably a genre but if it has a name anyone's agreed on, I don't know what it is. Oh, wait... yes I do! We call them Gacha Games. That's the catch-all, isn't it? Except all that's gacha about them is their main source of revenue. As a descriptor, it's about as helpful as Subscription or Free To Play. It tells you how the company stays in business but it doesn't give you much of a clue about the type of game you're going to be playing. Except it sort of does. As Mailvaltar observes, gacha games are " extremely alike mechanically...even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres. " And that's especially true of the way they handle character progression. His almost six year-old post linked above, my own from a month before and the post by Tobold that provoked it, all deal with the way Genshin Impact requires a huge amount of grinding to sustain the progress needed to keep the combat as easy as it was when you were starting out. Without that, combat can eventually get too tough for casuals like me and Tobold. As a general rule, this seems to be approximately how all the games that followed Genshin's huge commercial success roll. They also follow what's looking like a genre convention of odd, quirky, enigmatic names - Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, Noah's Heart, Wuthering Waves, Neverness To Everness. The shorthand in use for all of those is " Gacha Games ", so I suppose, by default, that is what the genre's called now. It might have made more sense to follow the gaming naming convention that gave us Roguelikes and Metroidvanias. We could have called them Genshinlikes . But we didn't. So gacha games it will have to be. And as Mailvaltar explained in very helpful detail in yesterday's post, there's a very specific way to play a gacha game if you want your characters to be capable and your progress smooth as you work your way through the storyline. You'll have to get to grips with a number of quite complex systems and then, when you've figured out what you need and how to get it, you'll have to grind your finger-tips off, killing the right mobs and doing the right quests to get the gear you want. Just as though it was EverQuest in 1999. That was enough to do for Tobold back in 2020. As he said " I'll be farming elite monsters for weeks. And I don't want to. " And who can blame him? I don't think he's played a Gacha Game since. I also noped out of Genshin Impact the moment it got hard but unlike Tobold it didn't put me off trying again. And it's as well I did because subsequent entries in the genre have been far less demanding. There have been a few barriers to progress in some of them that I've had to make some effort to clamber over but nothing like the harsh, early roadblocks of Genshin Impact. I was stuck for a while in both Noah's Heart and Wuthering Waves before I did some work to improve both my teams and my tactics but in both cases, though, it happened much later than in Genshin. It was easier to fix, too. And as Mailvaltar suggests in his most recent post, that easing continues. Neverness To Everness may be the least-demanding gacha game yet. The thing about Gacha games that I really wanted to dig into a little, though, is the apparent disconnect between content and delivery. It's a dissonance that echoes what Jack Emmert was saying about the importance of knowing your audience and the dangers of feature creep. The Gacha game studios, hearing Jack talk, must be muttering " Hold our beer... " One of the strongest drivers to engagement gacha games have is story. Right from the beginning, with Genshin Impact, the bar for storytelling was pushed through the roof. Back in 2020 I said " Genshin Impact is one of the best-written video games I've played. ", something I put down to " the tone, the very thing so few video games get right. " I said at the time I might put a whole post together about why the writing was so good but then I stopped playing because getting to see any more of it got so hard and that post never got written. The story was great but the way it was delivered sucked . Who the hell wants to grind and grind and practice and practice just sot hey can see the next episode of their favorite show? Since Genshin, that's never been quite the same problem but the underlying issue persists. The content gets ever better, which makes the hoops you need to jump through to get to it feel more and more inappropriate. And it is getting better and better. The writing in Wuthering Waves is better than I remember it being in Genshin and so is the voice acting. The animated sequences are more frequent, longer and approach cinematic quality. It's like watching high-quality anime with some awkward interruptions. My impression of Neverness To Everness so far suggests the evolution of Gacha game story content into some kind of mass media entertainment format isn't over yet. In the four chapters of the main story the game shipped with, there's barely any combat at all. What little is there presents little challenge and doesn't appear to increase in difficulty as the story moves on. Instead, there are a variety of interesting non-combat mechanics that enhance the storytelling instead of getting in its way. The " cut scenes " are longer and more sophisticated, too. It feels like playing a complex visual novel, complete with that same sense of watching a movie play out around you that sometimes leads people who like a bit more action to dismiss those games as " walking simulators ". Not to say they don't have a point. I've seen more than a few comments on reddit and YouTube from NTE fans who'd like Hotta to go the whole way and make an actual anime based on the game and I have to say that it does often seem like that might be a better use of the material. In the case of Neverness To Everness it's not only the quality of the writing, acting and storyline that's competing for attention with the Gacha revenue stream. There's also that whole Life Sim thing they have going on. It's something that hasn't been nearly as well-developed in other gacha titles I've played. Genshin had none of it that I can recall from back when I played but that was five years ago so maybe it does now. Noah's Heart had housing and affection bonds with your team but the whole game was a bit clunky and under-cooked so none of it had much impact outside of a dedicated few loyalists, of whom I was one. I don't know how common these features are in other gacha games because I haven't stuck with any long enough to find out but I can't say I remember any from the ones I've tried. In NTE you have plenty of non-combat, non-story options. You can run a business, either behind the scenes as management or out front with the customers if you want. You can be a street racer in your car, go fishing or play mah-jong. You can deliver parcels around the city or moonlight as a taxi driver. You can date, go to the movies, hold hands and hang out with your imaginary friends. You can own multiple properties, decorate them and, if you can build up sufficient bonds of affection, have your friends move in and live with you. None of this requires any fighting so the entire material grind that so upset Tobold back in the pandemic would seem to have no purchase here. It exists but you don't need to worry about it. You're not going to be punching anyone or anything. Or are you? I'm not so sure. All those characters I was talking about the other day plus all the others that will inevitably come into the game as time goes on, how will you meet and get to know them if you aren't pushing through the story? You can roll on the banners and you might be lucky but I'm a bit vague just now about how that works when it comes to interacting with the same characters in the world. I seem to have some I can team with but I can't get them to work in the cafe or come to my house. I think I might need to meet them in context before that can happen. Or maybe I've just missed something. Gacha games are ferociously complicated. In his recent post, Mailvaltar does an excellent job of explaining some of the systems I've been struggling to understand. Not that I've really been trying. I have no real interest in learning how they work. I just want to figure out the bare minimum to get by and then never think about them again. But even if I was fascinated by the complexity of it all, I think I'd struggle to keep all the details straight. There's a lot to remember. In the end, the best approach for anyone who doesn't enjoy the process is probably just to play the game and only worry about it when you get stuck. After all, if it isn't a problem, it isn't a problem, right? And a problem only becomes a problem when you can't fix it. Gacha games want you to be able to fix it. If you can't or if it looks like it'll be too much trouble, then like Tobold you might walk away and that's the one thing they really don't want you to do. Yesterday, when I uninstalled NTE, only so I could re-install it, Hotta responded with a heartfelt exit poll asking what they'd done to upset me and how they could make it better so I'd consider coming back. They already have, I suspect. They've made everything easier. In retrospect, Genshin was quite an unforgiving game, expecting high levels of both performance and compliance from an early stage. In comparison, Neverness to Everness positively welcomes slackers. So far...
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 week ago
Nobody wants another post about my computer problems so I'll keep this short. 4reelz this time! I just thought it would be worth mentioning that I'm typing this on the new machine, the one that was apparently glassed yesterday. How? Beats me. What happened was that it occurred to me I had a bunch of quite important stuff on the hard drive in the machine I was about to send to the other end of the country, stuff I might need before I got it back, so I tried to remove the hard drive so I could put it in an enclosure and copy what I needed. Only, when I went to do it, I found I couldn't get the drive out. It's super-neatly tucked away and fixed, firmly, with a couple of screws, one of which appears to be accessible only by dismantling the entire case. That would involve opening the one and only section that has a " Warranty void if opened " sticker, which seemed like it might be a bad idea, seeing as how I was about to return it under warranty. To get around it, there was even a moment when I was contemplating running cables to the drive from one PC while it was still installed in the other and trying to get into the files that way... but then I had an unusual moment of clarity and realised what a fucking stupid idea that would be and didn't do it. While I was fiddling around in the case, trying to get to the last screw, I removed the PSU, although I didn't disconnect it. I also pulled the connectors out of the hard drive but I'd also done that yesterday and it had no effect on anything then. Those, as far as I know, are the only things I did. If I was a sensible person, I'd have left it that and gone back to the replacement machine but I'm pathologically incapable of letting things lie in these situations. I can't help thinking " I wonder if... " Since it only meant plugging a couple of cables into the back, I connected the dead PC to the monitor (Via the integrated graphics port since the GPU was already in the other machine.) and powered it up, just to see what would happen. And it worked. Well, kinda. At least the monitor received a signal, which is more than I could get it to do in four hours of fiddling with it yesterday. It didn't exactly log in. It did that thing where it told me there was a problem and it was fixing it. Then it told me it couldn't fix it so it offered me a couple more options to try. I plugged in a keyboard and mouse, connected it back up to the network and after a couple more " I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave " moments it offered me some more choices, one of which was just to start Windows and see what happened. So I did. And it worked. Again, only not kinda this time. It actually, properly worked. I immediately set about changing the video drivers. That was what stopped the replacement PC sending a signal yesterday, right after I updated it to the latest GeForce drivers. I had them down as #1 suspect. I was in on the integrated graphics, though, and those are Radeon. But as it happens, I've been getting an error message about them every time I log in pretty much since I bought the machine. I assumed it was because I was using an Nvidia GPU and there was some kind of minor conflict but now it was still doing it without the card even being in the case... So I updated the Radeon drivers and the message went away. How about that? Who'd have thought? Thing must have shipped with the wrong drivers to begin with, although the ones it was using did still work. Next. I re-installed the GeForce 4060 and went to roll back the drivers to the previous ones that used to work just fine, only the roll-back option was greyed out. So I went to Nvidia's website, picked one from a month ago, before the problems started, and installed that instead. Then I went into Windows Defender and added all the individual Neverness .exe files to the whitelist and the whole folder to the Exception list just to be on the safe side. Finally, I logged into the game, just to see what would happen. It's a always a thrill ride around here, I can tell you. It was a new installation on the external SDD. I uninstalled and reinstalled yesterday, when I was trying to get it to run over there - without success, I might add - and then I played NTE for about twenty minutes. The final test came when I logged out, of course. That's when the trouble was going to start, if there was any coming. But this time nothing bad happened. I hung around for a while, waiting. Still nothing. I read a few blogs. Still nothing. Then started this one and I'd been at it a while before it was time for tea. I powered the machine down - another test of sorts - then I came back an hour later and powered it on again. And it worked. Normally. No halts, error messages or crashes. Here I am now, typing the last couple of paragraphs and everything still seems fine. I have no clue what got me in. I don't know if any of the changes I've made will mean I can stay. It might be a permanent fix or tomorrow I might be back where I started. I'd be a lot happier if I knew how I managed to get the thing working again But I'll take the win anyway. I was not looking forward to boxing the thing up and sending it off so anything that means I don't have to bother is good with me. I really hope this is the last time I'll be posting about computer issues, at least for a while. I wouldn't count on it, though. Remember the old superstition about things only work when you give up trying to make things happen and start complaining about it instead?. It used to be a meme in EverQuest back before there were memes, particularly when people were trying to spawn the Ancient Cyclops for the J-Boots quest. Funny how often it seems to happen that way, isn't it?
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 week ago
Well, it turns out the problem with my PC I was talking about on Monday may not have been anything to do with Neverness To Everness after all. I logged out of EverQuest II yesterday and the same thing happened, only this time I couldn't get the machine to wake up again. I spent most of this morning trying every fix Gemini, reddit and YouTube could suggest, including but not limited to reseating the ram, swapping it around, reseating the GPU, changing cables, changing monitors and removing and replacing the CMOS battery. Nothing had the slightest effect. So here I am, blogging from my old PC, which works fine (Fingers crossed, touch wood...) It's still on Windows 10 but I'm good for security updates until October, when all support ends, so it'll do me until I either get the other repaired or replaced. It's still under warranty but it's back-to-base of course, which is pain. I've submitted a request so we'll see how that goes. The only real drawback of (Temporarily.) reverting to the old PC is that it won't run Neverness To Everness. I'm a bit surprised because it ran Wuthering Waves flawlessly and I wouldn't have thought there was that much difference. I think it's one of those annoying hard-coded blocks, where the launcher checks the exact specs of the machine and refuses to go on if they don't meet the minimum. I'd much rather they just let me try it and find out. I've run plenty of games perfectly well on machines that didn't meet minimum spec before. Actually, I just googled (Yay! Live blogging!) and it isn't that at all. Apparently NTE does run on sub-standard hardware, so I need to look into why it's not doing it on mine. It'll be a shame if I have to stop playing for a while, not only because I was really enjoying it but because I was up-to-date, for once. I've finished all the main story quests that were in the game at launch and I was ready to start on whatever comes with the new update, Dreamwalk Corridor , which lands on June 3. And the live blogging continues... I looked into it and NTE runs on Google Play Games for PC, which I have installed on this old machine already although I don't think I've ever used it. And i'm not using it now, either. I tried it and it told me I wasn't entitled to play games with Google because I don't have hardware virtualization enabled. Also, while it was pointing out my deficiencies, it told me my graphics drivers were out of date. I just updated those the other day on the new machine and when I swapped to this one I also moved the good graphics card across so I knew where to go and which ones to get. I did that and then looked up how to enable hardware virtualization, which requires going into BIOS and flicking a switch. I powered down and restarted and... nothing. Well, something . I got as far as the Windows logo, then a spinning circle and then nothing. I tried doing that a few times until the fun wore off, then I tried booting into Safe Mode and that didn't work either because there didn't seem to be any such option. I did manage to get into the BIOS, though, by accident, so since I was there anyway, I enabled hardware virtualization. Then I got on the laptop and looked up how to enter Safe Mode now there's no sign of it at boot-up. It's a good job there are three PCs in the house, isn't it? (Actually, I think there at least five that work. Well, four now, I guess...) I followed the instructions on how to get to Safe Mode, which are ludicrously complicated these days. The walkthrough is literally a 12-step program, which is what you're going to need if you try and fix your own computer problems. At the 11th step, whoever wrote the list whispered an aside (" Isn't this so much easier than pressing F8 on start-up? ") Litotes and irony! Gosh-wow! They really must have been pissed. Anyway, at least it worked. I was able to get in and roll the video drivers back to the last ones. You know, the ones that worked. And now I'm wondering if that could have been the problem with the new PC. When did Forza Horizon 6 come out? 19 May. I have a feeling I updated my GeForce drivers the same day, although not for that reason. Which would have been about the time I started having problems... Tempted though I am to open the cases and swap everything around again just to find out for certain that it wasn't the reason, I have a better idea. I'll stick an old Radeon card in there instead and see if that works. It's not going to use the GeForce drivers so it should, if the drivers were the problem. Hang on... Nah. Wasn't that. Never thought it was, really. The PC also has integrated graphics that don't use Nvidia drivers as far as I know and they weren't working either. Still, nice to be sure. Getting back to the main plot, once I was able to get in again, I went back to Google Play Games to get NTE and bloody Google told me it still wouldn't let me play because my CPU wasn't up to the job. Well screw you, Google! Just because it's, like, a decade old... It's looking like no Neverness To Everness for me until I get my PC fixed or replaced but the good news is I just got confirmation that the company I bought the PC from is happy to look at it under warranty. Even if they can fix it, I very much doubt they'll do it in time for the big NTE update, especially since I don't even have the boxes to send it in yet. They want me to send it back in two boxes, one inside the other, assuming I didn't keep the original packaging, which of course I didn't. As it happens, I did keep the box. It was a nice, big, solid one and I thought it might come in useful for something but luckily it hasn't so it's just sitting there, waiting to be used. Believe it or not, though, I don't also have a second, slightly smaller box to go inside it or indeed a second, slightly larger one tp put it in. I'll have to get one or the other before I give a date and time for the courier to collect it. And that was how I spent my day. Aren't computers fun? Luckily, it was only the second-hottest of the year, after yesterday's record-breaking hottest Spring day ever. (33C in the shade in our back garden. I took a theromemeter out and measured it. Don't tell me I don't know how to have a good time!) Nothing I like better than doing several hours of fiddly tech stuff with sweat dripping off my nose into the electrics... For the time being, I imagine there'll be a pause in posts about Neverness To Everness, which will probably come as a relief to some readers. On the other hand, they might be replaced by posts about Wuthering Waves, if I decide to get my anime fix there instead for a while, so don't get too comfortable. Or I might just play EQII for a bit. I was doing some things there before NTE knocked me off course. At least my old PC can run that one. Suck on that , Google Play Games! Notes on AI used in this post: Three images from the AI-generated suggested prompts I use every day to get my daily done at NightCafe. I never even look at the details beyond checking if there's some kind of animal involved and if there's neon or cyberpunk or noir in the description. I also never change the model so I guess it's whatever I used the last time I cared. Since I'm burning up the planet making these things, I figure I might as well get some use out of them. And they are quite pretty. Particularly the fox. I really like that fox, with his waistcoat and his weak left eye. It's not his fault he's artificial...
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 week ago
Jack Emmert , CEO of Cryptic and one of the names behind a whole slew of MMORPGs you'll have heard of, if not played, including all his current studio's titles and also City of Heroes and DCUO , gave an interview to GamesIndustry recently that seemed to me to be at one and the same time both clear- and short-sighted. His thesis is that there's a pent-up demand for MMOs that's currently going unmet and his primary evidence for it is the number of people who bought New World, apparently estimated to be a staggering 10 million. First, ten million ? Really? The source quoted by GI is Video Game Insights , whose website comes under the umbrella of something called SensorTower . It seems to offer a service very similar to what SuperData used to trade on so give it whatever credibility you used to give them, I guess? Ten million sounds like a lot of customers to give up on, though. Impressive chutzpah from Amazon , throwing that many under the bus. Jack's explanation for that is " I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it " although if Amazon don't have the infrastructure, who does? Still, even if it was actually " only " half of what VGI claim, jack's right. That's a lot of players willing to give an MMO a go. But not to stick with one, obviously. Just like the millions who didn't stick with Lost Ark or any of the other big ticket launches of the last few years. Jack also cites the continuing millions believed, if not proven, to be playing World of Warcraft and " the Daybreak games, or whatever " as proof the interest is still there. All of which is uncontroversial enough, I guess, although I'm not entirely convinced it means a huge pent-up demand so much as a lot of people stuck in games they used to love, now finding themselves unwilling to move on... I'm more interested in his analysis of why the demand, if we accept it exists, isn't being met. Apparently it's because the new games are simultaneously empty of meaning even while being overfilled with content.: "These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again." I think he's talking about what Wilhelm often complains about with games in development - that desire to be everything to everyone rather than sticking to what you're good at. " Feature creep " as it's sometimes called. Jack goes on to explain that when he was designing Neverwinter Online, he had a simple mission statement: " Kill shit and take their loot ." He doubles down: " That was it, over and over again .". Then he adds, almost as an after thought, " And make it fun. " The fact that NWO is still running is cited as proof the concept worked. A lot of MMOs are still running, though. As has been noted many times, they're harder to kill than cockroaches. I could log into half a dozen I can think of immediately that have been up as long or longer than NWO and I'd lay good odds I'd be one of fewer than a dozen players online in any of them. Persistence is evidence of something but I'm not sure that something is demand. My real problem with Jack's thesis, though, isn't the existence of a substantial demographic interested in massively multiple online games. Undeniably, there are tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people playing MMOs of various kinds. If we assume Jack means the kinds of games he makes and that he's name-checking, though, all of which are MMO RPG s, not just MMOs, I'll still allow it. Lots of people do play those, albeit nowhere near as many. And logic does suggest there are orders of magnitude more players, who used to play games like those but don't any more. Where I diverge from his argument is that what the people, who currently aren't playing MMORPGs but might one day, are impatiently awaiting are games where they can " run the same goddamn dungeon a hundred times " so they can get better and better loot, progress their character and improve their playing skills, which is what Jack thinks is needed to bring those lost sheep thundering back into the fold. "It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it. In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do." I'm happy for Jack. He's like Mark E Smith from the Fall . Well, in one way. They both dig repetition . I do, too - in music. In games, not so much. I'm over here, in the camp Jack dismisses as irrelevant: "But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'. Oh, god yes. Try to make me do that and I will get bored. And leave. But appraently "That misunderstands the point." Sorry? What point was that, again? It was the lack of any need for variety or content in a new MMORPG. "The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't. Running the same dungeon multiple times is perfectly fine at the start, then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new… And once you do that, the players are sold." Except that the evidence of numerous Steam Charts past is that by the time you get to that first, quarterly content drop, 90% of your players will have left. And few of them are going to come back to see what else is new three months later because by then your game is going to be just some old game they wish they hadn't wasted their money on. The demand may be there but the patience sure as hell is not. You may be able to frog-boil WoW vets into running the same content over and over and over at higher and higher difficulty forever and ever but that's a form of conditioning that takes years to induce. It's not going to bed down in a couple of weeks, which is, at the outside, about as long as you'll have before the players get bored and wander off to find something less tedious. The two genres that have been eating MMORPGs lunch for half a decade now are Survival-Crafting and Open World RPG Gacha. One of those does indeed exemplify Jack's wish to " focus on economical use of assets and environments " and reliance on repetition, although the repetition in question is rarely if ever multiple dungeon runs. The repetition has more to do with creativity than compliance. As for the other, it's the total antithesis. Pure entertainment. Also a six-weekly content cadence that leaves players struggling to keep up rather than lost for new things to do. What neither of them rely on is running the same goddam dungeon over and over and over until your eyes bleed, just so you can add 0.1% to your Critical Chance stat, if you're lucky. There are people who like doing that, true, but I suspect very, very few of them are actively looking for a new game that will allow them to do it. They're being very well-served already in a number of games that were last truly popular at least a decade and a half ago and most of them are not going to be moving unless that game actually shuts down. None of which is to say Jack doesn't have a good business plan. He has. It's very realistic. A lot of developers would do well to follow it. "I'm a niche developer in the grand scheme of things, because I identify... something with a passionate fan base, and then I try my best to create an authentic experience." There's the future of the genre in a nutshell for you: niche product serving a pre-existing fanbase. I'm not going to argue against it. It'll work and if someone cares to apply the method to an IP I care about, I'll play it, too. I'm just not sold on the idea that there's some larger, untapped, unsatisfied audience out there, desperately waiting for someone to make an MMORPG that will let them run the same dungeon over and over and over... Or maybe I just hope there isn't. God! that would be depressing...
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 week ago
Today's post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, I think. Not a Grab-Bag. I have a sort of format for those and this isn't going to fit it. It's just a few things I wanted to post about that probably won't make full posts of their own. Then again, maybe one will blow up into something bigger as I write, in which case I'll just come back and delete this introduction and no-one will ever know! Always On First, something that definitely isn't worth a whole post. I just want to moan about it. Unlike some people, Nimgimli for one, I've had absolutely no technical problems with Nevernesss To Everness so far. No bugs, no UI glitches, no performance issues. For me, playing on PC, it runs as smoothly as any viscous liquid you care to name. Playing is no problem. The problem comes when I stop. In the last few days - I bet since one of the frequent updates, although I couldn't nail down exactly which - whenever I log out of NTE , about half a minute or so later Windows tells me it's " run into a problem " and needs to reboot. That would be annoying enough but it turns out Windows can't reboot and I end up staring at a black screen until I switch the power off and restart, after which everything works perfectly until the next time I stop playing NTE. Apart from being annoying, I worry all this sudden stopping and starting will damage something, so I googled for explanations and fixes. First, I did it the old-fashioned way. I checked reddit threads and watched YouTube videos but no-one seemed to have the exact problem I did and nothing they suggested seemed particularly helpful, so I thought I might as well let Gemini have a go, since it kept on offering. Gemini was extremely co-operative. It asked pertinent questions, gave me lucid explanations, offered fixes, walked me through what to do when I had difficulties implementing them and basically acted like the best kind of IT department I've ever had to speak to (And I've spoken to plenty.) All of which would be great if the solutions Gemini provided had worked. They did not. Oh, they worked in the sense that all the commands and instructions were accepted when I followed them and they did what they were supposed to do. It just didn't stop NTE crashing my PC on exit. But then, neither did any of the non-AI fixes and suggestions I tried. If it was a football match it'd be a no-score draw. (But then, I just used Gemini to fix a perpetually annoying issue I have with Blogger getting the color of links wrong and it sorted it out perfectly in ten seconds, so I guess AI wins in injury time.) Of all the various possible reasons offered, by far the most likely seems to be a conflict with the Anti-Cheat software NTE uses. From long experience with online games, the most likely fix is going to be putting up with it until the developers patch again and it magically goes away. Until then, I might just try shutting the PC down immediately I log out to see if I can beat the crash. That'll be fun. [Edit: Tried it and it works so that'll be my temporary solution for now.] Had Gemini's fix actually worked, I might have been here today singing AI's praises. That'd be a popular post, I'm sure. If anything, anti-AI sentiment seems to be growing. It used to be mostly in my gaming and music feeds but now it's increasingly present in just about anything I read. As for positive sentiments regarding our would-be artificial overlords (That's Google and Amazon and whatever Elon Musk is calling himself today rather than the inert and blameless software itself, of course.), those seem to be very thin on the ground indeed. Search Me All of which does make me wonder, even more than usual, how this is all going to pan out. I heard the rumor that Google plans to replace search entirely with some kind of Agentic AI (I do love that word - Agentic - don't you? Doesn't it just ooze futurity? Algorithms never had that kind of PR.). It sounded a bit worrying so I checked (Using Google Search, inevitably.) and it turns out to be the usual kind of hyperbolic over-exaggeration humans have been using to get Eyeballs or Clicks or whatever the metric is these days since at least the day Buzzfeed went live. Which was exactly twenty years ago. I just checked. (Google> Wikipedia.) In fact, Google Search continues as before , according to a statement Google gave USA Today , who bothered to ask them, but there will be a new All-AI front end as well. That, inevitably, will be Google's new focus and I'm sure it will be the first/main thing you see, which means most people will use it without thinking any more about it. I imagine their hope is that Search itself will wither away from neglect and disuse and they'll be able to discontinue it at some future date when no-one cares any more. Will that happen? Hard to say. How did Google take over from all those other search engines - AltaVista, Netscape, Yahoo and the rest - in the first place? It was faster, more accurate and more comprehensive, that's how. People used it, found it did the job better and stopped using the older search engines. Have people changed that much in a couple of decades? If they find the new AI Agents are worse than the search they had before, will they not move away from Google to something that gives them what they want? Isn't it just handing a huge opportunity to a new " Traditional Search " provider to come into the market? Or, much more likely, will most general internet users find AI means much less fiddling about and reading websites and a lot more getting quick answers that work well enough, often enough, which will be plenty to keep almost everyone at least happy to go along with it? Too much effort just to get back to something they probably won't miss anyway. So, yes, I imagine AI Agents are going to replace search if only because I'd bet the huge majority of users never really liked searching to begin with. It was always a necessary inconvenience for most people and I'll bet they'll be glad to see the back of it. People who actively enjoy searching as we've known it have to be a pretty small minority of web users, surely? I'm kind of on the fence about the whole thing. I definitely don't hate AI. I just wish it was better. Maybe it will be, one day. Or maybe the current technology, which seems to be part brute force and part black magic, is a dead end and it'll never be entirely reliable. I suspect that's more likely but it's too soon to jump one way or the other. You Want Me To Draw You A Picture? All of which brings me to a little discussion that took place in the comments on a post over at The Friendly Necromancer, where Stingite was talking about feeling guilty for using AI art to illustrate his (Other.) blog, rather than, for example, hiring an actual artist to do it. I said in the comments that it's a notional argument. No hobby blogger is ever going to commission an artist to provide illustrations for posts except on an absolutely exceptional basis. I must have read tens of thousands of blog posts now and I can't remember ever seeing it done. It didn't happen before AI so AI isn't stopping it happening now. No artist is starving because a blogger stopped commissioning spot illustrations for their posts. Very, very occasionally I have seen someone commission a piece of art to be a permanent feature on a blog. I remember Belghast doing it for a masthead a couple of times and I have a vague idea one or two others may have done something similar. But no-one who posts several times a week is going to pay a commercial rate to a professional artist for even one illustration per post, let alone the half-dozen or more most people who use pictures at all like to throw in And that in turn got me thinking about The Olden Days. I'm not talking about Ye Olde Webbe of Yore that so many people, most of them barely old enough to have experienced it the first time around, seem so struck on bringing back. I'm talking the way things were before the worldwide web even existed. When I came back from college in the early 1980s, one of the first things I did was start a comics fanzine with my then-wife, a friend of ours and the guy who owned the comic shop I worked in. We put out seven issues over two years and then our friend took over the editing and publishing of a bigger, more successful 'zine, which he eventually turned into a semi-pro operation. I switched to writing for that and we pulled the plug on our own zine. Every issue of our original zine was stuffed with what we called " Spot Illos " - either decontextualized images, used to break up the text, or more targeted images, intended to support it. We also had comic strips sometimes and full-size cover art for every issue. A minority of the pictures were drawn by my wife, who was a great comic artist and should have made a career out of it, but most were done by people who read our zine and who were active in comics fandom at the time. Some of them already had a foot in the door of professional comics publishing, some went on to be professional comic artists later, but most remained hobbyists and amateurs. Whatever their status and ability, no-one got paid a penny. No-one expected to be paid. Paying people for art that wasn't going to be sold for a profit was not a thing anyone did, wanted to do or even thought about doing. All people wanted was to see their work and their names in print. If they did have professional aspirations, they'd add it to their portfolio so they could at least show potential employers something they'd had published but most of our contributors weren't even that ambitious. They just liked to draw and enjoyed sharing the results. If something similar was part of blogging culture, the way it was always part of the 'zine culture I grew up with, no-one would need AI to draw them a picture. There'd be no shortage of people happy to provide it for free. We always had far more submissions than we could use. And we had a smaller readership than many hobby blogs, too. From memory, I think our print run was about 300 at the peak although the semi-pro zine my friend ended up editing and publishing ran to ten times that eventually. And I don't believe he ever paid anyone anything, either, until a bigger publisher picked him up and gave him a budget to go pro with an actual comic . There could be a place on the web where bloggers could ask for images to illustrate posts and artists could supply them for nothing more than credit and a link. The technology has been in place for years to allow something like that to grow into a global free exchange of talent. Granted it would never be quite as instant and frictionless as generating an AI image but the results would be so much better it would be worth the wait. Probably. Although now I think about some of the pictures we published, let alone the ones we didn't... Maybe something like that does exist already. I know it does for paid, commissioned art. If it does, though, the evidence has never shown up in any blog I ever read. And I'm certainly not offering to set up any such kind of website myself, although ironically I imagine I could get an AI to to code it for me if I was. They're supposed to be good at that sort of thing. And even if someone else did all the donkey-work, it wouldn't be great for me as a user anyway. It would better suit people who write their posts with at least a little lead-time. I tend to bash mine out on the day and I don't think there are many artists out there who'd be happy to get a request after lunch asking them to knock out half a dozen pictures before tea. That's how AI wins, I guess. It may be soulless but it sure is fast and it never complains or makes excuses. It never says " Do it yourself. I'm busy. " Or fobs you off with " I've just got to walk the dog and do a bit of shopping. But I'll get to it as soon as I can. Promise! " And yet, I don't use a lot of AI art here any more. It's not even because readers don't like it. When I do drop a few AI illos into a post, most people just ignore them, I think, assuming they even notice. As Stingite says, AI's much better at doing art than it used to be so it doesn't stand out the way it did. No, it's more that I find it a bit dull, now the novelty value isn't there any more. I'll use it if I need to but it's purely functional, not the crazy thrill-ride it could be a few years back. I get better results dicking around with images in Paint.net , anyway, and that feels a lot more creative than writing prompts. I'm not at all sure it is but it feels that way. Hmm. I seem to be wandering away from whatever point I had. Not that I expected the post to go anywhere but at least I got a few things off my chest. I had a couple more somewhat-related topics to talk about, too, but since this has clearly gone on long enough already (More than, probably...) I'll save those for another time. Now... shall I use AI to illustrate this post? Would that be ironic? Post-modern? Provocative? Or just plain lazy?
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 week ago
I don't really play DCUO any more. It's arguable whether I ever did, really. I leveled to the extremely low cap of 30 a couple of times, which is tantamount to boasting about having completed the tutorial in any other MMO. And even that was many years ago. In recent times, about all I've done is log in when there's some new freebie to collect or if something's going on that I think might make a blog post. And that's kind of what's happening today. Only this time I don't even need to log in! As you may have noticed (If you've been paying attention to anything I've been saying.) there's a new Supergirl movie out this summer. Next month, in fact. June 26 to be precise. I posted about it here and here which, since I'm talking about it again today, makes this three months in a row. DC should be paying me! It's not so much the movie this time as the opportunity it represents. Digital Ink , the Daybreak sub-studio responsible for DCUO has, unsurprisingly, thrown itself headlong onto what it hopes is going to be the Summer Supergirl Bandwagon. If I had to bet, I'd guess the movie will be an artistic success but a commercial failure but until it comes out, its success or lack thereof is conveniently unsullied by either reviews or box office receipts so why not make the most of it while it lasts?. There is, naturally, an in-game event based around the movie. There's even a (Not very good...) trailer, which you can watch below, although if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother. I've completely lost track of how these things work in DCUO any more. There used to be Chapters and then there was some kind of multi-part story set up and now I don't know what they're doing. It must be well over a year since I last logged in and a lot longer than that since I played for more than half an hour before I got bored and logged out again. Of late, I haven't even bothered to go in and get my free stuff. There's always free stuff but if you're not playing, what are you going to do with it? And I got a bit annoyed when I bought a new Hideout and instead of ending up with two, it lost me the one I already had. Which I never got back. Not that I'm bitter.. . I tried to redecorate the new one but my heart was never in it. Anyway, enough of that. For this summer's Supergirl event there's a freebie you don't have to log in to enjoy. And it's a good one, too. If you like Supergirl and superhero comics, that is. Which, obviously, I do. To cut to the chase (In the skies above Metropolis, likely as not.) DCUO is " giving away " six issues of Supergirl's comic to promote the new Children of Krypton: Shadows Over Argo event. I say " giving away " but it's more like " Giving you a lend of " as we used to say when I was at school. And when I say " comics ", I imagine no-one really believes they're going to send you half a dozen printed copies through the mail. No, what they're giving you is limited-duration access to selected digital issues through the DC Universe Infinite portal. You do have to sign up and register an account at DCUI but it just asks for your age and an email and password but it only takes like thirty seconds. The most interesting part of all this for me was learning that DCUI is now available in the UK. Has been since 2022, in fact. I completely missed the Bat Signal on that one. Several times, back in the twenty-teens, I tried to sign up for the service and was repeatedly rebuffed. I wanted to give them my money but they wouldn't take it. I kept checking back to see if they'd expanded into my region and they hadn't but then, some time during the pandemic I think it must have been, I happened upon a website that gave me free access to what seems like every comic ever published and I forgot all about DCUI. The six Supergirl comics you can read for nothing right now. I've used that website, sporadically, whenever there's been something I particularly wanted to read. I assume it's some sort of pirate operation so won't link it here but really I have no clue what it is. At no point has anyone ever asked for any money or indeed any personal details, You don't even need to provide an email address. It's as easy to access as Wikipedi and as public, which seems a bit of an odd way to do piracy. Still, I prefer not to pirate if there's a legal alternative. FFS, I don't even like playing pirate-themed games! Pirates of any and all kinds are the antithesis of cool as far as I'm concerned. Bad pirates! Pirates bad! The upshot of which is that, having been alerted by the DCUO promotion to the fact that DC is now willing to take my money, I will very soon be giving it to them, not least because the monthly subscription is an extremely cost-effective £6.99. For reasons that are anything but rational (Or indeed sane.) I feel it would be foolish to give them that money before I've read my six free issues, so I'll probably start subbing next month. I fancy the idea of reading comics on my tablet in my lunch hour at work. You can download them and read offline with the DC offer so I won't even have to contend with our crappy wi-fi.. The one thing that's putting me of a bit is that, having read one of the issues on the DCUI platform this morning, the experience doesn't seem to be anything like as good as it is with the pirate version. I was only saying to someone at work this week that I now find reading comics on a screen considerably more immersive than reading them on paper but that certainly wasn't true of the one I read on DCUI today. I hope there are better ways to display and turn the pages hidden in the UI somewhere because the default option felt really clunky. The six free issues are mostly very recent, including the first in the current run that's been so highly rated by Anj at Supergirl Comic Box Commentary . Anj's reviews are so incredibly thorough that you could just read them and not bother with the comics at all. I have to skip most of what he says about anything I have any intention of reading. The word " spoiler " doesn't seem to feature in his vocabulary. 340 more Supergirl comics you could read for just £6.99 a month. Having read that one, I can confirm it's excellent but also probably of more interest to long-time fans of the character than casual readers. I guess that's likely true of most of the others but I would recommend anyone with more than a passing interest, especially if they have any plans to see the movie, to take the opportunity to read the free copy of Issue #1 of Tom King 's Woman of Tomorrow , the full graphic novel version of which I wrote about at some length in one of the posts I linked earlier. Ah, yes. Issue #1 and only Issue #1 for free. That's worth noting because of course the hope is that, having had a taste, you'll crave more and be willing to pay for it next time. Remind me again what profession uses that sales model? I was curious (Read: suspicious.) that the free Supergirl comics were just the regular free tasters on offer over at DCUI. Well, I was once I remembered that, when I was checking the platform out all those years ago, giving away free issues was a thing there. So I went there directly to check, using a different browser, and they're not. Not the same, I mean. There are six free comics anyone can read over there, just not the same six. And none of them feature Supergirl, which seems odd now I come to think of it. Why would they miss a chance at cross-promotion? Free Supergirl comics coming to all in June, I'll bet. Thinking about that, it occurred to me to wonder just who it is that can access this offer. I got an email but whether that's because I'm a Daybreak All Access customer or because I have a history of playing DCUO so Digital Ink has me email address I couldn't say. Well, I probably could, if I dug into it a bit but I have better things to do with my Saturday afternoon. It's not like I'm a journalist! In that spirit, I offer the information, for what it's worth, " as seen. " If you play DCUO or have played it, maybe you can read six Supergirl comics for free, too. Or maybe not. If you care enough, I imagine you'll go find out, now I've brought it to your attention. And if it turns out you can't... well, there are other ways.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 week ago
This might be the least original music post I've ever done. The last one was a couple of weeks ago and among others it featured Charli xcx, Olivia Rodrigo and Mike D . Guess who's in this one? And guess who else is in it? Gracie Abrams, Westside Cowboy and Blondshell . Anyone getting a sense of d éjà vu here? Yeah, I know, but what am I supposed to do? People I like have albums coming, they put out singles to promote them, the songs are great... I'm supposed to just ignore all of that? Pick a bunch of second-rate stuff just to be edgy? OK, I could do that. Alright then, I have done that! In the past, though. In the past! Look, it's called evolution. Or emotional maturity. Something like that. I think it's meant to be a good thing? Whatever it is, it's what's coming next so best get on with it. It's not like I have anything else. Unless anyone wants another post about Neverness to Everness ? I have plenty more of those I could write. No? Alright then. Here we go. Kick Stones (The Boys) - Westside Cowboy Spoiled for choice when it comes to bangers this time around. As will soon become obvious. I might ought to have saved this for the end, now I come to think about it. It has that manic, driving, end of set energy. Reminds me a little of Tom Verlaine' s Breaking In My Heart that the Blue Aeroplanes always used to end on. Reminds me of a lot of other things, too. That rhythm has done much service over the years. No surprises there other than to hear it again in 2026. Westside Cowboy are a true surprise, though. Attentive readers may remember I only came across them as the best of a really bad bunch of applicants in one of Glastonbury's increasingly disappointing Emerging Artists comps. Yeah, well, maybe the organizers of that bunfest did know something after all because I've liked everything I've heard by the band since then and this might be their best yet. And y'know what the best thing about it is? That female vocal, way down in the mix all the way through, until it comes up at the end or rather stays where it is as everything else drops out. That's novel. I like that a lot. SS26 - Charli xcx Charli 's causing all kinds of chaos with her New Direction. The last single was called Rock Music and a lot of people who like rock music got all upset about it. Whether it was rock music is up for debate (If you missed it, let me redirect you to my last post so you can decide for yourself.) and I guess the same arguments are going to get trundled out for this one although not by me. I've listened to a lot of rock music over the years. It sounds like Westside Cowboy and it sounds like Charli xcx does now. And it sounds nothing like either of them. Not that I don't like putting everything in the right box as much as the next pedant but maybe just have a bigger box marked " Good " and when you've boxed everything, stick all the boxes with stuff in that you like in that? the cure - Olivia Rodrigo When I logged in after breakfast this morning, this was in my feeds. I watched it. It had just over half a million views. I notice these things. Then Mrs Bhagpuss and I took Beryl for a walk and when we got back I started writing this post, went back to YouTube to rewatch it and grab the link and it had 1.6m views. People really like Olivia Rodrigo . Even rock fans like her. She's like the acceptable face of pop for people who need the cover. She's smart and funny and she knows the things she needs to know as well as a lot of other things as well. She knows, for example, that when some people see she's done a song called the cure it will immediately make them think of the band The Cure and remember how they saw her bring on Robert Smith at Glastonbury and how he's been in the studio with her for her new album and they'll jump to conclusions that are not at all going to be justified when they hear the song but by then she'll have them anyway. And she hasn't lowercased that title by coincidence, has she? And I'm not even sure it's a coincidence that she's playing acoustic guitar in the video like she was on stage with Bob although it's not the same guitar and now I'm starting to think I overthinking things. But that's the sort of associative thinking you get from rock fans, isn't it? No wonder they like her. I wonder why they don't like Charli? She's smart and postmodern too, isn't she? I dunno. I guess you'd have to ask a rock fan. Hit The Wall - Gracie Abrams I don't think there's much chance of anyone calling what Gracie Abrams does " rock music ". Pop is the new rock anyway, isn't it? The thing that interests me more is how really similar so many pop songs sound now without being in the least obvious or repetitive about it. It's like how all funk sounded like funk once but every song was different. Very much that, actually, rather than a couple of decades ago when all " R&B " sounded almost identical to me and I didn't like any of it. That was a bleak time in popular music. Well, for me it was. I honestly thought we were done at one point. I thought it was all going to be like that forever. And then one day nothing was like that and hasn't been since and instead almost everything was better and keeps getting better and now it's the best it's ever been. Maybe someone should tell Jack Antonoff . Things I've Killed - Telehealth Oh, look! Here's someone almost as mad at modern life as Jack! If I understand correctly, the lyric consists of a list of things Millennials rendered untenable. I read that somewhere. I've forgotten where. It was definitely something a human wrote though, not an AI, so it must be true. Everything said by humans is true and everything made by humans is good. Telehealth self-evidently wish it was 1978 though, so I'm not sure we should be listening to anything they say. I mean, I was there and it wasn't that great. Now is better. Musically, I mean. Not anything else, obviously. Well, not everything else. Goes out. Comes in again. Heart Has To Work So Hard - Blondshell Sometimes I wonder if Sabrina Teitelbaum might not be working on some kind of performance art project, the way Poppy uses music or used to before she went all metal. First Sabrina was Baum and she sang big songs with a big soul voice then she went grunge and invented Blondshell and the first album had loads of tunes you could hum, like you could if it was something Dinosaur Jr might have done. Then there was the second album and I think it might have had two actual tunes on it although the only one I can remember and sing would be 23's A Baby. And now she releases this as a taster of the third album and it's literally her intoning one note for most of the running time like some kind of Tibetan chant. And I love everything she's done. All of it. I just love her voice. It doesn't matter how few notes she makes it do. It's the timbre. I'm not saying I wouldn't mind a melody, once in a while. It's not like she can't hold a tune, either. She fucking kills on the covers she's done, where she has to sing someone else's melodies. God - maybe she'll do a covers album some day... Excuse me. I need to go lie down for a moment... EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED Tiffany Day Really, who even wants a melody these days, anyway? They just get in the way, don't they? Also I really am going to have to do a whole post on smoking in pop videos one of these days. I need to start making notes for that although I could probably just throw a stone at YouTube and hit a dozen. I just googled it though and it looks disturbingly like something the alt-right is stressing over. (Are they even alt these days? If so, alt to what, exactly?). If I did post something, is it going to align me with some terrible doomsday clique? Then again, if it's all part of a terrible conspiracy to Bring Back The Good Old Days when you were Free To Do What You Want, you'd think the billionaires would be all for it. Maybe it's just that smoking looks hella cool even now, when almost no-one does it but really poor people? Maybe it's really that simple. Because almost no-one does it but really poor people, even. Anyway, if I don't stop I'm gonna be writing the post right here so let's move on. DANCE - Slayyyter I'm sorry. I was sleeping on Slayyyter . I'd love to say it won't happen again but there are a lot of really great new acts coming up all the time (Cf. Gracie Abrams commentary above.) Who can keep up? I only caught up with Slayyter because she was at Coachella and I was on the stream looking for Blondshell. I watched three or four numbers from Slayyyter's set, where she was absolutely killing it with a huge early afternoon audience that apparently knew the songs and wanted to hear them. I know! Unheard of at festivals in general let alone at the laziest, most uncommitted of them all, Coachella. For calibration, Blondshell played a bigger stage a couple of hours later to what looked and sounded like half a dozen uninterested passers-by and a dog. (I don't think they actually allow dogs into Coachella, do they? I mean, it's not like a real festival. I once watched two panicking dogs that had got siamese-twinned while mating, as dogs do, carve their way through a festival crowd like a chain mower... Now that was a real festival!) Slayyyter did this one on Jimmy Fallon a couple of days ago but whoever uploaded it to YouTube had the volume down too low. Great visuals, shame you can barely hear her. As for the Coachella set, if you care to watch some of that you will see Slayyyter is absolutely, unequivocally playing Rock Music . Boundaries redrawn. Requiem For A Dying Day - Francis of Delirium Yes, yes. Bootlegger turn, I know. Where was I going to put it though, eh? It's not like it was going to fit in better anywhere else. As Chandler would say, could it be any more Nick Drake ? The Standard Model - MORN The post-punk avalanche is stuttering to a standstill now, I think. A couple or three years ago half my feeds sounded like this. Now they sound like Gracie Abrams. Room for both, I'd say. Two or three more and we're done, I think. There's a couple in my YouTube subs I haven't even listened to yet. Talk among yourselves while I check if there's anything good there... Hmm. Tiger LeFlor and Goldie Boutlier and they both sound exactly like they should but I'll pass for now. Tiger's just a little too authentic 'sixties this time around and Goldie's new one is great but she'll be back with a video, I'm sure. I'll wait for that. Oh, wait... haven't checked my other account... Aha! E8/N16 - M(h)aol It's the video more than the song. Not gonna lie. Kiss Goodbye - Sad Happy Birthdays Almost as new to me as it is to you. Saw the thumbnail back when I was grabbing the address for Charli at the top of the post and thought it looked worth a click, then I got distracted and by the time I got down here and wanted it, it had vanished and of course I couldn't remember the name of the song or the artist. Took me about a dozen pokes of the algorithm to get it to spit it out again and it was worth it. And finally... What We Got - Mike D Did you miss the Beastie Boys ? I did. That's lucky thirteen. I'm done.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
2 weeks ago
Just as an FYI, before we get to the post proper, I wanted to say I'm aware that some blogs aren't updating in the Blog Roll at the moment. It's a known issue and apparently Google is looking into it. I imagine first they'll have to find someone who remembers what Blogger is and then that person will need to find someone else who knows how it works but eventually I expect something will be done and everything will go back to normal. Or what passes for normal these days, anyway. And now, on to the scheduled program, which today is another post about Neverness To Everness . Oh, joy! What's more, it's a particularly self-indulgent one that I'm mostly writing for my own amusement. So, nothing new there, then... In a reply to Nimgimli in the comments to yesterday's post, I mentioned I was thinking of doing " a post on the characters and what I think about them " and guess what? This is that post. First, I guess I ought to figure out just who I mean by " the characters ". In any gacha game there are several kinds: Playable Characters - major characters you can have in your team Supporting Characters - significant characters you can't Walk-ons and Cameos , color and flavor but still a speaking role Everyone Else , the extras, the NPCs, the hordes Supporting Characters can and sometimes do convert to Playable Characters. For example, Akane , who I mentioned yesterday, most likely will convert. She has a lot of dialog, a well-delineated personality and is already something of a fan favorite. Nothing has been announced but she's an odds-on bet to become playable at some point. Lacrimosa , to whom I dedicated a whole post a while back, has already been slated to become playable in the near future, as has Chaos , who I haven't mentioned before but who features heavily in the chapter of the main storyline I started this morning. I'm not going to talk about any of them today, nor about any of the many minor characters that crop up in the story or make themselves known as you wander around the city, even if some of those are potentially as interesting and engaging as the leads. Hethereau is a big place and if you spend as much time there as I've been doing you'll run into a whole lot of people with stories to tell. We'd be here all week if I tried to give space to them all. No, for this post I'm going to stick to Playable Characters only and even then only the ones I've seen enough of to form some kind of opinion. There are currently eighteen Playable Characters according to the NTE Characters List , which despite the name and internet address is not an official source. But it's good enough. The eighteen are, in alphabetical order, Adler , Aurelia, Baicang, Chiz, Daffodil, Edgar, Fadia, Haniel, Hathor, Hotori, Jiuyuan, Mint, Nannally, Sakiri and Skia . Numerate readers, which I assume is everyone, will immediately have noticed there are fewer than eighteen names in that list. That's because a) I have left out Lacrimosa because she's not going to playable until next month and b) I have also left out the two, gendered iterations of the Player Character, known variously as Zero, The Appraiser , CoCo or Precious , depending who's talking. That leaves fifteen, at least three of whom of which I have barely met and have nothing to say about, so we're down to a nice round dozen. Still a lot. I might have to break this post into two parts. We'll see how we go. I also have absolutely no intention of discussing any of them in terms of their combat effectiveness, whether they're A or A Class, what practical benefit they bring to a team or any of that boring old guff. Plenty of places you can go look that stuff up if you care. All I'm interested in is who they are, whether I like them and why. I said it was going to be a self-indulgent exercise! I will say that my team so far has mainly been Mint, Adler, Hotori and very occasionally Skia, so it's conceivable that some element of those particular characters' combat effectiveness may have bled over into how I feel about them but I doubt it. Not the way I play. I am going to say if I'd want each of the twelve on my team but I'm basing that decision on whether I could stand to spend time with them, not how useful they might be. And with that unnecessarily lengthy introduction, let's get to the characters who, again, I'll present in alphabetical order or else there will be pouting and possibly fist-fights. Yes, I am looking at you, Sakiri! Adler : Eidon 's butler, Hotori's amanuensis and protector and winner of the Hethereau Poker-Face Award for Lack of Affect three years running. Well, he would be if there was one. Adler is the exemplary professional servant from every costume drama since Mr. Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs . Unflappable, emotionless, impossible to read. I did not like him at all at first and even now I can't say I'm fond of him. I do, however, respect and admire him, although not for anything he's done or said in the game. He shows a very different face in one of Hotori's vignettes (Included in a previous post .) and having watched that, I see there's a lot more to him than the cliche. Still don't actually enjoy his company much, though. It's like teacher's come back into the room every time he appears. He can be a bit of a downer, if I'm honest. Already on my team, even though I can't remember ever inviting him. Baicang - Baicang is a devious, smarmy, patronizing, narcissistic jerk. Oh, sorry, was I being too nice to him? Yes, you're right. He's worse than that. God , he's annoying! I want to reach through the screen and punch him every time I hear him talking down to Flora . There's an outside chance something deeper might be going on with him but with a surface like that, who's ever going to dig down far enough to find out? I'm a bit confused about his status, too. It seems like the BAC has quasi-military ranks and Baicang is a Captain while Skia is a Lieutenant but Skia seems to be in charge. Then again, who'd ever put Baicang in charge of anything? He'll join my team the day I uninstall the game. No, actually, not even then. Chiz - Chiz barely makes it onto the list for the simple reason I've only met her once. She makes an impression, though. Pronounced " Cheese ", as she's quick to tell you, Chiz is a representative of the Pink Paws Bank , where the dress code apparently includes going to work in whatever you slept in, even when that was hardly anything. Someone who looks less like they work in a bank would be almost impossible to imagine. Then again, if you call your financial institution " Pink Paws " you're already good with confounding expectation, I guess. I She's very bubbly although in this game there's plenty of competition when it comes to bubbliness. I'd have her on my team in a heartbeat. Daffodil - Eidon's enforcer. Tough as nails, taciturn, dresses all in black, wears a business suit even when she's fighting. Even the ichi-daime of the Colluccis calls her Master... and yet she's actually quite diffident and unsure of herself in private, I think. She's rather sweet in a mildly terrifying way. A potentially intriguing back-story feels like it's just starting to develop in the quest I'm doing so maybe there's more to her than the hardened exterior suggests. I'd take her onto the team either way. At least she's quiet. Edgar - The enigma. Edgar presents as a small boy in what looks like a parody of Edwardian dress but he talks like a college professor. He has a pleasant, unabrasive personality, which makes for a fine contrast with the two girls he hangs out with. Even though he's unobtrusive and quiet, he rarely seems intimidated by anything, least of all Sakiri and Nanally, in whose company he comes across as being more long-suffering and tolerant than put-upon. It's almost as though he's secure in some world of his own, observing the chaos around him with an academic curiosity. I'd be very happy to have Edgar on the team. I feel like I might learn something. Haniel - OMG! Haniel! It makes me tired just thinking about her. Haniel almost literally never stops. She openly despises sleep. She works a full shift plus overtime then goes clubbing 'til the early hours and when you blearily open your own eyes far too early next morning she's there, bright as sunrise, demanding you get up and start all over again. I'm convinced she's on drugs. She probably doesn't even think of them as drugs because she's so clean and nice but it'll be little pills she keeps in a bunny-shaped box or maybe she has an Oddity at home that makes her feel Fresh! and Bright! whenever she strokes its rainbow fur. It's got to be something. Sugar and caffeine will only take you so far. Haniel is exhausting but I'd have her on the team all the same. She's Fun with a Capital F. Hotori - I think I've already made it clear how much I like Hotori. She's my favorite character by a margin. She's the owner and boss of Eidon Antiques and she presents as a lazy, sleepy, lush, which is fair because she does as little work as possible, sleeps all the time and drinks like several fish, if fish drank wine not water. Hotori, however, like all the characters or so I suspect, is More Than She Seems. For one thing, she's incredibly powerful. She can literally stop time. She also knows everyone who's anyone and from the reactions of powerful people she's a Power To Be Reckoned With in her own right. When we visited BAC HQ today, junior staff were starstruck and in awe. She either was or still is a Captain in that organization and the Director takes private meetings with her. Hotori is a fully realized character with a deep backstory we've only glimpsed and Lindsay Sheppard , her voice actor, does a brilliant job of putting all of that across. Hotori is on my team already and I'm extremely glad to have her. Jiuyuan - Hotori's equivalent at Sterry Express and something of a rival. Possibly a frenemy. Jiuyuaan is cool and somewhat haughty and I don't feel I know her at all. She gives the impression of being considerably older than she looks, although since everyone looks so young that's a hard one to read. Her speech patterns and tone make her seem like she might be in her forties at least, though. I don't really have much of a take on her yet. I'm not sure I trust her. I definitely don't know whether I like her. Would I have her on my team? I'm not sure it would be my choice. If she wanted to be there, that's where she'd be. Mint - Lovely Mint! Mint is quite possibly the friendliest person you will ever meet. Mint makes up nicknames for everyone she likes and she likes everyone. She bases the nicknames on what people smell like. She calls Flora CoCo. Are you whimsied out yet? I'm not but then I have a high threshold for whimsy. Mint also lives in Flora's apartment for reasons unclear. Flora invited her over to see it and Mint just never left. She wanders around in her night-clothes, making little " Umm " and " Ahh " noises for no apparent reason and now Flora is wondering whether it mightn’t be time to start looking for that second apartment after all. Mint is second only to Haniel in terms of energy and enthusiasm but she does at least take a day off once in a while. I don't think she's on anything. She's just perpetually high on life. She was the first person Flora met in Hethereau and the first to join the team and she's extremely welcome to stay as long as she wants. In the team, that is, not in the apartment... Nanally - Aka the Ichi-Daime of The Colluccis aka The Tiger aka Natalie . Not sure when she changed her name or why. Nanally is an Esper of uncertain age (Aren't they all?) but probably somewhere in her teens. She lives at Eidon Antiques, where she works as an Anomaly Hunter, dealing with the less dangerous commissions. She speaks in a voice so high-pitched only bats can understand her, which can be a tad irritating at times. She appears to have based her entire persona on an anime movie (Or possibly TV series.) called Sin City Chronicles . This is a fictional IP within the NTE universe, not any of the several real-world versions that do in fact exist. Like Adler, Nanally's backstory is only alluded to in out-of-game media, which is a shame because it fundamentally shifts her personality away from annoying fantasist to something much more sad and emotive. Her relationship with Hotori is unclear. Are they Mentor/Mentee? Employer/Employee? Guardian/Ward? More information needed. I'd take Nanally onto the team without hesitation. She's enthusiastic, loyal and a great fighter. Also, she can run up walls, which could be really handy. Sakiri - Hmm. Hard one. Not Sakiri herself, although she sure would like you to think so. No, Sakiri's a bit of a mystery. She seems to be very young, possibly a child rather than a teenager, but then we know Esper abilities can affect aging so it's impossible to tell how old an Esper is by looks alone. She behaves like a hyperactive ten year-old some of the time but as Nimgimli says, like a psychopath at others. I find her antics highly amusing, She's like a firework, going off in all directions. She seems perpetually angry or outraged. She finds everyone around her annoying and irritating. Her main Esper ability seems to consist of summoning an Oddity called Kiramourou , who presents as some kind of all-devouring demon. She treats him like a badly-behaved pet and yells at him all the time but he looks like he can take it. When Sakiri is on stage, everyone else takes a supporting role. She's a tiny force of nature. Once again, though, in the out-of-game media featuring her, she comes across as someone who has her own demons, not just a pet that looks like one. I'd love to find out more about her and I'd welcome her onto the team any time. Kiramourou too. Skia - Last and, frankly, least, we have Skia. Literally the only vaguely interesting thing about Skia is that he looks like a werewolf. He isn't a werewolf. That would be genuinely interesting. He just looks like one as a side effect of his Esper ability. (That's also why Nanally and Mint have tails and Sakiri has horns, I believe.) Just about the only amusing thing I've seen Baicang do is tease Skia about how soft his fur is and what a pity it is he can't use his nose to track things like a real wolf. And come to think of it, that's not even funny, either. But it does establish that even though Skia looks like a wolf he's just a human. And a dull one at that. I had him on my team briefly but I dropped him. Not keen to have him back. And that's the lot. I left out Hathor, who's basically Skerry's version of Dafodill, and Aurelia and Fadia, neither of whom I can actually remember meeting. And now I'm off to have lunch. That was a morning well-spent!
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
2 weeks ago
It's been three weeks, give or take, since Neverness To Everness went live and I believe I've played every day. If I was playing the game through Steam , I'd know how many hours I've put in but NTE isn't on Steam so I don't. I guess if I was that interested, I could download and install one of those game-time trackers I see people blogging about now and then but I think that really would be taking the whole thing too seriously. I'll just take a guess instead. Let's see... I doubt I've played any less than an hour most days. Once or twice, like yesterday, I was so busy I really didn't have time to do more than log in, collect my minimum activity rewards and log out again but usually I get involved in something that takes at least a short session to finish and a short session these days would indeed be about an hour. Often, though, I've played a lot longer than that. This morning, for example, I played for a couple of hours and it's odds-on I'll play for a couple more later today. There have been a few days where I played for three or four hours. Let's say that, over the course of the three weeks the game's been out, I've averaged two hours a day. That seems about right. So, over forty hours so far. And after all of that, I'm a smidgeon from dinging Hunter Level 24, which is when the next chapter of the main storyline becomes available. I'll get enough xp from tomorrow's basic log-in reward, although I might do something before then that dings me sooner. As Mailvaltar explained in the comments the other day, Hunter xp is quite specific. You don't get it from everything you do. It mostly comes from log-in dailies and quests. Not all quests, though, and mostly not the ones I've been doing. Thinking about it, 24 levels (Almost...) in 21 days in a game where the level cap is 40 (Yes, alright, technically it's 60, but 40 seems to be the de facto practical cap for now.) seems pretty slow by modern standards. And yet it feels anything but. Too fast, if anything, given that I've really made no attempt to chase xp. If you stand on the fountains, it stops the water spurting up. Ask me how I know... So what have I been doing? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? I'm not sure I have much of an answer. A bit of this... a bit of that... Let's take this morning's session, for example. It was probably about average. It should give a fair impression of how most of my sessions turn out. I logged in with the intention of collecting my basic " Here I am again! " rewards. Other than that, I didn't have much of a plan. I was thinking I might take a look at the clothing options, see if there was anything I could do about getting something different to wear, but that was about as far as I'd taken it. And I did do some of that, eventually, but not until right at the end, just before I had to stop for lunch. As usual, I ended up spending most of my time trotting around the streets of Hethereau , admiring the view, taking screenshots and getting caught up in the quotidian life of what has to be the best-realized city I've had the pleasure of visiting in any game yet. I wasn't just roaming around at random, although that is what I find myself doing, often as not. I did have some sort of goal in mind. I was going to stock up on coffee and food supplies to keep my three cafes going. This is not anything I'd expected to be doing when I imagined playing the surreal, high-paced, action-packed magitech rpg, Neverness To Everness. It's definitely not the game I was expecting. It's a lot better than that. Come on! It's on Moomin Street! Who'd say no to that? Still, as a cafe manager, I'd have to admit my involvement so far has been something less than hands-on. Each time I pay the lease on a property and open a new cafe, I somehow manage to convince a couple of my friends into working there for nothing, while I bugger off and leave them to it. About the only active part I play in the running of the business is setting the menu and collecting the money. I don't do the cooking. I don't think that's even an option. I don't serve customers either, although that definitely is something you can choose to do - if you're clinically insane. And since the first day, I haven't even done my own shopping. I do the ordering, That much I can manage. Even then, though, I've been opting to have the supplies delivered. I've been taking the largest available shipment each time, meaning it only takes me a couple of clicks once every three days to keep the place stocked, but I pay through the nose for doing it that way. Delivery charges are obviously part of one of the city's many extortion rackets. This morning, for no good reason other than miserliness, I decided I'd go pick up my own supplies from the store and save myself some money. How hard could it be? As it happens, not very hard at all. NTE has some exemplary systems to support doing your own shopping. You can add everything you need, automatically, to a shopping list that appears on screen and if you click on each item it will tell you which stores, in which parts of town, stock it. It will even open the map for you and show you where to go. And when you get to the store, you can have the shopping list and the store's inventory open at the same time to see each item being checked off as you buy it. Aand... it took me about an hour to figure all that out. I started off just working purely from memory, as in " Oh, that 24-hour convenience store where I helped the guy with his Fluffy problem probably sells what I need. I vaguely remember how to get there... " Well, he did sell me some milk, when I eventually found him... Can you believe that other guy only had milk?! As I was wandering about looking for food stores I just happened to notice a possible new location for my growing coffee shop empire. I'd been ignoring the prompts for ages but I had the cash and I was right there, so... Now I rent and run four coffee shops. Is that too many? (Probably, yes. By about four, I'd say.) Not sure who's making the coffee and taking the money at the new one because I don't have any more friends left who aren't already working at one of my other sweatshops cafes. I'm probably going to have to split up one of the teams and send someone over to the new place, I guess. #Livinthemanagementlife, amiright? I had to visit three different stores, one of which was in a part of town I'd never been to before, so that took a while, not least because of all the new photo opportunities. I got it all done, though, and with the money I was saving by not paying sky-high delivery charges, I was able to buy double what I needed of everything. It means next time I have to restock, in three days time, I can just do it from inventory. I'm restocking once a week, now, nearly. I imagine once you have the money, you could buy in bulk and barely ever have to shop again. I don't think anything ever expires. There's no item decay in the game. All of that took me a while but of course I also had to deal with the various protection rackets, muggings and other street crimes that plague the streets of Hethereau, night and day. Not to mention stopping to check what all those crows and seagulls were carrying and to pick up all those lost wallets... You just keep telling yourself that, Rabi . As I was jogging through the big square near Eidon , I saw a girl with a cute-looking Oddity so I stopped to take a photo and ended up agreeing to try a free sample of cake they were handing out, which led me to pick up some kind of quest or other from her father but then before I could do anything about it I'd found this amazing record store up some back alley and agreed with the slacker in charge to go look for an anomaly that had stolen the store's record player... Obviously not before I took a bunch of screenshots. Priorities! I can only think of two games I've played where there's a record store you can go into and look at the album sleeves: this one and The Secret World . The one in TSW has the edge in terms of the music that's playing but this one is bigger and has more to look at, not to mention do there. It's called Exile on Main Street , which is a great name for a record store. It would be even better if the store was actually on Main Street, of course, but bonus points for ambition, I guess. Also bonus points for the Pink Floyd quote on the wall. The line is " We're just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl " from " Wish You Were Here " I was pretty curious to see how the musical theme developed, not least since Flora is now the (Very, very bad..) drummer in Haniel 's band. That's not some head-cannon thing. It's an actual storyline in the game, one where you go to a dive club with Haniel, meet the woman behind the bar, Akane , who Haniel thinks is her friend but who's really just humoring her, and you both end up jamming on stage after the club closes, meaning Akane can't go home... That storyline is ongoing. Flora has jammed with Haniel twice and now Sakiri and Nanally look like they're going to get in on the act so we might have a full band soon. God help us. Anyway, I mention it only because, after a trip round half the shops in the area, following the trail of some mysterious, loud " Rock Music ", I ended up back at Eidon, where I was fully expecting to find Sakiri and Nunally " rehearsing " in the TV room upstairs. I guess it'll be okay to leave her. I put her in the recovery position... Instead, what I found was Hotori , passed out on the sofa, surrounded by empty wine bottles, drunk as a fucking skunk. This is why I love her! Also, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the quest I was on, which is why I love this game. When I went over to see if she was OK, a sweet cut-scene triggered in which Flora covered her boss with a blanket and cleared up the mess. That was apparently from another quest I had running but about which I had completely forgotten. Once I was sure the boss wasn't going to choke on her own vomit, I went out onto the balcony where I found Sakiri with her Oddity, Kiroumarou , the one that eats everything then sicks it up later. Naturally it transpired that Kiramourou had eaten the record player and then gone all round town with the music still playing from inside its stomach because that's something that happens. And the record was even still playing when Kiramourou threw it back up! I took the record-player and the record back to the shop and span some sort of tale to Sidd , the dope-head owner, so Sakiri and her pet wouldn't get into trouble. Geez, Sakiri! Chill, won't you? He's just an oddity! I just want to say at this point that Sakiri treats Kiramourou abominably. She yells at him, abuses him, threatens him... so far I've never seen her say one single nice thing to or about him. And yet he's always there with her, defending her, helping her, fighting for her. Granted, he's a complete liability, with no self-control whatsoever when it comes to stuffing his face full of anything he can grab hold of, but even so! She could be nicer to him. She should be nicer to him! There's no excuse for Oddity abuse and you can put that on a T-shirt. By the time I'd done all that, I'd been playing for over two hours. I'd also filled out all the dailies without trying so when I claimed the rewards, I got a huge chunk of xp and it all but dinged me. When Flora does level up, which will be tomorrow, if it's not later today, I can get her back to the main quest line, at which point I suppose it's not impossible some kind of coherent narrative might start to develop, although I certainly haven't seen any sign of one yet. Then again, as you can see from the above, I don't really need one. The game's more than entertaining enough as it is.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
2 weeks ago
Absolutely no time to write a post today or tomorrow but I don't want to go four days in a row with nothing so let's all enjoy enjoy some lens flare! Look Ma! No feet! It's taken me a while to figure out how to frame the shot to stop that happening. It doesn't help that the in-game camera shows the image without the frame that gets added when you take the shot. Is that a dog kennel over there? Why, do you know, I think it is! But what kind of a dog would live on a rooftop? Would it be one called Ruddy , I wonder? I think that's more glare than flare but I'll allow it. Now that's the real thing! Pretentious? Moi? Mais certainment non! And a little palette cleanser there, right at the end. Also, it's really about time I got some new clothes...
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
2 weeks ago
Hotta produces a lot of videos for Neverness To Everness . There are one hundred and forty listed the official YouTube account. They come in all flavors, from the exceptionally vivid and vibrant trailers that created so much of the buzz around the game a year or so back to the gameplay and combat and feature reveals. There are songs and cut scenes and appearances at conventions - promotions of all kinds. None of those does anyone need to watch to enjoy the game, now it's out there to be played. Or to decide whether to play it, either, since it's Free To Play. If you want to know what the game's like, you can just download it, make an account, log in and find out for yourself. If you do that and decide you like the game enough to keep playing, though, there are a few videos in that hundred and forty that you probably ought to make time to watch. Those are the vignettes, short stories and micro-movies that add background to the characters and also sometimes reveal them to be quite different from what you might have thought just from seeing them in the game itself. Some of these ought to be in the game, not on YouTube and even when you know where to look, it's not just a simple matter of going to the channel and watching them. First you have to find them. I was hoping to do that before I wrote this post but that was when I was thinking Hotta would have organized them in some way. Maybe they have but if there's any order or sequence, I can't figure it out. It's not even a simple task to single the damn things out from the pack. There look to be several naming conventions in play but I'm not convinced whoever's using them pays much attention to how they're being applied. There are " PV " videos, " EP" videos , " Animated Shorts ". I think PV means a take from the character's point of view, while an animated short is more objective. EPs are definitely music videos. It's also a job in itself spotting when a new one arrives. I'm subscribed to the channel so they pop up in my YouTube timeline but that moves so fast I miss most of what's there. I get emails from Hotta but not about any of these. This is what comes from playing a game made by and for digital natives, I guess. The target audience doesn't need to be told to pay attention to this sort of thing. I do, though, and since my audience here is almost certainly not part of the target demographic either, I thought I'd mention it as a kind of public service. If you'e playing NTE and not watching these videos, you're missing out on something you'd almost certainly enjoy and which might even change your perceptions of the characters you like or loathe or feel nothing but indifference for. It certainly changed my feelings about a couple of them. Hotori was already my favorite character, purely for the slacker chic and anarchic undertow she brings to the game, but my appreciation and understanding of her deepened considerably after I watched this: It explains nothing and yet it contextualizes everything. I know very little more about Hotori after watching it several times, other than she grew up rich and a Bad Thing happened and yet I feel as if I know her so much better. As for Adler , before I watched the video I thought he was a bit of an ass. Not any more. The gravitas he carries now feels like it comes from somewhere rather than just some pose he's taking. Then there's this: I have almost no clue what that's supposed to mean but it's a joy to watch. The animation is exemplary, the art design is gorgeous and it creates a sense of history that fills out the characters without really telling you anything about them. I welcome that approach in any medium. Don't tell me or show me - make me feel it. And finally in the Hotori trilogy there's this: Which is basically a music video. I watch a lot of music videos and that's a good one. The song's not bad, either. And once again it works on emotion not reason. All of those were released in the ten days or so running up to the arrival of Hotori as a banner pull so they're very much part of the marketing push, something that in no way undermines their value as narrative, lore and story. And, of course, mood. Mood is really super-important to NTE. It's a mood piece, almost, as much as a game. Kind of a tone poem, perhaps. At Hunter Level 21, Appraisal Level 2 and a couple of weeks into the game, I still have relatively little idea what the main storyline is, or if there even is one. I've been trying to remember if that was true of Wuthering Waves or Genshin Impact at the same stage but in both cases, later narrative developments have mostly overwritten my memory of how it all began. Still, I'm fairly sure both those games and indeed almost every other RPG, online or off, multiplayer or solo, that I've played had a clearer through-line in the early chapters than this one. NTE seems to thrive on ambiguity and vagueness. It's an approach that sits very well with me. I do like not knowing what's going on. For that to work, though, you have to really like the characters or at least find them fascinating. The game does a great job of that but the videos, even as they do almost nothing to explain the plot, do plenty to make the characters feel more empathetic. Nanally , for example, can seem bossy, harsh, brash and aggressive. Here's how she sees herself: That's a PV video, which I'm taking to mean it's from the character's perspective. Here's one from the outside, looking in: As well as making Nanally seem like a much more sympathetic character, these videos also go a huge way to explaining why such a young girl is part of a clean-up team nullifying and containing dangerous anomalies. She's a very powerful, skillful Esper, capable of showing a great deal of empathy for her targets. (How old is she, anyway? As with most characters in the game it's very hard to be sure.) Once again, watching these videos materially changed how I saw the character. I'm guessing - and hoping - that there's a lot more to learn about all of them inside the game but even if that's true, playing through character arcs takes quite a while. Assuming they even exist, it''ll be weeks if not months before I get to see most of them and I'd like to have at least some idea who I'm spending my time with before then. Nanally also gets a music video . It's not as good as Hotori's but it's pretty good all the same. That means both characters have a PV, an Animated Short and an EP, suggesting maybe every character will eventually get a set of three. So far, Sakiri , Jiuyuan and Fadia are the only others to get PV videos although for some reason the official Hotta PV Playlist also includes Mint 's Character Short. So much for the naming conventions. I haven't seen those yet so I'll say nothing. I'm going to watch them later today, though. For now, I'll go out with a song. Chiz , who I would be happy to see more of, doesn't get a PV or a short yet but she does get a song. Here's her EP: Chiz is pronounced " Cheese ". 'Nuff said...
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
3 weeks ago
In the comments to Monday's post , Mailvaltar mentioned that, since I'd just said she was my favorite character in the game so far, I might be interested to know the next limited banner in Neverness To Everness was going to feature Hotori as the S-Level pull. As I said in my reply, I wasn't as interested as might be expected because I generally don't bother all that much with the whole gacha part of gacha games. It's not out of any moral or fiscal objection to gambling. I'm British so I'm fine with all of that. We're a decadent nation. It's just that I prefer to stick with the smallest number of characters possible and change them as infrequently as I can get away with, while still being able to progress comfortably. Laziness is another national characteristic. For non-gacha-gamers some of that might need a little unpacking. I'm not really the best person to explain it but I'm what you've got so you'll have to make the best of it you can. Then again, if I can understand it, anyone ought to be able to. I certainly haven't put much effort into figuring out the details but even I can grasp the basics. The way the games work is that you start out playing a single character but then quickly add several more to make up a team. I found it quite disorienting at first but I'm used to it now. The first few characters, you get for free in the early stages of the story. Often you add a few more freebies along the way as the storyline continues but after a while it's mainly down to " pulls ". Every so often, usually on a set schedule, there are Events in the game. These events are unconnected to the narrative, and it's through these that new characters become available, although the characters themselves will almost always be familiar, having been introduced already through the story. The characters vary in numerous ways. There's usually some kind of system, akin to resistances in traditional RPGs, whereby they inflict different kinds of damage, to which various opponents may or may not be susceptible. There may also be characters who provide healing or buffs and there will always be certain, desirable synergies between various characters. Most importantly, at least in terms of combat, some characters are just more powerful than others. All the characters have a performance grade, usually a letter code. Other games I've played have had three or four gradations but as far as I can tell, NTE just has two - A and S. Theoretically the best characters are S-Grade although experience in other games suggests that isn't always the case. Regardless of their actual utility, however, S-Grades are always the hardest to obtain, having a much lower chance to drop from the gacha system. The exact nature of the gacha mechanics differs from game to game. NTE uses the visual representation of a board game. You throw dice to move, hoping to land on the square that has the thing you want. However it's set up, the effect is the same: you spend a specific currency for each " pull " (Or roll as it probably should be called in NTE.). There are often multiple currencies, used for different pulls like weapons or accessories. Some of those currencies come free with gameplay, some of can only be bought with real money. For most it's a mix of both. Most games seed you a little of the " real money " kind of currency, the one you need for the important pulls, just for playing the game, presumably to encourage you to buy more when you run out before you get the S-Class character you want, as it surely will. Some games I've played have been very stingy, others quite ridiculously generous. Noah's Heart , for example, gave me many hundreds of free pulls to the extent that I never even got close to using them all before I was given more. It's no wonder they went out of business. NTE is reasonably even-handed, from what I've seen so far. After playing for a couple of weeks, I already had enough of the good currency for a dozen rolls. Even so, I still wasn't thinking about making a play for Hotori when I logged in yesterday, for the reasons I gave Mailvaltar. I'm barely used to the three or four characters I'm playing now. The idea of changing one out and learning a new one did not appeal, even if that character was my favorite. I will do a post about the characters themselves at some point so I won't go into details here but I will just say I like nearly all of them. I'd be more than happy to explore any of their backgrounds in character quests. But that doesn't mean I want to fight as them. But Mailvaltar said something else in his comment that intrigued me. He said " she can literally stop time. Not only in combat, mind you, also in the open world. " Now that does sound like an ability I'd like to have, although I have no clue how it could work. (I've since read up how it works in combat and even that seems too complicated for me...) I would love it if it worked in the open world the way it does in this video, though. You can see it in action near the end . It's impressive as hell. I somehow don't imagine we'll all be wandering around Hethereau stopping the trains like that but wouldn't it be nice? I'll most likely also do a post about the character videos Hotta release, too. That one's just to show off the costumes Hotori can wear, character costuming being yet another possible post. I'm not at all sure I want to see Hotori wandering about my apartment in shorts... The really interesting videos are the ones that fill out the narrative out of game. They're very impressive and they seem to be almost a requirement to understanding the characters fully. It's a somewhat metatextual approach to storytelling, not unusual in games but taken to a more rarefied level than I'm used to seeing. For now, though, I'll try to stay on track for once, instead of cramming several posts into one. Getting back to point of this one, yesterday I had a lot to do in real life so I only had time for a very short session in the morning. I just wanted to claim my login rewards in case I forgot later on and missed a day. As I went through all the highlighted options, a notice popped up telling me there was a new banner event, that being the genre jargon for a time-limited gacha draw with a new character. I remembered Mailvaltar saying that character was going to be Hotori and I thought " Well, I don't have time to do much - maybe I'll just take a look... " I tend to apply the same rules to currency in games that I use in the outside world, namely only spend a fraction of what you have. In games, that fraction does tend to be a larger one but it's rarely more than half. I had a dozen Solid Dice , the "good" currency, so I thought I'd have half a dozen rolls just for the fun of it. To give it some perspective, in NTE you get a Pity pull after 90 rolls. A pity pull is when you're guaranteed a win. Again, it's a fairly generous system by genre standards . There's a " soft " pity threshold at 70 unsuccessful pulls, when the base chance jumps from 1.87% to 19.59%. If you're still out of luck after another twenty tries, which at those odds would be bad luck indeed, your next pull is 100% guaranteed to be the S-Class character. I got Hotori on my fifth pull. This is why gacha games never get any money from me. I didn't particularly want the character, even though she's my current favorite but now I've got her anyway. Not the first time, either. Go me! Ironically, it wasn't until the next day I got the email from Hotta telling me the event had started. The next question is, will I add her to my team and actually play her? If I'd been playing for longer the answer would most likely be no, unless I was already struggling to win fights. I'm just too lazy. Within reason, I'd rather have a longer, slower fight using tactics I already know than stop and learn new ones to speed it up. It's not like I'm on a contract. Of course, since my current tactics consist almost entirely of swapping between characters to hit the cooldowns, it wouldn't take a lot of re-learning but I'm guessing at some point I might need to do a bit more than that... But since I've only been playing for a couple of weeks, I haven't really had time to develop any specific muscle memory for the three characters I'm using. And there's one I don't have any particular fondness for: Adler . I don't dislike him - as I said, I like all the characters well enough - but he didn't really resonate with me at first. I'm coming to like him more but there are plenty of other characters I find more interesting or who seem like they'd be better company. He could easily step back to make space for Hotori. I'll try it and see how I get on. She ought to bring more to the battlefield, being S-Class and anyway Adler never seems to do all that much. Then again, I haven't really got much of an idea what any of them do. Yet another post waiting to be written: how insanely complicated combat in NTE is on paper and how little any of that ludicrous complexity seems to matter when you come to the actual fighting. The other thing about adding new characters to the team is that you have to level and gear them up. In past gacha titles, I've found that to be a real disincentive to making changes to the line-up but after just two weeks it won't be a problem. I've barely bothered to gear or level anyone yet! So there we are. Looks like it's time for Hotori to tag Adler and let the butler sit it out while his boss takes over. (That, for those who don't play, is their relationship in the game.) Maybe I'll report back on how it goes. And if it does turn out that Hotori really can stop time in the open world, not just in combat, then you'll definitely be hearing more about it! [Edit] And sooner than expected. I just tested it in the streets of Hethereau and it actually works! One of the weirdest things I've ever seen in a game. Not sure if it has any practical applications but it's a lot of fun to play around with. Also, it seems you can have four in a party so Adler doesn't get to take a sabbatical just yet!
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
3 weeks ago
There's a new movie out just now called The Sheep Detectives . In it, a bunch of sheep - alright, a flock of sheep then, if you want to be pedantic about it - investigate the mystery of the murder of the farmer who owns them. They know how to do this because the farmer was in the habit of reading them detective stories in the evening because that's a thing farmers do, just like sheep solve murder mysteries. Frankly the one is about as likely as the other. I watched the trailer last week and it looked surprisingly amusing. By chance, the novel on which it's based came into my hands at work a few days later. I had a look at that as well and it seemed like it would be a fun read. Do not let any of this supposed evidence fool you into thinking sheep are clever, though. This are fictional sheep. Real sheep are not so smart. Not that I'm saying sheep are thick. Most animals are a lot more intelligent than they're given credit for and I'm sure sheep, collectively and individually, have the capacity for all kinds of wickedly canny mischief you might not imagine they were capable of. Anecdotal experience of all kinds of domestic animals suggest that's likely to be true. I can tell you a couple of things the average sheep is not bright enough to work out for herself, though: It's a bad idea to put your head through a hole in a fence. How to get your head out again if you ignored rule #1. When Mrs Bhagpuss and I got up this morning, it looked like being a reasonably pleasant spring day. We neither of us had anything pressing to be getting on with, so we thought it might be a nice idea to take a flask of coffee and a couple of apples and go sit on top of a five thousand year old burial mound, since we happened to have one handy nearby. Stony Littleton Long Barrow is one of the finest surviving examples of a neolithic stone and earth tomb anywhere in Britain but it's not exactly on any tourist trail. There are no signs to direct you there and even if you have an idea where it is, to get to it you have to drive down a single track road with no passing places. When you get there, there's a parking space for about four cars and the enterprising small farmer opposite (I mean he farms on a small scale, not that he's the size of a Borrower.) has put out a couple of benches. You can buy an ice cream from him and sit on one of the benches to eat it, assuming he happens to have opened his little hut that day. We've been there a few times. It's a lovely walk, over the bridge and up the long hill to the barrow. Once there, you have a fine view of the surrounding countryside, which is to say some fields, some more fields and some more fields after that. The barrow itself is amazing. I'd show you a photograph but I didn't take any today and I can't find any of the ones I've taken on previous visits. I bet it's on the internet though. Just hold on moment... Ah yes, here's the English Heritage page . And it's on Wikipedia . And up there's a picture of the sign at the site itself. I took that this morning, when I thought I might be writing this post. Take my word for it, anyway. The barrow's a lot more impressive in person than in photographs because you can crouch down and shuffle inside it and get an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia even if you don't normally have a problem with confined spaces. It's worth the long walk up the hill just for the relief of getting out of the damn thing and back into the sunshine. But this isn't really a post about the barrow. It's about the walk back. We had Beryl with us but she was on her lead most of the time because the entire hillside as far as you could see in any direction was rife with sheep. There are often sheep there but this was way more sheep than usual. I quite like sheep. They look decorative, they're non-threatening and they nearly always get out of the way when they see you coming. Not like cows, which sometimes express a disturbing degree of interest and have been know, all too frequently, to trample people to death. My aunt and uncle once had to jump into a hedge to avoid being trampled. They're both dead now, although not from bovine trampling, I'm pleased to say. As for horses... do not get me started on horses. I grew up with horses in the fields next to my house and you do not want to go into any field that has horses in it, trust me. Horses have a very peculiar sense of humor, which includes running at people as fast as they can to see how they react. Then they stand there and laugh at you when you run away or fall over. At least they do if you're lucky. If not, they trample you, too. So much for horses and cows. Sheep, though, sheep are fine, so long as you don't have a dog with you. Not that the sheep go for the dog. More the dog goes for the sheep and it all ends in tears and/or a fatality, usually for the sheep but sometimes for the dog, if the farmer happens to be out and about and has brought his gun and in my experience no self-respecting farmer leaves the house without a gun. Beryl is not a dog for running after anything bigger than a squirrel and sheep are the size to her that elephants would be to us so we're not worried about her doing them any actual harm. Still, some sheep get scared by any dog, even small ones, the way elephants are supposedly scared of mice and we don't want to scare the sheep or get Beryl shot so she's always on her lead if sheep are around. On the way back, though, we went along a high ridge and the sheep were hundreds of yards away along the bottom of the valley so we let her amble along behind us for a while until I spotted one, lone sheep ahead of us, apparently grazing in the hedge. There's always one that has to be different. I put Beryl back on her lead and we were about to go around the sheep when we realized this sheep wasn't being different. This sheep was stuck. The dim-witted creature had apparently tried to reach some particularly tasty leaf just out of reach in the hedge and now it had its head firmly wedged in a square of wire. As we got near, it thrashed about a bit and tried to force its way further into the hedge, which wasn't a great plan. Mrs Bhagpuss took control of Beryl, who was starting to express some interest, and I went to see if I could unstick the poor creature. Sheep aren't exactly wild about about letting people they don't know come within arm's reach but this one didn't have a lot of choice. I've rarely had the opportunity to test it before but it seems as though, if they really can't get away, they go completely still, presumably in the hope of being taken for a particularly fuzzy boulder. Or maybe it was my soothing tone. The sheep stood dead still and let me pull her head this way and that, even move her ears about, as I tried to see if there was any way I could maneuver her loose. There was not. I bent the wire as far in all directions as it would go but it was obvious the head that had gone in with sharp end first was not coming back out with the thick end leading. Same principle as a lobster pot, presumably. We spent a while thinking about it but there was clearly no way to shift the sheep without a pair of wire-cutters. We decided we'd best leave the sheep be and see if we could find the farmer to let them know. We were pretty sure the small farm at the bottom of the hill had nothing to do with the sheep on the hills but there was another big house right in the fields where the sheep were roaming so we carried on down the path to to try there. That turned out to be a bust, No-one home but a dog. I don't think is was a sheepdog, either, although I only heard it barking. We worked out way back to where we began and I tried the other farm. The one that sells the ice-cream. There was someone there but as we'd suspected they didn't own the sheep. Or any sheep. Still, even being the nearest person to some sheep comes with its own responsibilities. The chap's face did fall a bit when I explained the problem. " Oh, not again... " he said. He cheered up a bit when I asked him if he had a pair of wire-cutters I could borrow. " I don't mind going back up and cutting her loose if you can lend me a pair ", I said, although what I was really thinking was " What a jolly jape! I hope he lets me do it! " In my head, I was nine years old and it was an Enid Blyton story... The farmer (Not really a farmer at all, in fact, just someone with a couple of alpacas and a horse in a field behind his house. Yes, alpacas. Surprisingly common around these parts...) offered Mrs Bhagpuss a coffee while she waited and I trudged back up the hill to the sheep which, when I finally got there, was no more glad to see me than it was before. Once it had calmed down a bit and resigned itself to being eaten by wolves or whatever it thought was going to happen, I was able to cut through the fence-wire with the cutters and watch the sheep just stand there as if nothing had changed. It turned out she wasn't just being extra-specially suspicious or even extraordinarily dim; she'd also managed to get some wool on her head wound round a strand of barbed wire because whoever fenced the field obviously though a thick hedge and a sturdy fence didn't make it nearly secure enough, so they'd run a strand of barbed wire between the two as well, just to be on the safe side. I can tell you now that you can't cut wool with wire cutters. Or I can't, anyway. Luckily, with a bit of encouragement the sheep gave a mighty shake of her head and tugged herself loose. Then she scampered off, bleating. It would be nice to think she was saying thank-you but she bloody well wasn't. She never looked my way once, just towards the rest of her pals, all of whom had abandoned her to her fate without a second thought. She was either yelling at them to ask what the hell they thought they were playing at or trying to warn them about the crazy human with the metal claws. For me, it was back down the hill to return the wire-cutters and accept a cup of coffee. Beryl and Mrs Bhagpuss had watched the whole thing from a comfortable distance. Beryl, reportedly, was not impressed with my heroism, although apparently she was quite interested to see me go and come back. Dogs are easily amused. Sheep are dim. Life goes on.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
3 weeks ago
As Tyler Edwards pointed out in the comments to yesterday's post, there are certain constraints involved in designing a game to be released in China. Or there are if you don't want to fall foul of Fenris Creations - er, sorry, I meant the CCP. Easy mistake! Until then, it hadn't really occurred to me that Neverness To Everness was a Chinese game. Indeed, it didn't even occur to me then, or not in that exact form. What did occur to me was that I had no idea where the company behind the game I was playing was based other than somewhere in the mysterious East. I rarely do. Honestly, it might as well be the nineteenth century for all the attention I've been paying to where most of the " imports " I keep picking up and then dropping might be coming from. This has been going on quite a while now, hasn't it? Forever, really, for as much as that means in the context of online gaming. I remember Mrs Bhagpuss and I playing the beta for some MMORPG from China so long ago I can't even remember what it was called any more. Just that it was one of her favorites for a while. Whatever it was, I don't believe it ever came out in " the West ". I just know it was long before we played Runes of Magic or Zentia although maybe not before I played NeoSteam ... The more I think about it, the more it seems it's always been this way, even if I do have a vague feeling I used to be much clearer on where the games I was playing were made. Final Fantasy XI came from Japan for a start. I always knew that. NeoSteam was Korean. I did have to fact-check that one just then but I was pretty sure. Zentia was from China and so was Loong . Or was Loong just set in China? It was published by Gamigo and they're... what are they now? German! I had to look that up even though I see some news item about Gamigo very nearly every day. Loong, it turns out, was developed by DACN out of Shanghai so it was Chinese. These days, though, I rarely have much of an idea who's behind anything I'm playing, unless it's a company I know already. And sometimes, even when it's one I ought to recognize, I find I don't. I'm well aware Neverness To Everness is being developed by Hotta Studios . I've known that from the start. It's an easy-to-remember name. Or you'd think it would be. It can't be that easy to remember, though, because I only just realized this morning, as I was researching this post, that Hotta is the company behind that very successful MMORPG from a few years back, Tower of Fantasy . At least, I think it was very successful. Wasn't it? For a while I saw a lot of people talking abut it but now I come to think of it, that didn't last long. No-one ever mentions it now. I never played it, which seems strange, given I'll play just about anything, so long as it's free and I think I can get a couple of blog posts out of it. As it happens, I know why I didn't play Tower of Fantasy. You won't guess. It's not a rational explanation. Or maybe it's too rational. I didn't play Tower of Fantasy because from the moment I saw the name I imagined the entire game was literally in a tower. I thought you'd have to start at the bottom and work your way up and that would be the all you'd ever do, which did not sound like a lot of fun to me, so I passed. I'm not completely crazy! There are MMORPGs that have towers like that inside them. It's a popular feature, I believe, although obviously not with me. I thought someone had just decided to make a whole game out of it, the way some developer or other is always trying to make an MMORPG that's all raids or all dungeons, one with no actual world to waste anyone's time. By the time I'd realized my mistake it was a couple of years too late to jump on the very short-lived ToF bandwagon and so far I've never gotten around to giving it a go. I'm still not saying I won't but I'm guessing that particular bus has left the stop. Although I feel like I might at least have recognized the name, in one way I'm not surprised I didn't. There doesn't appear to be a great deal of similarity between ToF and NTE. Different setting, different genre, different everything, pretty much. (ToF veterans are welcome to pop into the comments and tell me why that's just so wrong...assuming there's anyone reading who ever played it.) Less defensible is my complete ignorance of where NTE was made. Is being made. It'd be nice to think country of origin doesn't matter for a video game but that would be a hard case to make. For all the hopes and fears trotted out across the past few decades, all the arguments in favor or against globalization, this is still a world of nation states and nations have cultures all their own. Only in games, maybe not so much. It's blurry at best. For one thing, publishers with a global reach want to sell to all markets and they don't necessarily want to be running multiple versions to suit local tastes. Even if there is still a surprising amount of that sort of thing going on. For another, " globalization ", as it applies to entertainment these days, often means " localization ". Movies are made with different endings or a different emphasis in the storyline so as to play better in various territories. Games are localized not just by language but by cultural expectations including but not limited to age, dress code and the creatures you have to kill. I have a post brewing about aesthetic fragmentation that might get written one day... Localization for the " Western " market does, theoretically, make it less obvious what the original intentions of the creators might have been but it's often no more than a thin, surface veneer stretched over a mostly unchanged framework. The innate cultural values and taboos that, consciously or unconsciously, drive the narrative and the aesthetic remain. Or I assume they do. Except that I have such a shaky understanding of what those values and taboos might be, it's touch and go whether I'd recognize them in the first place. If there's one thing playing more games developed in China has taught me it's that I don't really know what China's like. Modern China, anyway. Zentia used to be my idea of a " Chinese " game - all pagodas and dragons and people wearing straw hats. Neverness To Everness feels much more like my idea of a Japanese game, all modern technology, skyscrapers and neon. Which, to be fair, would also be my ignorant take on a Korean game, I guess, except I'd expect anything from Japan to be quirkier and cuter... Is this racist? Maybe. I think it's more likely just ignorant. And lazy. I'd hold my hand up to both of those. Does it matter in the context of playing a video game? I guess not, so long as it leads to unconsidered assumptions being challenged and changed. And that does happen, quite a lot. For example, unrelated to Tyler's comment and how it got me thinking about who was behind NTE and what they were trying to tell me, I'd already been wondering why there was such a huge focus on work in the game. It's a major theme. Possibly the major theme. All the characters talk about their work all the time. It might be an even bigger obsession with many of them than food. All of them have jobs that they seem to take very seriously but despite their career goals, most of them also seem to have some kind of side-hustle going on. How they find time to sleep, let alone fit in any kind of social or private life, beats the hell out of me. I'm not even talking about hand-wavy game mechanics, like the way they can all somehow pop up to fight my battles for me any time, anywhere. Or how the same characters can work for me, 24/7, staffing the ever-increasing number of cafes that make up my growing business empire. No, I'm talking about proper, in-game second jobs the characters hold in character, usually menial, entry-level, gig economy deals like handing out leaflets in the street or doing courier work. More worrying is the way no-one seems to have any kind of employment rights. The subject of overtime comes up constantly, always with characters dreading it but glumly accepting it as an inevitability of employment. And everyone appears to be on-call all the time. Having an official day off in no way prevents anyone from getting an urgent call telling them to come back to work. They all complain about it but none of them questions it. Work comes first seems to be a universally acknowledged maxim. Someone literally says it in one of the quests I did yesterday although I failed to get a screencap. As someone who's spent their entire life doing their best to avoid as much work as possible, I find it exhausting just to watch! I want the characters to kick back against the system that exploits them - organize, unionize, withdraw their labor - anything other than just complaining about it in private but doing it anyway. I guess that's why my favorite character in the game so far is Hitori , the boss of Eidon Antiques . Hitori seems to do as little work as possible. She sleeps a lot, drinks a lot more, and mostly sends other people to do the jobs she can't be bothered with, which is all of them. As we see in the Main Story sequence, she's extremely capable when she needs to be but she doesn't feel the need to waste any energy proving herself to anyone. Mint, for one , could learn plenty from her example. The whole milieu reeks of double standards, hypocrisy and compromise, anyway, and Hitori is management so she can afford to delegate. She's not in any position to set an example. Half her staff is children! Granted, it's hard to tell exactly how old anyone's meant to be in NTE, what with the ever-rejuvenating anime art style, but Nanali, Edgar and Sakiri are specifically referred to as " kids " on multiple occasions, not least by Hitori herself. And Eidon isn't an isolated example of child labor. Illica and Haniel from Sterry Express seem to be much the same age, give or take a year or two. What are the rules in Hetherau about employing children? Aren't they supposed to be in full-time education? There are certainly schools because one of the side quests takes you inside one but I don't see the slightest hint that any of the teenage cast is enrolled anywhere. Maybe being an Esper takes you out of the classroom? I could buy that if they were all transferred into some government program for potential assets in the Anomaly Wars but how would it square with them all ending up in the back room of an antique shop owned by an alcoholic, spending their time watching TV, bickering and pretending to run a junior version of the mob? But then the ordinary rules don't seem to apply to characters destined to become playable some day. It's different for Hethereau's regular citizenry. They don't get to sit around watching shows all day long. Still, it is true that most of the people Flora meets seem to be reasonably happy in their work. All those hucksters outside stores and the sales people behind the counter inside. If you talk to them at length, though - and you often can because there's a lot of incidental, non-storyline dialog in NTE - it's often possible to sense an underlying dissatisfaction or ennui; workers for the same company getting a better deal, other branches offering a better quality of life... The grass is always greener ten blocks over. Perhaps the most overtly subversive conversation I've enjoyed so far was with an unnamed " Slacking Citizen ", who gleefully informed Flora that " slacking off is the essence of work ". That's the attitude! She was still very concerned Flora not tell her boss, mind you, so i don't think she's going to be doing any organizing anytime soon Maybe I'm reading more into all of this than I should but I can't help feeling the writers are telling us something about the society they live in. I get the feeling they may not disagree with the ethics of the way work is where they're from but they find the execution just a little hard to manage. Yes, work is great and of course we all need to do our best all the time but wouldn't it be nice to have a goddam day off, once in a while? I imagine, if you're sufficiently attuned to it, you'd be able to sense specific cultural nuances within all the games that would clue you in to which specific countries the developers - or maybe just the writers - came from, without needing to look up the street address of the company to be sure. It's probably all there, embedded in assumptions about family, responsibility, work and individualism, themes that seem to come up in dialog over and over again. For an ignorant westerner like me, though, what it mostly does is reinforce a pre-existing idea that life is more regimented in the East, wherever the East might be. And for me, the whole idea of taking what you do for a living in any way seriously seems almost distasteful. That's how I was raised. I mean, it's only a job, isn't it? It's not like it's anything important...
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
3 weeks ago
Yesterday's post was supposed to be about something entirely different but it got away from me in the first paragraph and I never even tried to wrangle it back to where it was meant to be going. Sometimes it's best just to give these things their head, although if you were wondering why it felt so under-researched and lacking in focus, now you know. The upside was that I got an extra post out of it. The downside was that all day I couldn't stop thinking about the one I'd meant to write. It was going to be a really short one, too. Well, it might have been. I always say that even if it rarely turns out to be true. Here's the short part, coming up now. So short I could use it for the title and pretty much leave it at that. Lacrimosa is a vampire. There we are. That's it. That's what the post was going to be about. I'm not claiming it's a great revelation or that I've had some kind of amazing insight. It's bloody obvious. It's clearly not meant to be a secret. The odd thing, though, is that if you google " Is Lacrimosa a vampire? " you get... well I'll get to that in a moment. If you google " Is Lacrimosa in Neverness to Everness a vampire?", though, you get a bland handful of links confirming she's " officially a sleepy vampire " and pretty much nothing else at all. I thought it would be more of a discussion topic but it seems not. Either people genuinely don't care or they haven't even noticed. It has to be the former. You can't possibly not notice. Here are the giveaways: She sleeps in a coffin She can turn into a bat. She lives on tomato jelly. Wait? What? What was that last one? Lacrimosa is obsessed with tomatoes in general. As you can see in one of the screenshots above, she has tomato plushies all over her apartment. She also grows tomatoes in the yard outside. What she really craves, though, is tomato jelly, which for some reason can very easily be had from vending machines in streets all over Hethereau . But hang on a minute... vampires don't drink tomato juice. Or jelly. They drink blood. Famous for it, in fact. And I guess that's why Lacrimosa can't be a proper vampire. Well, that and how she seems fine with being out in the sunshine and all. But tomato jelly looks an awful lot like blood. Not just in the game but in real life. Oh yes, didn't you know? Tomato jelly is a real thing. I'd never heard of it but google it and you'll find dozens of recipes and countless photographs and in some of them it looks really quite bloody. Although not nearly so much in the jars it's generally stored in as it does in Lacrimosa's preferred container, which is via something that looks extraordinarily like those plastic bags full of blood you see hooked up to an IV in hospital dramas. And which I have seen, on numerous occasions, in TV shows and movies about vampires who're trying to go straight and who only drink human blood from blood banks and the like. So, Lacrimosa is a sleepy vegetarian vampire, maybe? She likes the look and feel of drinking blood but not the actual blood itself. A bit like vegans who still like to pretend they're eating bacon by mocking it up from mushrooms or whatever the hell they make the revolting stuff from. I wonder how she'd eat an actual tomato? Would she sink her fangs into it and suck the juice? And that about wraps it up for Lacrimosa in NTE. Except remember how I said earlier I'd get to the "Is Lacrimosa a vampire? " google search results later? Well, this is later. On my first attempt to find out if, indeed, Lacrimosa is a vampire and if so what people were saying about it, I omitted to include the name of the game. That's how I was reminded of something I theoretically ought to have remembered, having read the book, namely that Lacrimosa has a namesake, who I strongly suspect she was named after. It'd be a bit of a co-incidence otherwise, wouldn't it? Lacrimosa de Magpyr is a teenage vampire in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld novel, Carpe Jugulum . The Discworld Wiki describes her as " excessively cruel ". The LSpace Wiki goes into more detail, calling her " spiteful, sadistic and malevolent " and noting she " acts as an obvious teenager with traits such as surliness, rebelliousness and being argumentative ." I haven't seen our Lacrimosa doing anything like that but it's interesting that the Tomato Jelly Rampage quest ends with Skia (Who is himself, at least by appearance, some kind of werewolf.) reminding Lacrimosa about certain basic aspects of civilized human behavior, which he has apparently had cause to tell her about before but which she clearly keeps forgetting. As with Tako yesterday, I'm beginning to think there may be more going on here than we're being told. On the other hand, Lacrimosa is set to become a playable character so I can't think she's going to turn out to be a villain like Tako almost certainly will. The whole concept of people behaving like vampires without necessarily being vampires is of some personal interest to me, as it happens, so maybe I'm more alert to it than average. One of the two quasi-novels I wrote in the '90s, the one for which I actually finished the first draft, has at its center a group of suspiciously long-lived, slow-aging, vaguely unsettling characters who may or may not have something to hide. Since I've spent much of the last twelve months turning that novel into songs, it's at the forefront of my mind and I'm easily triggered by anything even remotely similar. It's entirely possible I may be reading more into this than there is but it has me wondering... I really like a lot of the characters in Neverness To Everness. There's some very strong writing here, supported by equally strong voice acting. I'd be happy to spend time with most of the characters I've met so far. Lacrimosa, though, is... problematic. I'm not concerned about her being a vampire. if indeed she is one, although the tomato fetish is a little disconcerting. It's really the sleepy part I'm having trouble with, though. Her pauses are positively Pinteresque. I keep wanting to finish her sentences for her. And her voice makes her sound like a six year old doing an impression of Vivien Leigh in Streetcar . Which is good, in a way. I don't not like it. But it can be a bit much. Then again, Neverness To Everness is all a bit much at the moment, not that I'm complaining. I just hope it doesn't end up going the same way as Wuthering Waves and end up being so much I can't play it any more because that degree of commitment just isn't what I'm after when I settle down to play a video game these days.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
3 weeks ago
Something the developers - or maybe it's the publishers - of most of the open world gacha games I've played like to do is poll the players. Not the core fanbase, the people who follow the game on social media and chatter about it on Reddit and Discord, but all the people, the silent millions who actually play the games. Neverness To Everness has barely been out for a week and I've already completed two enormous in-game polls asking me how I feel about it. The polls are multiple choice but they also have plenty of space to give your opinions and suggestions. The one I filled in yesterday ended, as they often do, by asking what I thought Hotta could do to make the game better. Given I'd picked " Very Satisfied " for almost every answer up to then, you might have thought I'd struggle to come up with anything but I didn't have any problem at all. What the game is missing most, in my opinion, is personalization, something that applies to just about every game of its kind. When you have a business model that revolves around constantly encouraging players to add new characters to a team and then to swap from one character to another during gameplay, the underlying design mitigates against any form of personal identity for or identification with whatever character you're playing. It doesn't much help that you can dress them up, either, especially when the only way you can acquire new clothes is through the cash shop. I'm not sure if that's the only way to do it in NTE because, as I told them in the poll, I haven't even looked at the cash shop offers yet, but if there's another method I haven't happened across it. I haven't taken a look at the cash shop yet because I'm a terrible, terrible customer as far as any game developer is concerned but especially for anyone operating any kind of Free To Play game. F2P to me really does mean free. I struggle to think of a single, wholly F2P game, where I've ever spent any money at all. There are several reasons, the first and foremost of which is that I'm a mean-spirited old skinflint I barely have any desire to spend money on anything, period. I'm not much of a shopper, in or out of games. My default, baseline emotional reaction to just about anything I see up for sale is " Well, I'm sure I can manage perfectly well without that ! " In games, I frequently don't bother to spend even the in-game currency other than on essentials. I just let it pile up until I need it for something practical. Money doesn't burn holes in my pockets, real or imaginary. Still, there are occasions when I might make an exception. I do like playing dress-up... In fantasy games, I generally don't much care what my characters look like. Or, rather, I do but the games rarely want to facilitate my low-rent fashion aspirations. I'd quite like my characters to look like regular people but apparently that's not what I'm supposed to want. Redbeard was saying something the other day about how hard it is to get a character in a fantasy MMORPG to look like an ordinary person rather than an extremely rich one but really that's the best scenario. Most player-characters in fantasy games look more like a ten year-old's idea of a super-hero than any member of the aristocracy. If you want to look like an average member of society, you'd often be best off sticking with whatever starting clothes the game gave you. You remember? The dull set that was clearly intended to make you as keen as possible to level up just so you could get out of them and into something better. In games with a contemporary setting or a near-future approximation thereof, the chances of putting together something that both feels natural and looks stylish tend to be a lot better. In the really good games you might even manage to dress your character in clothes that would look cool even to someone who doesn't play video games. I know! It's the dream, right? My gold standard for dressing well in video games is still The Secret World . No other game I've played has ever done a better job of letting me create a character that looks like I wish I looked like in real life. Or indeed, who's dressed in clothes I'd be prepared to leave the house wearing. (It also lets you look like a crazy person who thinks it ought to be Halloween every day of the year, so there's something for everyone!) One of the many things that's pulled me out of fantasy MMORPGs and into open world gacha titles over the last few years is the clothes. Everything just looks so much better. The design sensibilities and attention to detail are orders of magnitude beyond anything I'd been used to seeing in the games I'd been playing before ( TSW always exempted.). The streets are full of NPCs who look like they actually thought about what to wear when they got up and obviously all the characters the company is hoping you'll pay money for are catwalk-ready. The problem is, they never really change. All the characters have a signature look and they stick with it. There are cash shop options to change things up with appearance gear and sometimes it comes free with special events or holidays but if you don't want to spend money or wait for the rare opportunity, you're mostly going to have to keep on wearing the same old duds. Where MMORPGs have the advantage is that they expect the player to have just a few characters, who they'll stick with for a long time, not constantly be acquiring new ones. To keep people playing they have to provide lots of chances to change things up for those characters, keep them fresh. New possibilities come at you from all directions: drops, quests, holidays, events, crafting, cash shops. There are so many ways in an MMORPG to keep your character looking... well, if not good then at least different. And players lap it up. Some even have fashion as a kind of end-game goal. It wasn't always that way. There was a time when you just wore what had the best stats and complained about how awful you looked but those days are long, long gone. Now every Western MMO has some form of transmog or appearance tab so you can wear your best fighting gear while looking like you're dressed for the Met Gala. In most of the gacha games I've played there is no gear as such. I don't believe the characters even had a paper doll with gear slots in the traditional manner. Maybe a weapon slot if you're lucky. Or a hat. The notable exception, in my experience, was Noah's Heart although that was kind of a gacha/MMORPG hybrid. Noah's Heart did have a few gear slots but what it did that worked so well for me was allow me to fill them by mixing and matching items from each of my playable characters to build a look of my own. It managed that through a clever mix of an Affection system and crafting that made the process feel more organic. I played Noah's Heart for over a year, longer than I've played any pure gacha title so far, and although the general quality of the game and its story were both well below the standard of the market leaders, the main reason I stayed so long was that I was working on looks for my character. Not that it did the game much good. Noah's Heart, of course, is no longer with us. I think it's the only gacha game I've played that's not. It was the lack of polish that finished the game off but I don't imagine the way it let you dress your character up without spending any money did it any favors. I'm not really surprised other gacha games don't allow it. I had all of this in the back of my mind when I filled out the poll and gave Hotta my considered opinion on what might make their already excellent game even better. I didn't have a lot of hope they'd be willing to add costumes and appearance gear as quest rewards or implement crafting so you could make your own clothes. Of course, I still asked . I mean, if you don't ask... What I thought might be a bit more realistic would be pets. Pets are great for making your character feel like an individual. And most games have them so they can't be that hard to add. I also think pets are something that could happily co-exist in a gacha game as both cash-shop items and in-game purchases or rewards. I'm pretty sure I'm pushing on an open door here. Hethereau already has pet shops and it already has pettable dogs and cats, although you have to do a quest (That I've started but haven't finished.) before you can actually pet them. There's apparently even a hint or two in some conversation or other that a pet system might be coming, or so I've heard. That was one thing I suggested in the poll. I wasn't the only one . I also suggested they should add some form of crafting and gathering. It's hard to believe they don't have gathering already. Every game has gathering. And since they have housing, furniture and house items would be the obvious output. Can't say I have a lot of hope for that one either, since they already have a well-established in-game means of obtaining housing items via furniture shops but it's a possibility. The final suggestion I made, one that I'm sure must have been echoed by thousands of respondents, was for emotes to be added to the open world. There's already a very limited selection, maybe half a dozen of the most basic gestures, in the game already but they're accessible only when using the camera. Even then it's via a somewhat obscure menu option and they don't persist long enough for you to take a picture unless you're in snapshot mode. Well, they didn't for me, although I might have been doing something wrong. I was only testing it, anyway. I don't use emotes much, so their omission doesn't impact me significantly, but even I was surprised they weren't in the game from the start. What sort of anime game launches without a full suite of emotes? Not to mention dances. I haven't seen any of those, either. Damn! Should have thought of dances... And boats! I forgot boats... Those were my suggestions to improve the game: better appearance options, crafting, gathering, a pet system and emotes. I'd bet we'll get a couple of those very soon indeed and a few of them sometime closer to never. Oh, and the other suggestion I made was that they add a PayPal option to the cash shop. That's the other main reason I never buy anything F2P games. They always want direct payments and I'm not happy about giving new companies I don't know much about my financial details. It's irrational in a way. I'll quite happily pay a subscription by credit card. Not sure what the difference is. Maybe I should have a rethink. I would actually spend a little money in some games, sometimes, if it wasn't for that. Hey, who knows? Maybe NTE will be so successful they'll start selling currency cards in stores. Then I could ask for some for my birthday and Christmas. I should have suggested that, too. I'll mention it in the next poll. There's bound to be another in a week or two.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
3 weeks ago
There was always going to be a music post today. It's a Friday and Fridays or Saturdays are the best days for writing about music, not least because Mrs Bhagpuss is at work so I can crank the volume and sing along. I could do that anyway, but I might have to explain my choices, not to mention my interpretation. If it wasn't going to be a music post, it'd have been something about Neverness To Everness . Again. I probably ought to pace myself a bit there. And it's been three weeks since the last What I've been Listening To so we're about due. But then a couple of things happened. Yesterday, a game called Mixtape launched. Anyone who's either in Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League or has been reading his posts about it might have spotted that after five months I still haven't seen a single game I've picked go live. Mixtape is the first and as you might guess from the title it's all about music. It's so much all about music, in fact, that the launch picked up mentions on several music sites I follow, including NME and Stereogum . As both of them note, it has one hell of a soundtrack, including favorites of mine like Iggy , the Jesus and Marychain, the Cure and Roxy Music , not to mention one of my favorites from my schooldays, Have You Seen Her? by the Chi-Lites . I won't say anything about how well the game is doing for me in the League. I'll leave that to Wilhelm. It did seem like it might be an idea to do a whole post based on the tracklist, though, so I was still mulling that over this morning, when I saw there was a new post from Amy Rigby on her blog, Diary of Amy Rigby , which I only now realize I don't have in my blog roll. Corrected! The post isn't about music at all. It's about wardrobes. But it mentions in passing a band called Lassie that Amy's husband, Wreckless Eric , is working with at his and Amy's home studio. Out of curiosity, I went to look for them on YouTube, where I didn't find them. (I found them later, another way. This is them , covering a Porter Wagoner/Dolly Parton number - for about thirty seconds. By co-incidence or maybe not really, this morning I was also listening to an interview Eric and Amy did with KSQD in Santa Cruz, where Amy asked for some Porter Wagoner and they played his " Cold Hard Facts of Life ", which it turns out is also a cover as well as a hell of a song...) What I did get when I searched YouTube for Lassie was a whole lot of results featuring bands or songs named after the famous dog and her movies. I had no idea it was a such a thing! That inevitably gave me the idea of putting a whole " Lassie " post together and I got as far as bookmarking four or five possible choices before I realized I was going to run out of good ones long before I had enough. So here we are, back where we began, with a What I've Been Listening To post. And it's almost themed, too, although not through any calculation or plan of mine. It's just that I seem to have been listening to a lot of new songs by really quite famous people for a change, instead of the usual run of obscurities. Enough. Let's rock! Rock Music - Charli xcx How is it I've only just noticed the xcx is lower case? Or is that new? When I saw Charli saying her next project was going to be a rock album , this isn't exactly what I was expecting. It seems it's more an album about rock music than one made of it. If it's all like this it's gonna rock anyway! I have some notes on the video but I'll save them for later. Might be a post in there, somewhere. In The Stars - The Rolling Stones I dunno. I'd have said they ought to stop but then they do something like this. They sound better in their 80s than they did in the 90s, that's for sure. That chorus... Jeep - Kim Petras I've been dimly aware of Kim Petras for years. She's a big star but I never felt the need to find out what she sounded like until she started recording with Frost Children . I liked that but I love this. It's got the bittersweet sweep of Americana and the swagger and sass of (hyper)pop fitted tight into one another like they shouldn't but they do. Really great lyrics, too. I'm just gonna say it. Doesn't sound like Lana musically but it sounds like Lana lyrically. She did it live on Jimmy Fallon last night and fucking killed it! I was wondering what the weird double mic was and then it turns out to be a torch. Did not see that coming. The YouTube clip is really quiet, unfortunately. Turn it right up. Gonna be watching out for the album now. drop dead - Olivia Rodrigo All the stars are out tonight! Real crowd-pleasing set I got going here. Actually, this was meant to be in the last post but I couldn't squeeze it in. Gotta find space for it somewhere or it won't be eligible for the Best of the Year post and that would be a travesty. Know what Olivia and the Rolling Stones have in common? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Robert Smith is on both their new albums, that's what. He's putting himself about, isn't he? He even gets a name check in this one. Also, that thing Olivia does quite a lot, where she talks in that bouncing rhythm? Always reminds me of 88 Lines About 44 Women by the Nails . And something by the Student Teachers from the same era that I can't put a name to. Olivia would have fit right into that post-no-wave NY scene... I Feel So Free - Madonna Oh my god! Will no-one think about the children? How are they going to get famous if all these old people won't stop making good new records?! Did you see Madge on stage with Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella? I did. They stream the whole thing live now, all stages, both weekends, then repeat it the next day. I don't like festivals in general and Coachella is a particularly egregious example of one of the reasons why, namely performers playing to audiences who aren't all that interested, especially in the daytime slots. I wasn't much taken with the Coachella bill this year either. The only band I really wanted to see was Blondshell . I missed them the first weekend but I caught about five songs of the repeat of their set the next weekend before Mrs Bhagpuss came in to tell me tea was ready and by the time I came back to watch the rest of it they'd stopped the repeat and moved on to the live stream. So that sucked, especially since I was going to film the whole thing on my phone, seeing as how you can't download livestreams even when they're on playback. But on the plus side, I did manage to see all of Madonna and Sabrina doing Like A Prayer, Vogue and Bring Your Love . You can, too, if you click this link although I only really recommend it out of historical interest. I'd suggest watching the other Sabrina doing Kiss City instead. Not only is it wonderful, the way she sings almost entirely on one note all the way through, but it also shows you just how demoralizing it has to be, playing these stupid beanos. At least it sounds like a few people enjoyed it. Have I run out of famous people yet? Hmm. Maybe. Switch Up - Mike D Nah, we're good still. The Beastie Boys count. On first hearing I thought this might be thirty seconds too long but I revise that opinion. If anything, it might not be long enough! Midnight Sun - Zara Larsson Reminds me of something but I can't figure out what it is. Then again, doesn't everything? Don't think I ever shared the collab she did with PinkPantheress , did I? Pantheress is so all over everything these days I keep missing stuff. Who'd ever have thought she'd turn out to be such a huge influence? Also, I only just realized, when I was searching my own blog to egoboo myself about how early I picked up on her (2021 in case you were counting. I was. I always do. Don't sadface me.) and it didn't find some posts I knew were there that I realized she runs both names together, as in PinkPantheress. I know that but apparently I keep forgetting because most of the posts with her in have her as Pink Pantheress. Typography is a real bear these days. Oh, wait, this is a Zara Larsson song. Pantheress isn't even on it... Forget I said anything. Boys In Blue - Nia Archives And with that I think we're out of megastars. Not that Nia Archives isn't a big name but it's more cult big than just plain big. Also her first appearance here I think although I always enjoy her stuff when I hear it. This is the first that really caught my ear though. Very 'seventies football chant, which is always nice to hear. In a pop song, that is. Not so much coming up the road behind you on a Saturday afternoon. Been there, done that. Not feeling the nostalgia for it, if I'm honest. And with that, I think we really are done with anyone you could call famous. And yet somehow we're not done altogether. Internet Fantasy - Spacemoth That reminds me. Jane Weaver hasn't had anything new out for a while, has she? Boat Garage - hey, nothing You know how they say " Write what you know "? This is literally about the day the house next door to where the band live burned down, apparently. As it says in the song " They left the embers in the boat garage After the birthday party! " Which is all very well but what the hell is a boat garage? And finally, the pick of the Lassie litter. Maybe I'll share the rest another time. I'll have to see if there any other songs or bands named for famous dogs first... Lassie - Doc Holliday Takes The Shotgun I think he's singing about all the dogs he's buried but it's hard to concentrate on the lyrics when he's lunging and leering at the camera like that. Great bass sound anyway. I do love me some dirty bass.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
4 weeks ago
Nimgimli and I have been having a conversation in the comment threads of our respective blogs about the merits or otherwise of a series of quests in Neverness To Everness involving a character called Taygedo . I covered a little of this in yesterday's post but to recap, Taygedo is a work colleague of the PC, he features heavily in the early game and a lot of players find him really annoying. I think I'm going to need to break that down a little. Bear with me if you don't play NTE and maybe even if you do because I'm about to give some background detail to elements of the game I don't entirely understand yet. The set-up for the game is that there was some kind of global supernatural or paranormal incident a while back, which continues in the form of rolling reality breaches of varying significance and seriousness. The cause may be explained and I just didn't take it in or it may be unknown. Either way, I have no clear understanding of how it happened, how long ago or what the wider implications might be. What I do know is that these incursions show no signs of stopping and regular, human society has had to learn to live with them. It's clearly been happening long enough that most people have adapted to accept and incorporate the new status quo. There are government departments and private organizations ready and willing to deal with any new incursion or threat. Responses vary from banishment to containment but there are also opportunities to be had so there's no real sense of imminent apocalypse, which makes a nice change. There are rules and systems in place to allow and even encourage the integration of any useful artifacts or materials that enter the world via an Anomaly, which is only to be expected. More importantly, there are strict rules for handling the entities that arrive through anomalies (And, I think, for those that were already here, if they become in some way changed by them.) Sentient creatures that meet certain criteria, mostly not being dangerous, are known as Oddities and these Oddities can be sponsored either by individuals or organizations. A sponsored Oddity has to be kept under close watch at all times by its Guarantor, making them roughly equivalent to a pet dog. They're not allowed to roam freely and their Guarantor is responsible for any accidents or mischief they may cause. Particularly well-adapted Oddities, however, can apply for Citizenship. If granted, this gives them an official ID Card and the right to move around the city freely, without oversight by their Guarantor. They can also have paid jobs, own property and do many, if not all, of the things a human citizen can. The ID needs to be renewed annually. Renewal is not automatic, requiring a visit to the BAC offices and a repeat of the same tests that granted citizenship in the first place. Providing nothing has changed, though, renewal is pretty much a formality. That, at least, is how I understand it, having finished several of Taygedo's quests, in which much is explained. A lot of what I just wrote might be wrong though because while there's an extraordinary amount of detail on the bureaucracy of the process there's little in the way of historical context. And my character knows very little more about it all than I do. The player-character is a newcomer to the city and with memory loss on top (So what's new?). It's confusing for her and me but for the NPCs we meet, it's all just everyday life. This is a society that's both familiar and comfortable with its situation. Crisis? What crisis? Taygedo is a Citizen. Like most Oddities he has an ability (Superpower might be a reasonable analogy.) which in his case is some sort of affinity with and ability to affect mechanical devices. I'm still hazy on the details but it allows him to work as a mechanic at Eibon Antiques , under whose corporate Guarantorship he remains, even as a citizen. In appearance he's a short, plump, anthropomorphic otter wearing clothes, except for his head, which is an old-fashioned cathode ray television set displaying the cartoon face of an otter. He speaks in an incomprehensible dialect consisting largely of variations on his own name and he has the squeaky cartoon voice you'd expect a comedy cartoon otter to have. By most reports, people either love him or loathe him. I like him, personally. Nimgimli is firmly in the other camp. What I think we both agree on, in common with many others on both sides of the argument, is that Taygedo and his storyline have no place in the opening chapters of the main quest. There's a great summation of the problem in the opening post of this Reddit thread . As the OP explains, the quest, which is called " Love That Begins With Lies ", may work for players who " like Slice of Life anime " but " If you don't like those types of story, you will HATE it. " What's arguably worse than merely alienating what's probably the majority of your players with a poor aesthetic choice is misleading them about the nature of the game itself. As the OP ( MutedCountry3708 ) points out, those players " may WRONGFULLY think that this is how the rest of MSQ is going to be: which is NOT the case ". I'm going to have to take their word on that because I haven't seen any more of the MSQ yet. You need to get to Hunter Level 14 to open the next chapter, which is also a problem because what does the game suggest you do while you're waiting? A whole bunch more of Taygedo's quests, that's what. The follow-on is seamless. I received a very urgent message from Taygedo almost immediately after the MSQ section ended, although I ought to clarify that all messages from Taygedo are " Very Urgent " because he's a hyper-excitable drama queen. I didn't realize until much later that it wasn't just a continuation of the same quest. I'm going to give my considered opinion here that Taygedo's quests are actually pretty good. The MSQ one is arguably the weakest and certainly the silliest but it's not bad . The others I found very engaging, particularly the one where I had to accompany him to get his ID. All these quests supply a lot of interesting and helpful backstory without making it feel like you're getting infodumped. If you're interested in backstory and world-building, you'll likely get something out of them. If you're not, though, and for many people I suspect even if you are, you're in for a long and tedious plod through a really extraordinary amount of surprisingly realistic legalese and bureaucratic red tape. There is a fair bit more to do than just click through dialog but effectively these are the short story equivalent of visual novels. And here's the real problem, I think. Although I knew going in that Neverness To Everness was to some extent a life sim as well as an adventure game and an RPG, I wasn't really imagining this level of engagement with the minutiae of life in Hethereau . Taygedo's citizenship is just one example among many of the way the game is willing to let you experience the world at the same pace as its citizens, regardless of whether that makes it entertaining. Here's another example, taken from my session this morning. To leave my fifth floor apartment I have to open the door into the hallway, walk along the hall to the elevator, call the lift with the button on the wall, wait for it to arrive, walk (The game enforces walking at this point.) into it, wait for the door to close, select the floor I want, press the button, wait for the elevator to descend, then finally walk out into the lobby. Every part of that operation takes roughly as long as it would if I was doing it in real life. The only other game I remember being that literal about things is Star Citizen . I also rode the bus again today, to see where it went and how long it would take. The simulation was disturbingly realistic or perhaps i should say authentic. The bus moved at the speed of a city bus, obeyed every traffic regulation, gave all the right maneuvering signals and stopped at every stop, where it waited for NPCs to get on and off. Outside, all the other vehicles moved just as real vehicles would, always assuming they were being driven by people who obeyed the rules of the road. Pedestrians used the crossings, waited for the lights to change, broke into a jog if they were still on the crossing when the traffic began to move... I'm having a great time in NTE precisely because it's the most convincing iteration of a fully-functioning city I've ever seen in a game-world. I thought the cities in Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves were impressive but this is better than either. Which is amazing, if what you're looking for is a life sim but not so much if you thought you were getting slam-bang supernatural action. The promotional videos certainly did give the impression of a far more action-oriented experience and from what I can tell that experience is certainly in the game, somewhere. It's just not in the opening chapters of the MSQ. There's some of it in the Prolog but that doesn't last long. Taygedo's MSQ quest, even without all the subsidiaries, goes on for much longer. Or maybe it just feels like it. The early stages of the MSQ feel a bit out of kilter even allowing for Taygedo and his love-life butting in and taking over. Even though I've been enjoying myself, I still have relatively little idea what my character is supposed to be doing. She seems to have been inducted into a quasi-military police force at one moment and then handed on to a bunch of eccentrics running a dubious back street junk shop the next. The BAC, which inducted her, is full of hyper-efficient workaholics operating from state of the art offices bursting with hi-tech equipment, whereas Eidon Antiques is a ramshackle operation in a back alley in the bad part of town, run by an alcoholic good-time girl, an otter and a bunch of bickering children. How these pieces fit together beats me. The thing is, I like the shabby, fractious crew at Eidon whereas the slick, smart, secret-agent/super-hero gang that picked me up in the Prolog and passed me along to Eidon when they'd done with me made my teeth itch. I'd far rather hang out with otters and tweens pretending to be in the cosa nostra than a bunch of runway models cosplaying James Bond . But that's just me. I'm the part of the audience this stuff is working for, although I'm one hundred per cent sure I don't fit the demographic description. I'd be more than happy to carry on with Taygedo's storyline and not get back to the serious stuff ever. Unfortunately, there has to be a real chance that a sizeable portion of the audience, the part that doesn't feel the same way, will already have voted with their uninstall buttons. Taygedo's trivial troubles might make a great series of side-quests but even I can see there's no place for them in the main storyline. Except... there is this one thing... Remember what that quest is called? " Love That Begins With Lies". That obviously means the lies Taygedo tells his love-interest, Tako , as he tries to impress her, right? Well, yes, but what if also meant the lies she's telling him ? I have no evidence for this, other than a nebulouis sense that there's something ironic about her dialog, but I just don't trust her. So much so that, at one point in the storyline, I literally told Taygedo out loud, " I wouldn't trust her as far as I could kick her! " Granted, it might have been in part because Taku reminds me of Sweet Sue from the Sooty Show , a character I've always found intensely irritating. Or it might have just been that Taku is BLOODY ANNOYING! Even so, I'm pretty sure she's up to something. If she is and if it turns out to have some major storyline implications further down the line, it still won't justify the placement of the quest where it is. It's just " in the WRONG PLACE , at the WRONG TIME " as MutedCountry3708 so aptly puts it. I only hope it hasn't done too much damage to the game's prospects overall. I imagine most players will grit their teeth and get past it. I hope so, anyway. Me, though? I'm looking forward to more of Taygedo's antics. Who doesn't love a comedy otter?
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
4 weeks ago
Here's a first-world blogging problem if there ever was one: new games give you far too much to blog about. Such a terrible situation to find yourself in! Enough ideas for a dozen posts but how are you meant to choose? Maybe pick the most immediate, the one that's right there in front of you, shimmering with vitality and immediacy? Or should you let it rest a while to settle and prove? But if you do, will it join all those other, unwritten posts? Drift away into the void, never to be seen? Should you stand back, take the broader view? Focus on the details? What are you trying to achieve, anyway? Do you want to tell stories? Offer advice? Share information? Analyze and explain? Are you looking to give a show and tell with pictures? A critical essay on one specific aspect of the game? Half a dozen bullet-pointed paragraphs on several? Or perhaps you find yourself so stunned by choice all you can do is write about how hard it is to choose at all. Yeah, that really would be a waste of time, wouldn't it? So let's not do that. Lens Flare When this blog was young, I'd have done a whole post about it. Just the sort of sidewise lean I loved back then. Mind you, that whole post would only have been the length of one section of this one. I valued concision more then, too. Oh, but how I love lens flare! It hits me like a drug. When I say I like a game there's a non-trivial chance what I really mean is it gives good lens flare. Quite a lot of the imports I've been keen on the last few years answer to that. On any given day you care to name, there's a strong possibility I'll have been staring into the sun, mesmerized by the glare, fascinated by the halo, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral. Again. And taking screenshots. Do you know how hard it is to not take screenshots of lens flare? Especially at sunset or sunrise. Games have golden hours just like Hollywood needs. I have to talk myself down, convince myself they aren't magical moments never to be repeated. Just coded performances, another show same time tomorrow. By The Clock It should get easier now, I found the clock. I found it yesterday. Actually, I didn't. The game told me about it. Oh, wait, I didn't mention the name of the game yet, did I? Neverness To Everness . I guess you guessed that, though. I was doing a quest. Not that they call them quests. Games with contemporary or futuristic settings tend to avoid giving that mystical gloss. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what they are called in NTE . Missions, maybe? Doesn't matter anyway, except that names always matter. But let's not go there just now. It was one of those deals you get in games sometimes, where the NPC tells you to come back in a while. A few minutes, a few hours, tonight, tomorrow, after dark, when you've had time to think about it. Any time but not right now, ok? They're annoying, aren't they? Does anyone actually enjoy being fobbed off by an NPC with a " Give me a day and I'll have finished making your boots. "? Why do developers even bother? Is it just to piss people off? Rhetorical question. Of course it is. Here's a tougher one. What might be going through a developer's mind when they add a quest like that, one with a hiatus, then pop in a hint telling you if you can't be bothered waiting you could just spin the hands on the clock and make it happen right away? That's what NTE does. I met this woman who was selling her car for real cheap except you could tell she didn't really want to. She asked me to come watch her race so I could check out what a great bargain it was but the race didn't start until six in the evening and it was midday then. The car was a real steal and I wanted it plus there was obviously a backstory and I wanted that too. I thought I'd do something else for the afternoon and come back later. Only I didn't need to bother. It seems you can set the time to anything you want. The weather, too. Those sunrises and sunsets? Any goddam time you please! All of which is top quality of life and so very welcome. Only, if you're allowing that, why even suggest waiting? I think it's for " realism ". It's not clear if the street races are even legal but they all happen after dark. Maybe the roads are just quieter then but I kinda doubt it. All the bad things happen at night, don't they? I guess it would make even less sense if you could talk to an NPC any time of day and a race would magically begin right there and then, though. Oh, the compromises we make for authenticity. Friends Would Be A Reality Show Here You know that thing everyone mocks about Friends ? Ok, ok! I'll be more specific. You know that one thing? How everyone always points out how unrealistic it is, to put it mildly, that a bunch of twentysomethings with crap jobs, if they even have any job at all this week, could afford live in those apartments in New York? Or any apartment? Yeah, well you ain't seen my pad in Hethereau ! I got it yesterday and it is saaweeet! So sweet! I was wondering when housing was going to appear, so I had a poke around and found you have to get to Tycoon Level 5 first. Tycoon Levels probably needs a post of their own but the tl:dr is that it's how you get all the casual/leisure options, like fishing and housing and runing a business, assuming you call that last a leisure activity, which I fricken' do not. I was momentarily concerned it might be a grind to get to Level 5 to open the feature that most interested me but it wasn't. I'm sure there will be grinds in the game but I haven't hit any yet. It took me a couple of sessions to get to where I needed to be and by sessions I mean fragments. I did some Tycooning in-between exploring and questing and taking screenshots of atmospheric weather conditions. I suppose it might have taken me an hour, all added up. So, getting on the housing ladder was quick and easy. It was also cheap. And like most things in the game it was quasi-realistic. I had to go to a real estate agency, where the realtor showed me what she had on her books. That part was convincing enough. The illusion of reality started to break down when I saw that only one property was available at my level, the rest needing to be unlocked. Then it shattered completely when I found out how much it cost: 200,000 Fons. That's almost chump change! What? It sounds like a lot? I suppose... I mean, 200,000 is a biggish number. But then, of course, if you don't play the game you have no idea what a " Fon " is so it might be a fortune or just a whole lot of nothing. I can't say I have a clear mental image of a Fon either. Bloody stupid name for a currency if you ask me. Every time I see it pluralized, it makes me think of Henry Winkler . Maybe they should have called it the Winkle. The important part is that, even though I've only just started playing, and even though I've spent most of my time goofing around, I still had enough cash on me to buy the apartment outright. And that was after I'd leased a cafe and bought a car! I imagine there'll be a whole post on housing at some point, not to mention the truly bizarre entrepreneurial economy, but for now I'll just say that just the starter home is a fifth floor duplex with huge picture windows and stunning views. If this is what a part-time gig at a down-at-heel, back-street enterprise in a poor part of town, run by a drunk and staffed largely by children gets you, god knows what I'll be able to afford when I get a real job! I bet you wish you lived in Hethereau. I know I do. Otterness To Notterness Nimgimli posted yesterday, listing a few things that were harshing his mellow in NTE and one of them was Taygedo . Taygedo is an otter with a television for a head because what else would he be? He works for the Eibon Antique Shop , the struggling business the PC gets drafted into right at the start of the game for reasons that are still not as clear to me as they probably should be. Taygedo communicates almost entirely by the use of the word " Taygedo " or slight variations, a bit like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy . He occasionally throws in a few grunts and squeals but conversations involving him mostly run along the lines of the old subtitled movie gag, where several sentences of dialog are rendered in the titles by just that single word. Only in reverse. I feel relatively neutral about the gimmick but it's self-evidently as likely to infuriate as delight. It certainly annoyed Nimgimli. However endearing or otherwise you find him, though, I do think making Taygedo the central figure in a lengthy storyline close to the start of the game is a high risk strategy. At best. Add to that, the plotline doesn't just give you an otter with a televison set for a head repeating one word over and over ad infinitum. It also asks you to stop whatever you're doing so you can help him set up a date with another otter (No TV head for this one.). You have to take him shopping, buy him clothes and gifts and then to pretend he's your boss so he can impress his date, who he's given the impression he's much more important than he really is. Basic 1960s sitcom plot in other words. I was going to say " minus the mechanical animism " but then I remembered My Mother The Car .... I can see why Nimgimli was losing patience if that's waht he'd been doing. I'm quite enjoying it myself. I've bought Taygedo the gear. I haven't yet been on the date yet. So that's something to look forward to... Setting Boundaries Finally, for this post that is, there's the issue of where to go next. Or rather where the game's going to let me go. I've been doing a lot of exploring and some of it has taken the form of seeing how far out of town I can get. It varies and it's not nearly as obvious as you'd imagine. Hethereau is bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by some lush green hills. I was fairly sure neither would be available to explore and I was mostly right but not entirely. The sea is just sea for the most part. The distant hills are out of reach but there is a substantial out-of-town wilderness area with campgrounds and a somewhat manicured stretch of woodland you can wander around in if you want. Not much to see there except trees but it's nice to get out of the city for a while. Across the river and stretching along the coast is what looks like another part of town although it could be a separate conurbation entirely. I wanted to see what it was like. It would be an exaggeration to say I felt confident I could go there. That would imply some element of doubt. I had none. I didn't think about it at all. I happened to be strolling along the beach opposite when I got the urge to go take a look so I took a right-turn to the ocean and ran straight into the red No Access barrier that materializes when you try to go somewhere you shouldn't. Because I can't take a hint, I tried a few other ways- gliding, crossing the bridges, swimming - no joy. You can see the area is fully developed. There are even cars moving through the streets. You just can't go there. Ooh, I was cross! Why even put the thing there if it's just a tease? I was crosser still, when I tried to go to PukaLand . PukaLand is an amusement park on an island just off the coast. Or maybe its on a peninsula. You can see it from anywhere on that side of the city, its fairground identity established by a huge ferris wheel and a Disneyesque castle. You can see it but you can't see it. You can go up to the gate but you can't go in. That damned red screen again. I can't say whether these and other inaccessible locations are places not yet " in the game " or whether they open up at certain points in the storyline but either way it's frustrating. I guess the positive take is that it means there's more content ready and waiting to go, one way or the other but damn! I wanted to go there now ! And that's it for today. Just some random thoughts among many. Plenty more where those came from but I'll try to narrow it down to just the one next time. Maybe. No promises.
bhagpuss.blogspot.com
1 month ago
Want to know how many screenshots I've taken in Neverness To Everness so far? A tad shy of a hundred and fifty. I'd say I've been quite restrained. I thought it would be more than that but I just counted them and it's not, so pardon me while I give myself a cookie. I've been out and about some, that's for sure. All over the place. Opened all the map now, by visiting each of those big, golden spikes that let you see what's around you. Lift the fog. They do something else, as well, I think. Something much more important to the welfare of the city than just making it easier to get around. Mint explained it to me but I forgot what she said the moment she stopped talking. I kind of tune her out, sometimes. You have to, really. Mint hardly ever stops talking. She's hyper-excitable. She loves her work, she loves to chat and she loves to eat, too. Don't they all? Not just in NTE . It's all the open-world gachas. It reminds me of how, in The Beano I read as I was growing up, when every character seemed to be obsessed by food. For readers who grew up deprived of the output of Dundee's unlikely publishing giant, D.C. Thompson , The Beano is a comic aimed at children aged from maybe five to ten or so, although plenty of readers stick with it for a lot longer than that. Then again, who isn't familiar with The Beano? I just learned - from Wikipedia so it must be true - that The Beano is " the best-selling comics magazine outside of Japan , having sold more than two billion copies to date. Wait, how did we get onto The Beano? I don't even like the fricken' Beano that much! Oh yes, I remember. Characters being obsessed with eating... It makes sense that child characters in a publication aimed at children would be crazy for candy. Children have a limited number of objects of desire and the subset deemed acceptable by parents is likely smaller still. Even with the fashions in parenting that roll relentlessly through the culture, kids always want sweets and savories, even if they're not always allowed to have them. It makes sense there'd be a craving fiction could exploit. So, I get why all kids in all comics seem to have the appetites of cavemen, treating every taste of sugar and salt like a drug hit, but it makes a lot less sense to see the same behavior in self-directed, independent twenty-somethings in the games I'm playing. But it's there. I've already been out for ice-cream with Mint and she ate so much she got stomach-ache from the cold, the cure for which was that we both went to a different cafe for hot chocolate! Mint and Flora are bonding over food. They might even be flirting. It's hard to tell. Flora is my character's name, by the way. Does everyone find it as hard as I do to keep the names and pronouns straight in posts about what they've been doing in the games they play? I've long claimed I don't identify with my characters in that way people do when they try to make all of them look as much like they do as possible and on one level that's true but on another, quite possibly a deeper and more significant one, it's really not. My confusion of identity leeches out in posts, where I tell stories about what " I " have been doing, then have to stop myself and reframe it as what my characters have done. It hasn't helped that until very recently I had a policy of never naming my characters in posts. That's because back when I started blogging, when I was much more sociable in games than I am now and MMORPGs were much more sociable places, and when people who played them occasionally read blogs, there were a couple of occasions where someone recognized one of my characters in game from reading the name in a post and sent me a /tell about it. Being noticed made me feel a bit uncomfortable so I stopped outing my characters by name and took to referring to them by their classes or races or some similarly impersonal designate. Then, as time went on and the games I played became less and less social, often to the point of being single-player, or if not then feeling like they were, and as the number of people reading what I wrote drifted down and down, it started to feel like mentioning character names was probably going to be less of a problem than it had been, assuming it ever was one to begin with. Using proper names certainly made it easier to structure the sentences, so I slipped into doing it and now here I am, although as you can see from the rest of the post, I still have trouble separating myself from my characters. So, Flora and Mint... I'm not a fan of dating in games. I've said that before. I mean, if it's a dating game, sure, fine, go for it. I just won't play it. I think of dating as a genre not a feature. Except that's just me, I guess, because it's clearly both, just like PvP. You can have a game where the whole point is to kill other players or you can have one where it's just one of the many things you can do. It's only when you can't play the game at all without engaging with it that it becomes a PvP game. Until recently, dating hasn't really been a thing in the kinds of games I play, even as an option. I can't think of an MMORPG that has it although I'm sure there must be some. Mabinogi comes to mind for some reason... It has been a thing in RPGs for a while, though. I think there was something of the sort in the first Dragon Age , which must also have been the first time I became aware the concept even existed. Not the concept of dating itself. I knew that existed. I wasn't raised in a monastery! Player-characters in video games simulating courtship rituals with NPCs, I mean. That sort of dating. I found it very weird at the time, I remember. Creepy, really. I'm not sure I can articulate why but I suspect it's an analog of the uncanny valley idea, the way the appearance of something can be just slightly off in a way that triggers some lizard-brain warning. As with many unfamiliar ideas and experiences, time and repeated exposure has normalized dating NPCs for me to the extent that I now mostly think of it as just something I could do but don't, as opposed to something I'd never do. Except I said yes to Mint's offer of ice-cream and I said nice things to her about the time we were spending together, so I guess that means it's just something I don't usually do now, not something I never do. Even when it's not necessary to the plot. But then, I've been doing a lot of things in Neverness To Everness that have very little to do with the plot. Assuming there is a plot. I think there's a plot? I'm not entirely sure. If there is, I certainly haven't seen much of it. I've been far too busy, and not just out getting ice-cream with Mint (Hmm. That makes me think of King Krule 's classic Out Getting Ribs ...) or putting my palm on tower touch-plates. Just exploring, really. There's so much to see. And I've seen so many things. I've seen stars falling like rain... No, really, that's a thing I saw! And an achievement I got. Stars Falling Like Rain (Witness a meteor shower.) Except when it happened I thought it was something else. And maybe it was. I was up a tower at the time. Not one of those stubby golden ones that are really public art not architecture. No, this is the truly towering tower that rises into the clouds over Heathereau. It has a name but I can't remember it offhand and it doesn't come up in any of the forty screenshots I took while I was climbing. I've climbed a lot of things in video games. I've written before about how climbing used to be a thing people did in MMORPGs before the developers even began adding climbing skills to the games. Back then, climbing was as much about breaking the game as it was seeing the sights. With the coming of the current wave of whatever we're calling the genre that started with Genshin Impact , climbing has turned into something of a focus feature. I bet all the games have it now. Wuthering Waves certainly does. I've never had a climbing experience quite like this one, though. The tower goes up and up and up. It feels like it's never going to stop. There are big observation platforms with telescopes (That you can't use - they missed a trick there.) then smaller railed rings clearly meant for maintenance workers and then nothing but the pure climb, up an ever-narrowing column studded with projecting spurs you can rest on if you're careful, until one, final, tiny railed platform barely wide enough to walk around before the last stretch to the very top, where you can haul yourself up and stand on the beacon-light that shines over the city, the highest thing in the world. All of which would be too terrifying to contemplate, much less attempt, if it wasn't for being able to stick to sheer surfaces like Spider-Man and glide like the Falcon if you fall. But I didn't fall. I flew. At the end, when there was nowhere else to climb, I launched myself into space and glided all the way down to the second-highest tower in the city, far below me. And there was a story all its own when I got there, let me tell you! But It'll have to be a story for another day because I'm not finished with this one yet. When Flora got to one of the higher platforms - not, I seem to remember, the last one - that achievement popped. I thought at the time it was for reaching a certain point in the climb and it may have been but if so it was also trigger for something much more spectacular. I'd started climbing in the late afternoon and now night had fallen and suddenly the sky was full of blue fire. A meteor shower, processing very slowly across an arc of the heavens, moving not at all like falling stars. Over the course of several minutes the sky lit up from side to side in a great, glowing arc, a rainbow made out of only indigo and blue. It's one of the more memorable events I've seen in gaming, all the more so for being both unexpected and understated. It felt like it just happened and I just happened to be there. Perhaps it was linked to my climb (I just googled it and it seems you have to be up the tower when the meteor show happens to get the achievements but whether being there also causes it is unclear.) but even if it was, Flora doesn't know that. For her it's just a thing that happened. Lucky for her she had her camera.
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1 month ago
