Lands Ho!

I read a post at MassivelyOP this morning, where Bree was asking the regulars what their three most-played MMOs of the year might have been. It got me thinking. In 2022 I probably played mmorpgs for fewer hours than at any time since I started, back in 1999. 

For a moment I was tempted to say "video games" there, rather than just mmorpgs. Technically that might be true. It would be misleading, though, suggesting as it would a larger falling-away from the overall hobby than I feel has taken place. 

There's absolutely no question about the reason my game-playing has declined. It's not lack of interest; it's one hundred per cent down to having a dog in the house. This morning, for example, I was out walking her for almost two hours and that's in the depths of winter. The better the weather, the longer I'm outdoors these days, which I'm sure is great for both my mental and physical well-being but obviously knocks a big hole in the time I have to sit at a desk or in front of a keyboard.

It's not just the getting out of the house, though. Since we got Beryl, I've been very loathe to engage with any content that can't immediately be interrupted. Beryl's super-power is knowing exactly when I'm just in the middle of a crucial battle and she makes full use of her abilities. It's easier not to get into the situation in the first place than it is to deal with it when it happens.

Despite that, I still play video games every single day and I would guess I may well be playing - or at least trying out - more individual games than at any point in my life until now. What's more, I'm even finishing quite a few of them - playing them right to the closing credits - something I've very rarely done in the past.

A visit to the Carriage Museum. (No, not really...)

A great deal of the variety derives from my relatively new-found love of demos. I've always enjoyed the kind of free trials, betas and so on that ongoing live service games like to use as promotional tools but until I discovered the joys of Steam's NextFest I didn't have any idea just how much I really, really like demos. They're just the right length to sustain my interest without outstaying their welcome. I kind of wish developers would just make games that last about an hour, sometimes. It often seems like enough.

It's hard to be sure exactly how much time I spend gaming, anyway. Unlike several bloggers I follow, I don't run one of those apps that tallies up how much time I spend playing each game I log into over the course of a week or a month or a year. Maybe I should, although honestly they kind of give me the creeps. I'm not at all sure it's information I want to know in that level of excruciating detail.

Still, it would be handy at least to have some idea. I could go through Steam and check my time-played for each game there, I suppose, but that would be too much like homework and anyway it would only give a very partial picture, seeing I play most of my games elsewhere.

I could also go back through the blog and check how much I posted about specific games. I have a determined tendency to post a lot of posts in quick succession whenever I get into a new game, so the blog does at least leave a convincing trail of infatuation. 

Never did find time to post about my "Punk Bed", did I?

Even then, though, I frequently pull  back on the posting after an initial flurry. Either I run out of new things to say or, more likely, I start to get a sense that an over-abundance of posts on one subject is unbalancing the flow of the blog. As I keep repeating, I have yet to miss a single day playing Noah's Heart since it launched in July but I've been holding back on writing about it too much, not because I don't have more to say but because I don't want to turn into that guy, the one who won't shut up about that game no-one cares about.

That just leaves memory and as we know it's the most unreliable of narrators. I posted a comment to that MOP post and I couldn't even decide with any certainty what my three most played mmorpgs of 2022 were. You'd think I'd be able to remember but no. I could just about remember what I'd played but as for how often, after the first couple the rest all seemed to melt into one general background hum.

Just for the sake of posterity, I'm going to list out the mmorpgs I can remember playing at least once in 2022. It's a list that's going to start with a couple of definites for most-played and then quickly tail off to "in no particular order". I'd also lay good odds it will be incomplete, as a flip through last years posts would almost certainly prove. Only problem there is there were three hundred and twenty-eight of those. Who has the patience to comb through that?

1. Noah's Heart
2. EverQuest II
3. Lord of the Rings Online
4. New World
5. Guild Wars 2
6. Rose Online
7. Chimeraland
8. Dragon Nest Origins
9. Vanguard Emu
10. Occupy White Walls
11. AdventureQuest 3D
12. Rift

Our mission, to explore strange new worlds. Then forget about them.

A round dozen. Not bad. And as I said, I bet it was really more than that. Some very obvious omissions there, too: EverQuest, Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, World of Warcraft... When it comes to playing video games, I don't do schedules or goals but as a general principle, when it comes to the end of 2023 I'd like to be able to say I at least logged into those four, always with the caveat of Blizzard becoming somewhere I'm willing to spend either time or money or both. 

I've particularly been thinking about trying some FFXIV again lately. It would be interesting to see how much has changed for the solo player. I also think that it would make a big difference to my hours played if I could work out a better way to play games away from my desk. That's an ongoing investigation. 

It's been useful putting this down in print. It's clarified my thoughts somewhat. I had been wondering if perhaps I might be coming within sight of the wind-down of my love affair with the hobby but I can say now that's definitely not the case. Just typing out the names of these games makes me want to log into each and every one of them, not to mention all the new ones I haven't yet tried.

All good for another year, then, I guess. Onwards!

Hoarding Is Such An Ugly Word

Time for another round of "What I've Been Listening To Lately" - only when I say "listening" it's really more like "collecting". I've always had an unfortunate tendency to treat popular culture at least as much like the building blocks for a collection as a source for aesthetic or emotional experiences, although obviously my relationship with the various zeitgeists has a deal more complexity than just putting things in boxes, be they physical, virtual or conceptual.

For example, I'm sitting here, typing this with my knee pressed against a stack of music papers from the late 1970s, Sounds and NME mostly, while to my right, just out of arm's reach, I can see about a thousand vinyl albums. I bought those papers as they came out so I could keep myself apprised of the fast-moving music scene prior to the advent of the World Wide Web and I read pretty much every word in all of them - doesn't quite explain why I still have them forty-five years later, though, does it?

Equally, I bought the huge majority (Although not exactly all...)of those albums to play and listen to but I haven't fired up a turntable for the best part of a quarter of a century. I don't have any plans to break that streak, so why are all those records still not just in my house but out on open display?

Well, because I collected them - duh! Isn't it obvious? Their primary function, when I acquired them, was to be used for their intended purpose but their primary purpose now is simply to be owned. They bring pleasure purely by proximity.

You may be familiar with the work of Ms Marie Kondo, "Tidying Expert", whose mantra, "Spark Joy", was also the title of her breakthrough bestseller and an inescapable meme a few years back. As others have pointed, deciding what to throw away based on whether the sight of it "sparks joy" or not really doesn't work when damn near everything you see sets a dopamine receptor tingling. 

I do have more practical, less metaphysical, reasons to hang on to the emblems of the past, too.  I've said over and over again that my memory is unreliable. At least, it is if I have to try and start it up cold. If I can get a jump from an object or an image or a sound, though, those memories come trickling, then flooding back. And even if they don't, it's a safe bet that if I found something interesting or exciting enough to acquire once, I'm going fine it equally stimulating when I run across it again. Doesn't matter if I can't recall how, where or why I got it - it's a new thing now and I can I find reasons to fall in love with it all over again.

You might think the switch from physical to digital and the change to on-demand availability via streaming would have eliminated any need to "collect" those cultural artifacts capable of conversion - video, text, images and for the purposes of this post, most specifically sound - but you'd be very, very wrong. All it really means is more ways to collect them all.

So, when I say these are the tunes and artists I've been listening to lately, what I really mean is they're the ones I've heard once, maybe twice, then squirreled away for future reference. The days when I'd buy a new album and listen to it a dozen times in a weekend are so far in the past I'd need a chronoscope to see them from here.

Which is why putting these posts together is so enjoyable and so valuable for me. It's a journey of rediscovery even as I write. even if the initial encounters may only have happened a matter of days ago. And there'll be another trip through the time tunnel whenever I flick through my own back pages, something I do with narcissistic regularity. [Insert hackneyed T.S. Eliot quote here. Ed.]

Enough self-justification. Let's have the tunes.

Chosen To Deserve - Wednesday

If you type "Wednesday songs" into any search engine these days, you know what you're going to get, right? Either this or this. Although actually the dance doesn't come up that much if you specify "songs". Finicky internet.

Point stands. Wednesday Addams may have filled the space where "Wednesday" goes, for now, but there are other Wednesdays. In this case, the Wednesday probably soon to be referred to, for clarity, as "Wednesday the Band" - if the Burton/Ortega juggernaut gathers pace as expected in Season Two. 

Chosen to Deserve is the current single from Wednesday's upcoming album Rat Saw God and in the accompanying press release, as reported by Stereogum, singer Karly Hartzman describes it as "a writing exercise I gave myself to try to recreate the iconic song by Drive-By Truckers ‘Let There Be Rock’". Guess what? I've never heard that one. It sounds just awful. 

It isn't. It's just a bit dull. Have a listen. The chorus goes "And I never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd but I sure saw Molly Hatchet", to which I can reply "Well I never saw Molly Hatchet but I sure saw Lynyrd Skynyrd". It must have been around 1973 or '74. I would have been fifteen or sixteen. They toured the UK in a double bill with Dutch rockers Golden Earring. I think they took in turns to open. Skynyrd opened the night I saw them. I don't think I'd heard of them before. 

I was there to see Earring, whose album, Moontan, I owned and loved, especially Candy's Going Bad, some of the lyrics of which I can still bring to mind even though it must be thirty years since I heard it. (Or not. I think I might have linked it on the blog before...) Skynyrd were alright, as I remember, but as usual, I don't remember much. I do recall them doing "Freebird", though. That was good.

Hmm. It's starting to feel like Friday night at the old folks home now. I really need to move this along or we'll be here all week...

Don't Have A Cow - Whitmer Thomas

Geez! Talk about a change of pace. About the only thing this has in common with the last one is the down-home feel of the video. I clicked on this from somewhere because of the Bart Simpson title and I did not get what I was expecting. It's stunningly bleak and the last twenty seconds are utterly unexpected. This man's a talent.

We're going to play a game now. Just by watching the video and listening to the song, tell me when you think this was recorded...

Sophie - CVC

Probably about the same time I was going to see bands like Golden Earring and Lynyrd Skynyrd, would you say? Maybe a year or two earlier. 1971 sounds about right... well, except for the obviously not-the-nineteen-seventies production.

It's a month old and let me tell you, once again, there's a lot of it going about. Just about everything new I heard this week sounds like something from another era. I'm not even sure what would count as contemporary right now. This lot, though, are full-on retro. You don't get up of a morning and just fall out of bed looking like that. Not in 2023. It's like the rock'n'roll equivalent of historical re-enactment.

I couldn't recall hearing of CVC before, although feel free to point out where they've featured on the blog before. I had to look them up. I guessed they were Eastern European. I've seen a few bands from over that way, who dress a bit like that, but no. They're from much closer to home. In fact, not much more than fifty miles from where I live: Cardiff, South Wales, to be precise. I don't know what to do with that information now I have it.

Hard Drive - Cassandra Jenkins

There's a whole scene coalescing around the speak-singing style exemplified by Yard Act and Dry Cleaning. It's not really doing much for me, although I don't not enjoy hearing it, in small doses. This, however, is much more to my taste. I think it's because the spoken aspect is integral to the song, not to the singer. Or maybe it's the way nothing about it seems to reference that overhashed post-punk sound and structure. Or maybe I just like her voice more.

Michelangelo - Cassandra Jenkins

This one's almost alt-country or Americana or something. I need to investigate further but there's no time for that now. I have a lot more in the queue and we're definitely not going to get them all into the one post.

Caught Up - Kylie Rowland

Okay, that sounds a bit more current. I happened across it by way of a throwaway comment on Stereogum, when Chris deVille closed a short news item about a festival with the words "I am definitely curious about Kylie Rowland." Blast you, Chris! Now I am, too! And still not much the wiser, frankly.

From Kylie Rowland it was small step to Amelea. Well, a small step thematically. Sonically, it was a pretty massive leap.

She's Fiction Ft. P!lot - Amelea

I hear the ghost of Ari Up stalking the halls, closely pursued by We've Got  A Fuzzbox... I actually prefer the Hot Pink remix but there's no video with that one.

After I'd watched a couple more Amelea videos I started to wonder just what P!lot were/was adding to the pot, so I took a look. A lot, as it turns out.

J'aime Le Chat - P!lot

This was the first thing that came up when I tapped the annoying-to-type P!lot into YouTube. You'll forgive me, I'm sure, for assuming she/they were French. 

She and they are not. It took a bit of googling to find out but P!lot is the name of a band not an individual, although the band is fronted by Erel Pilo, who "leads the project by writing the songs and singing leads. With a background in movement, she also incorporates dance, roller skating and aerials into performance." They're from Brooklyn because of course they are.

If I had to sum Erel and P!lot up in a  word it would have to be "charming". She's operating in a long, long tradition of endearingly eccentric, often fragile whimsy that encompasses everyone from Lorraine Bowen to Angel Corpus-Christie. I have an extraordinarily high tolerance for this sort of thing, as you're just about to find out.

Groovin' (Aretha Franklin/Young Rascals Cover) - P!lot

It takes a certain amount of nerve to cover a pop standard and then point out it's the Aretha Franklin cover you're covering. Whether nerve is enough I'll leave you to decide.

I have more but I really think I should save it for next time. By which time, of course, I'll have even more still. This collecting thing, you know. It doesn't stop.

Missing The Boat?

That's me up there, waiting for the boat in Noah's Heart. Again. 

Yep. It's 2023 and I'm still standing at the dock, waiting for the boat to come like it's 1999. That's odd enough in itself but in a game with autoquesting, autorun and automated fast travel? A game with free teleport-by-map? That's a little more than just odd, isn't it? That's wilfully perverse!

So, why am I doing it?

Why am I waiting for the boat? Is it to travel from one continent to the next? Because the boats do that.

No it's not.

Is it to travel to another city along the coast on the same continent? Because the boats do that, too.

No, it's not.

Is it to use the boat as transportation in any way, shape or form? 

Nah. No-one does that. At least I don't think anyone does.

Why would they? I woudn't. If I actually wanted to sail somewhere I didn't already have the teleport location for (Not going to happen because I have all of them.) then I have a boat of my own I could use. Why would I stand on the dock, twiddling the feather in my headband, waiting for the next shceduled departure, when I could just summon my own ship and be on my way?

See? I wouldn't. So why am I there in the picture, waiting for my ship to come in?

Money, of course! And reward! It's a quest. Or, more accurately, an Encounter, which is a kind of pop-up landscape quest.

Someone called Sef tasked me with collecting a package from an incoming ship and delivering it to someone called Grego. Why me? Because I happened to walk past and because I clearly have nothing better to do with my time than run erands for strangers, despite being a leading member of the nation's foremost Mercenary crew, Gale Force, as well as special confidante and helpmeet to kings, princes and powers across the land and despite being currently engaged in trying to stop an extra-dimensional invasion that could bring on the apocalypse. 

So naturally, I dropped everything and ran off to spend seven full minutes of real time, standing on some planking staring out to sea, waiting for a ship to arrive. When it did, there was someone on deck waiting for me. Lucky I decided to take the job. Otherwise I guess he'd have just had to ride the ship back to wherever it came from and take the package with him. And I'd be out 50k and a stack of SSR shards.

Thinking of ships reminds me of trains. Back when I began playing Noah's Heart, one of the first things that impressed me was the extensive and well-implemented railway system. It featured quite prominently in the tutorial. I assumed it would continue to be a significant feature of the game.

It's not, or if it is I must not be finding any of the content that uses it. The great stations with their impressive architecture and detailed schedules provide a reliable transport infrastructure that no-one needs to use. Like the ships, as soon as you have your teleport stations, why would you take public transport?

It's emblematic of Noah's Heart, a game that has far more genuinely good ideas than uses for them. Playing the game is to be exposed over and over again to aesthetically pleasing, narratively satisfying systems and mechanics that then seem to go nowhere. 

Okay, alright. Some of them, the trains and boats for example, do go somewhere - literally. They just don't go anywhere thematically.

I guess it's a lot better for a game to have so many ideas it can afford to throw most of them away, scarcely used, than to have hardly any and try to stretch them thin enough to cover. I'd still like to have some reason to use the ships, trains, balloons and other mechanical contrivances, but even without need, the game's better with them than without.

Then again, even after nearly six months, I can't help feeling there's a lot about the game I still don't understand. Maybe one day I'll find out what I've been missing.

Blurred Visions Of The Near-Past

I don't really have anything much I want to say today but I didn't want to skip another post after the weekend, so I guess it's random grab-bag of nonsense time. On a Monday, yet. And why not? Why should Fridays have all the fun?

Chicken Police

I finished it! A few days ago, actually. Unlike Steam, Amazon Prime Gaming doesn't tell you how long you've been playing, or at least if it does, I've never spotted it. What I can say is, I played at least one session pretty much every day until I got to the end and for however long that was, it was my go-to game.

I'm not going to review it or even say much more about what I thought about it than I did in my first post. I will say the quality held up right to the end and I never lost interest or enthusiasm, which is about all you can ask. 

As noted, the gameplay elements can feel a little abstract - not to say irrelevant - and the mini-games really don't add anything. All the strengths are in the writing, voice-acting and visuals. That said, I did find it fun to play as a game, not just as a visual novel, which arguably is mostly what the experience is. I did find the detective bits quite engaging, even if it's unclear how success or lack of it affects the outcome.

I was amused to discover, while doing some out of game research, that it's "Based on a true story". Or, more accurately, a true meme. It's this one:

The writers saw that thirty-second clip and span an entire game out of it. If nothing else, they at least have a ready answer for the inevitable "Where do you guys get your ideas from?"

The Wild Gentlemen have a new game in development but don't ask me where they got the idea for this one. It's called RetroSpace and according to Rock, Paper, Shotgun it's "a disco-punk immersive sim", which makes it sound even more like Disco Elysium than the last one. I would be excited but I watched the trailer and it really didn't gel for me. Still, very early days. Herer it is, anyway. Maybe it'll do more for you than it did for me.

Faux Productivity

This is a term used and quite possibly invented by Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts and a very useful one it is, too. For a while I was thinking of dedicating a whole post to it in response, as Dan/MagiWasTaken from Indiecator did but in the end I decided I didn't have that much to say about it. 

I don't not have anything to say though, so here's what I do have: I wonder what, if anything, outside of the four base tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, even counts as Real Productivity? Certainly not much that anyone I follow ever writes about, that's for sure!

More to the point, to take a classic cliche example I used to throw in to arguments about worthwhile or entertaining in-game activities, before I realised just what a poor analogy it was, is cleaning your oven really a more productive use of your time than running a dungeon for the umpteenth time? I mean, what's so all-fired wonderful about a clean oven? If you don't clean the thing, does it not work any more? Do you get ill? Does anything bad happen? At all? And aren't most ovens self-cleaning these days and even if they aren't, who ever examines the inside of their oven anyway? The oven police?

When it comes to many - probably most - real-world chore-like activities, my feeling is the truly necesary ones always get done and the rest fill exactly the same "faux productivity" role as anything you might do while playing a game, watching a show or writing a blog post. Yes, I feel almost unaccountably good about myself when I've spent an hour hand-washing the paintwork in the hallway but has anything in my life changed materially for the better because of the removal of a layer of dust or am I just enjoying the feel-good factor that comes from slotting comfortably into a societal norm?

Discuss. Or don't. See? Doesn't matter either way!

I think I'll carry on posting nonsense, playing games and aggrandizing pop culture as well as cutting the grass, tidying the cupboards and washing the car and I won't waste any time trying to work out which of them matters more, so long as they all make me feel like I've done something worth doing.

(Heh! Like I'd wash the car...)

He's French, You Know...

And finally - because as I said, I really don't have anything to say - let's have a couple of tunes. Only a couple. I don't want to walk all over my own What I've Been Listening To Lately post that I'm going to need in a few days' time. It's not like I'm dripping with post ideas right now...

First, there's this, which doesn't have a video so might otherwise not have gotten space. It's a cover of J'aime Les Filles, originally recorded by Jacques Dutronc and written by him and Jacques Lanzmann.

J'Aime Les Filles - Kate Bollinger

Now, you don't exactly find yourself snowed under by Jacques Dutronc covers, so that's probably reason enough to call attention to this one but it's also really good. Dare I say it, better than the original, although maybe that's just a comment on time passing.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this song is the lyric. If you don't speak French and can't be bothered to look up the translation, you'd probably assume it was one of those "California Girls" style sixties paeans to the ready availability of willing female company for the aspiring stars of any rock, pop or other musical subgenre, an interpretation that, these days, would most likely set your teeth slightly on edge.

That, however, is not what the song is about - or not exactly. Here's a link to the full, translated lyric but for short try this sample verse:

"I love the girls from Renault

I love the girls from Citroen

I love the girls of the blast furnaces

I love the girls who work at a chain store"

 

Jacques also claims to love the girls who camp, go on strike and make him laugh, as well as intellectual girls and girls both with and without Dad. No, I have no idea about that last one, either. Maybe it's a French thing.

And finally, finally...

Rigmarole - Whitmer Thomas

I watched one video by Whitmer Thomas (Not this one.) and ended up watching just about everything he has on YouTube, including his stand-up comedy. Like Wilbur Soot from a previous post, Whitmer seems to be what used to be called a multi-hyphenate. He can sing, he can tell jokes, he acts... I imagine, like Wilbur, he has a book out or if not he he soon will...

More about Whitmer Thomas another time. Probably. Depending what else turns up, I guess. It's not like I plan ahead or anything...

Sound And Vision

I can't remember exactly when I first saw the tag "Visualizer" appended to a YouTube video but it feels like it must have been a few years ago, now. It was definitely well before I started noticing the equally sinister attribution "Distrokid" or the disturbing "CDBaby". Once I'd become aware of them, though, I couldn't stop seeing them everywhere.

It took a while but eventually I cracked and googled Distrokid. It was obviously some kind of distribution network but as to its provenance or authority I had nothing. Turns out it's about as unsinister as a faceless corporation can be. In case anyone else hasn't been able to find the ten seconds necesary to crack the code, Distrokid is "the easiest way for musicians to get music into Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, TikTok, YouTube, and more." Their words, obviously. 

It's not free but it's cheap at $19.99 a year for unlimited digital distribution to all those platforms, per artist. CDBaby's deal is based on per-item pricing. If I had something to sell I'm sure I'd end up using one or the other.

I don't, though, so that's about as far as I'm going with that story. Curiosity satisfied. Job done. 

And for a while, I thought I had the whole visualizer thing pegged, too. It was just some cheap-looking automated animation process that jiggles the screen or generates waveforms in response to an audio signal. It was clearly being used by people without either the time or the resources to make a proper video, although given you can make one on a phone in about the same time it takes to play the damn song, it's hard to imagine who those people might be.

If I'm not misremembering, there used to be something like it, built into whatever audio software we all used back in the 90s. I seem to recall you could have your monitor throw graphic shapes every time you played a soundfile or a CD. It was fun for five minutes but the novelty wore off fast.

The problem with that analysis was the increasing sophistication of the videos flying the "Visualizer" flag. When I first noticed them they were extremely basic - infinity tunnels, shimmering starfields, wobbling text, that kind of thing. Nothing you'd ever actually sit and watch, just some movement to make you feel you weren't stuck with a static image, something which I have to admit does make me move on to another "video" pretty damn fast when I'm surfing YouTube.

As time went on, the imagery started to become more nuanced. There were occasions where I did indeed watch a visualizer as though it had genuine content. Even so, I can't remember seeing one that made me think "Hang on, how is this not an actual video that someone's scripted, performed, directed and edited?" And then this morning I watched this:

That's Cuchillos by the excellent Lisasinson. It's also what I'd call "a video" but their record company, Elefant Records, don't agree. They've officially tagged it as a "Visualizer".

That does seem to blur the boundaries somewhat. I'd have been willing to bet that all the imagery in the video (Which is what I'm going to call it.) had been shot specifically for the occasion. It's a bet I'd lose, as will soon be revealed...

The lyrics are in Spanish, a language in which I can pick my way through a newspaper but don't speak nearly well enough to understand what they're singing. Fortunately, Elefant have thoughtfully provided a full transcript, which I ran through Google Translate, allowing me to affirm that, yes, the imagery in the video is specific to the import of the song. I mean, the bloody title of the thing in English  is "Knives" and the chorus runs

I do not want to hurt you
My knives are not for you

It's not even until halfway through that video the imagery even begins to repeat. It wasn't until I'd seen the whole thing and formed my interpretation that I found out much of it is recycled from another visualizer the band released about three months ago, for their last single Últimamente. That one looks even more like a fully-scripted video, though. Far from undermining my argument, I think it reinforces it.

I was really at loss to understand why either had the Visualizer tag at all, so finally I broke down and googled the whole concept.

Plenty of people seemed keen to explain it to me, although since the British-English spelling of the word (Visualiser) refers to a specific piece of office equipment, not all of them were helpful. Once I'd got my esses and zees sorted out, I found this from 2017, when the phenomenon appeared to be relatively new.

As Aliya Chaudry from 34th Street magazine puts it:

"A visualizer seems to be a simplistic visual intended to accompany a song, much like a music video or lyric video, and it’s a new trend. They tend to be less developed and fully–fledged than music videos, which often have more complicated visuals or a plot and characters. This term could come from music visualizers, software which produce graphics in response to audio, like Windows Media Player. This means that by calling their video clips “visualizers,” artists are arguing that this is the visual representation of their audio pieces."

So, pretty much what I always thought. Aliya also seems to be pushing the alternative term "Visualette". Thankfully, that never caught on, although a quick google search does show a lingering, residual usage. The article also makes the valid point that visualizers are often released as placeholder videos before a full video is available, something I've often seen. 

Less prescient is the idea that visualizers might replace lyric videos or the speculation that they "could just be another weird new trend in music." Five years on, I think we can safely say lyric videos aren't going anywhere and visualizers are here to stay.

Having confirmed the definition, I began to wonder about the source. I'm sure a band like Lisasinson, signed to a large indie label like Elefant, have all the resources they need to make videos or visualizers but what about the rest of us? Is there somewhere you can bang one of these things out at home, for free?

Yes, of course there is. More than one. Here's a list of the top eight. (Weird cut-off point. Who compiled that list? A spider?) I didn't see that one until after I'd done a basic Google search of my own. The top results in that were Veed and Renderforest. I picked the latter purely because of more mellifluous name.

Since I don't - for reasons that would take far too long to go into now - have any original music of my own available to upload, I grabbed a copyright-free MP3 from Pixabay. I combined that with a screenshot from my vast horde and slapped them together. To avoid stretching both Renderforest's freebie size limits and the patience of anyone foolish enough to watch the thing, I cut a short segment out of the audiofile using Audacity, limiting the whole thing to a tidy sixteen seconds or so.

Including the time it took me to find all the component parts, work out how to use Renderforest, remember how to use Audacity, run through the four-stage process and complete the project, it took me no more than twenty minutes to make two test samples. 

They may not be much (Okay, there's no "may" about it.) but as proof of concept they do what they need to. If I had to knock another of these out, say for an actual song, I reckon I could do it faster than I can drink a cup of coffee. Give me a couple of hours, I could probably make one I wouldn't be ashamed to have other people see.

As with most of these technological possibilities, chances are I'll never get around to using it for anything much, although I do have a few ideas.... As for writing about it, I realize I'm a good five years past the time anyone cared. Still, you never know when new knowledge is going to come in useful. 

I mean, I use that AI photo editing site Tipa put me on to a while back pretty much ever day. And does anyone even notice?

The Roadmap Goes Ever On

Ooh! Look! A roadmap! I like roadmaps.

And apparently so does everyone else. We're getting this one because "Last year's "experiment" was so well received".

I suspect "astonished" was closer to most people's reaction at the time, when the inaugural EverQuest II Roadmap appeared on 19 January 2022. I was sufficiently taken with the whole concept, I managed to post two thousand words about it, albeit many of them cut and pasted from the document itself.

I wrapped the whole thing up by saying "Let's hope the players appreciate it". Looks like they did, which is pretty close to a miracle in itself, given the general tenor of the EQII community these days.

In last year's post, I went through the whole thing almost line by line. I'm not planning on doing that again. For one thing I don't have the enthusiasm for it, what with the novelty value having worn off, but for another a quick scan through the details suggests a focus on more renovation, less innovation this time around, which gives me less to talk about.

That's in no way a criticism. EQII is a live service game and this roadmap firmly endorses that model. The team clearly have a handle on what works for the game and its core audience. Almost everything in the schedule involves building on the strong foundation they've already established. 

As I suggested, quite mildly, earlier, the installed base for EQII can be highly critical and hard to please, something it has in common with the equivalent demographic in many long-running mmorpgs. In the last year or so, however, I have begun to detect at least some small cracks in the wall of opposition to anything new. 

Time and attrition have boiled off most of the uncommitted along with many of those who really can't stomach change. I wouldn't say those who remain were more easy-going or open-minded about the direction the game is headed but I do sense less hostility in the conversation. Apparently telling people your plans ahead of time and then sticking to them does build trust. Who'd have guessed?

So, FV! What's the plan?

It's always a bit presumptive to allocate successful policy to a single person but Jenn Chan's appointment as Head of Studio does seem to mark something of a watershed. Compared to just about every one of her predecessors, including figureheads and spokespeople as well as actual Studio leads, she comes across as more straightforward, less tricksy. She has a knack of putting things in terms that sound both friendly and authoritative, which is more than many people in similar positions seem to be able to manage.

All in all, as a player, I get the feeling of a ship in reasonably safe hands, sailing in fairly calm waters. Or, I guess, since this is a roadmap we're talking about, not a navigational chart, a competent driver on a well-maintained highway. Compared to almost any era of EQII's history, from the rocky launch and subsequent Hail Mary pass that saved it, through the imperial decline of the later Smedley administration (Speaking of the devil...) to the frankly terrifying Columbus Nova sleigh-ride, this feels like coming out of the storm into safe harbor at last.

Cue the whole thing falling apart in six weeks time...

Enough preamble. What's in the roadmap that's worth a closer look?

Well, I was taken by the use of the repeated phrases "New updates" and "New large updates" as used to describe the various holiday events. Most of the old favorites get the basic version, which I imagine means some different rewards for the existing quests, new things to buy from the vendors, probably some new crafting books. 

The focus, as last year, seems to be on building the summer into a major festival season. Last year saw Oceanfest, Scorched Sky and Tinkerfest stitched together under the banner of Summer Jubilee. This year sees the process continued and consolidated, with all three events receiving "large updates", something that last year included not just fresh quests but new dungeons and instances. 

Sometimes I wonder if they give us too much... Nah, just kidding!

The Jubilee is clearly intended as a permanent replacement for the old summer Ethereal event, which suits me very well. I never really bothered with that, group-focused as it tended to be. A much-expanded suite of holiday events would seem to have a much wider appeal across the whole playerbase than one purely aimed at the endgame elite, although just how broad a church the EQII playerbase might be nowadays is another question altogether. All in all, though, it looks like a solid use of resources.

Presumably much of that necessarily limited resource (Albeit, perhaps, not quite as limited as it would have been a few years back.) will be directed towards the two numbered Game Updates (122 and 123) and the annual expansion, a very substantial amount of brand-new content for a game of EQII's vintage. 

It's revealing - and reassuring -  that the existence of yet another expansion is now so much to be expected it can simply be mentioned in the same terms as every other recurring, annual event. A sea-change from just a couple of years back, when speculation flourished over whether each expansion would be the last.

There's a lot in the roadmap about various unlocks and server mergers for the TLE subculture, none of which need concern us here. Of slightly more interest is the addition of yet another new, special rules server in April, this one using a PvP ruleset. EQII maintains a highly vocal, if not necessarily all that numerous, advocacy for PvP but almost no iteration of the playstyle yet tried seems to suit enough would-be players to stick. The advantage of catering to the PvP crowd by way of the TLE system would seem to be the format's inbuilt obsolescence, meaning the server doesn't necessarily have to hold a crowd for the long term to be considered a success.

Mark it in your calendar, Zel. Retraining course in May.

There's one planned, systemic change to the game this year that could prove significant. In May there's an updating of the AI used by mercenaries to assist and heal players: "Mercenaries will more reliably heal and resurrect their companions, and generally react faster, with higher tier mercenaries gaining increased reaction time over their common brethren." 

At the purely solo level I play, I haven't noticed any major issues with my mercenaries but I have been aware of some undertow of complaint for a while now. I certainly wouldn't trust mine on anything much harder than a boss in a solo instance and even then it's sometimes a close call. 

What I'd really like to see addressed, though, is the placement of the merc. Mine has a suicidal urge to stand in front of anything I'm fighting, taking every AE full in the face. Even if I put him on Passive and play like a proper tank, turning the mob, he has a terrible habit of shuffling round to stand next to me. Coupled with his seeming unwillingness to heal himself until the last moment, I've died more from my merc not healing himself than from his not healing me. If they fix that I'll be delighted.

There's more in the full roadmap but I think that covers the most salient points for now. If I've missed anything major, entirely likely given the limited attention I was paying as I flipped between the various sections, please let me know. I'd hate to be blindsided by something I should have seen coming down the road.

At It LIke Rabbits - Again

Once again, news of a festival brings me back to a game I wasn't planning on playing. This time it's Guild Wars 2. 

A few years ago, I recall complaining about the paucity of holiday events in GW2, which at the time had only three or four annual celebrations in its calendar. It's entirely possible I didn't know when we were well off.

These days, it still only has half a dozen but as a glance at the schedule on the wiki reveals, they still manage to take up most of the year:

• Lunar New Year - Late January to Early February
• Super Adventure Festival - Late March to Mid April
• Dragon Bash - Early to Late June
• Festival of the Four Winds - Late July to Early August
• Halloween - Mid October to Early November
• Wintersday - Mid December to Early January

All mmorpg festivals can be enervating but Tyrian celebrations sometimes feel more exhausting than most. 

When you're playing regularly it's easy to ignore the incipient insanity of repeating the same activities dozens, hundreds or even thousands of times, just to be able to put a line of text under your name that tells people you've done it. It's possible to tell yourself it makes sense to spend hour after hour earning special currencies to buy costumes you'll wear for a few days at most, then never want to see again. It somehow makes sense to open parcel after parcel in the vaguest hope that, just once, there might be something worth having inside.

When you take a break and come back, though, it's harder to pretend that any of what you're doing is reasonable, let alone rational. Take the holiday of the moment; Lunar New Year.

I've always liked this one. It's probably my favorite. It's certainly the one I've put the most consistent effort into over the years. 

 

I log in all three of my accounts and buy my daily allotment of eight lucky envelopes for each of them. I spend a while buffing one character up to the highest level of Luck I can manage, raiding my banks for food and boosters, setting off fireworks, trailing round the likeliest busy areas in search of Community Bonfires; all the little tricks and wrinkles that come with having played a game for a decade.

Then I pass all the envelopes to that one character, who opens them all in the expectation of turning a small a profit and the hope of finding one of the season's rarities. I could easily make more money by selling the envelopes on the Trading Post, where they start out somewhere around 1.75 face value and almost never drop much below 1.3. 

If I did that, though, I'd do myself out of the fun of anticipation. It's the second before you open the envelope that counts; that fleeting, Schrödinger moment, when there could be anything inside. It's not, after all, that there's ever anything in there I'm actually going to use. I just want the warm thrill of knowing I bucked the odds and got the prize. The prize itself is just another piece of clutter.

Things would be very different if ArenaNet ever gave away anything worth having but there's precious little chance of that. They are, without any question, the most abstemious of gifters among mmorpg developers. Every other game I've played has better freebies.

Like the process itself, though, the prizes come to seem acceptable through a process of acclimatization. You could call it Stockholm Syndrome. Stick with the program long enough and even a truly horrible back item that clips through every character model somehow acquires Must-Have status.

Speaking of which, I hesitate to make the assertion without all the evidence but preliminary findings suggest that, for the first time ever, this year's lantern backpack might just eschew the worst of the traditional excrescences to display almost normally. I got one out of an envelope today and in the Dressing Room view, at least, it looks subdued, neat and balanced. 

It barely clips with my staff at all. Even if it does look as though I've threaded the staff between the rabbits and the frame, that's at least something I can imagine having done on purpose. 

Of course, that's just the regular version. The Grand Rabbit Lantern, no doubt, will have some dangly bits. The big ones always do, else how would you know they're better? I'll wait until I get one of those before I adjudge the thing fit to wear.

And I will get one. I only logged in today to refresh my memory on the event. I told myself I would, for sure, not fall back into the habit of cycling all my accounts every day for a few weeks just to maximize my envelope-opening potential. At most, I decided, I'd keep it to a single account.

That lasted all of five minutes. The best compromise I reached with myself was that I wouldn't spend ages trying to squeeze the last few percentage points out of my Luck stat by setting up a dedicated envelope opener. I'm going to open everything on my regular character, my primary Elementalist, and if she's a few points short then so be it.

Even so, things don't bode well. The brief time I'd marked out for the project stretched from a few minutes to nearly an hour. The lines I'd draw for myself became blurred then wore away completely. I did the mount race around Divinity's Reach on all three accounts and since I had them all on I started opening their mail as well.

That's how I found a very unexpected and rather exciting surprise. It may even be a bug. I'm really not
sure.

Back in October, ANet ran a promotion to encourage opt-ins to their official Newsletter. The bribe was a 24-slot bag, something really quite desirable. I checked all my accounts to make sure they were signed up to the newsletter, which they all already were. I was covered but there was going to be a wait. The offer warned "please allow several weeks for delivery."

Well, several weeks have passed. I haven't been logging in much - or at all in the case of two of the three accounts - and I'd completely forgotten about the bag so it was a nice surprise to find one waiting in each of the three mailboxes. And an even nicer surprise to discover one of the accounts had been sent two of them.

It was on the account I'm least likely to play but that's also the account most likely to benefit. I have people on the other two who can craft large bags, albeit at horrific cost, should I ever feel the need.

However it's fallen out, the feeling of getting double something for nothing is very warming on a cold, January day. Maybe it's something I shouldn't have or maybe it's a bona fide bonus for reasons I don't understand but either way it's mine now and I'm keeping it.

If ANet would give stuff this good away all the time, I would probably never have left. Until that happy day comes, though, I guess I'm in for a few weeks, just to open my envelopes. Perhaps I'll get lucky.

Oh, wait a minute... I see it now...