You Do Know You're A Cat, Right?

I don't keep a list of things I never imagined existed. Who does that? If I did, though, a DC comic teaming Superman with Top Cat would certainly be on it. And now I'd have to cross it off because such a wonder, if that's what you want to call it, does in fact exist. 

As of a couple of hours ago, I can also confirm that I've read it and it is... not good. Okay, it's bad. I mean, I cut it as much slack I could but there just isn't enough slack to cut. It's just bad.

I probably ought to make it clear I didn't go looking for a Supes/TC collab just to prove one couldn't exist. I was just following up some reviews I'd read of the Supergirl back-ups in recent editions of Action Comics. 

I'd seen those on a blog I follow by the name of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. I tend to disagree with most of the reviews there, although I enjoy reading them, which is why I like to check the source. It was while I was doing that that I caught sight of the cover of the  Superman/Top Cat Special.

My first reaction? Disbelief. My second? Thrilled. 

Not by the cover, that's for sure. It's horrible. By the concept.

These are two of my favorite fictional characters of all time. I grew up with both of them and in their own very different ways I consider each to be an influence and a role model. I own more than a thousand comic books featuring the Man of Steel in some version or other and I own  - and have watched, multiple times - all thirty episodes of the one and only, 1961 season of Top Cat.

I also have enough experience with both comic books and animation to know that absolutely no crossover, no matter how outlandish, ludicrous or ill-conceived, is ever completely off the table. If you can think of it, someone is going to try it. (Generally applicable almost anywhere, that one...)

Just because TC is an anthropomorphised cat who lives in a garbage can in a back alley is no reason to think he couldn't or shouldn't team up with an alien being powerful enough to lift mountains and turn back time (Superman cannot turn back time. Other superheros who can turn back time are available.)

It is theoretically possible that someone could write a good story featuring a team-up between a three-foot tall talking cat in a vest and a hat with holes cut in it for his ears to poke through and a six-foot tall hunk of beefcake in spandex and a cape. We do, after all, live in a post Howard the Duck: The Movie world. Anything is possible. It just hasn't been done yet and certainly not in this comic book.

I won't attempt to summarize the plot. I'll just say it revolves around the last living Kalien, a race of sentient vegetables living on Earth as the leafy green we know as kale and the villainous billionaire CEO of a global internet shopping business, who just happens to have a really Greek-sounding last name. Whatever that leads you to imagine, the reality is worse.

Oftentimes in comics, a bad plot can be saved by some snappy dialog or some great art. Not here. Top Cat has to have one of the most distinctive "voices" in the entire funny animal kingdom. Granted it's not all his own work , given his whole persona and presentation was lifted almost verbatim from a signature performance in a 1950s TV show, but it's still one of the most recognizable around and, I would have though, one of the most easily imitated. 

Not in this comic book, it's not. I have to wonder why anyone would even bother to borrow a well-known character from another medium if they weren't going to make use of any of the things that made that character famous in the first place. FFS, it doesn't even look like TC. If he wasn't wearing the hat and vest I wouldn't know who it was supposed to be.

Still,it could be worse, right? It can always be worse. They could have teamed him up with Batman.

Ah. You're ahead of me. 

I have a twist, though. The Batman/Top Cat team up, which precedes the one I've been talking about in continuity (Seriously, though? Is any of this canon?) and explains how TC got to be in the same world as the superheroes in the first place, is actually much better! I'm not saying it's good but it's definitely better.

For one thing, TC is drawn as both more recognizably the character we all know and in a style more appropriate to a superhero comic. I don't mean he wears a costume... well, okay, I guess he does... it's that hat and vest again... but he's taller and slightly less cartoonish and just fits the Gotham milieu. Plus I would one hundred percent know who he was supposed to be from his face, without the hat and vest. 

Not that anyone ever saw TC without his hat and vest... oh, wait... that actually happens here, too.

There's a nice bit of interplay between Batman and TC and later between TC and Catwoman and amazingly it all stays broadly in character for all of them, insofar as anything featuring those three characters together ever could. TC still doesn't really sound much like himself but he doesn't sound entirely wrong all the time, like the version that Superman met, either.

I enjoyed it, anyway. There were a couple of good jokes and I liked the way it looked. The story, which is only an eight-pager, appeared as the bonus feature in Adam Strange Future Quest Special, another crossover. In the main feature, Adam Strange teams up with Jonny Quest and his crew but I didn't read that. Jonny Quest wasn't shown in the TV region where I grew up so I get no nostalgic buzz when he turns up in other media, something he seems to do quite often. I'm happy to pass.

The story ends with a "To be continued in Top Cat" teaser, which does somewhat suggest TC was about to get a DC title of his own. That was back in 2017. We're still waiting.

Of course, TC has already had his own comic book. Several, in fact, published, on and off, by Dell, Gold Key and Charlton and running from the early nineteen-sixties through to the mid-seventies. I have a few copies tucked away somewhere. Gold Key, I think.

After that, a company I'm not familiar with, Murray, picked up the franchise until the end of the decade and then, once again to my complete surprise and mystification, it seems in 1983-4 Marvel put out more than thirty issues of something called Top Cat's T.V. Comic Show. I was not only very active in comics fandom at the time, I was working in fricken' comic shop but I don't recall ever hearing about it, let alone seeing a copy.

Which brings us almost full circle, back to comics I didn't know existed, a very long list indeed. But it's not quite the end, not yet. There's still one more team-up featuring the cat in the vest-and-hat I need to mention. It's by far the most natural pairing and the most recognizable version of Top Cat DC has published so far.

I don't have quite the same level of nostalgia for Scooby-Doo as I do for TC, mostly because I was a few years older by the time the original sseries surfaced on British TV, but as I've mentioned a few times here in the past, I do still have a pretty large soft spot for the Scooby and the gang. My favorite iteration by far is the one in Scooby-Doo, Mystery Incorporated. but I like the OG Scooby series a lot, too. 

The original seems to be the main basis for DC's Scooby-Doo Team-Up, a fairly long-running title in which the gang collaborate with a whole range of DC superheroes, as well as just about any other I.P. DC holds the rights to, including Jonny Quest, again, and Top Cat.

The Top Cat team-up was first published in issue #29 and then again, split acoss two digital issues as #57 and #58. It's a far more authentic take on the familiar characters from the TV version. All the Top Cat regulars appear, staying firmly in character, with dialog that wouldn't feel out of place in the show. The plot, involving a ghost that - no spoiler warning required - turns out to not to be a real ghost at all, is the Scooby Gang's schtick but the way it's handled is very much according to TC.

I read all of three of the above comics today and enjoyed two of them. I'd still quite like to see that missing Top Cat comic, too, the one that never seems to have appeared.  We could have followed a more time-worn, cynical TC, searching for his lost pal, Benny, trapped in a world he never made.

They could have made a movie out of it.

Then again, maybe not...

The Turning Of The Season

Once Human's third season, The Way Of Winter, has just entered Phase Four, The End of Ice And Fire. Like Phase Three, A Glimmer of Hope, it's scheduled to last for ten days, after which we're into the fifth and final phase, Break of Dawn, which is basically a month of downtime where everyone thinks about what they're going to do next.

Before the game launched and all through the first season there was endless speculation about the seasonal process, focusing on how - or more often whether - it would work. Plenty of people claimed they'd quit if their progress was reset. Plenty more told them to grow up and join the modern world because this is the way we do things now.

I was kind of on the fence about it. I could see the attractions of a fresh start every six to eight weeks. It didn't seem all that different from the (Really.) old days, when I would roll new characters in the same game and start over on different servers all the time. No-one had heard of account-based content back then, either, so every new character pretty much meant starting from scratch, unless you were into twinking, something very much frowned upon by most players, even if everyone did it.

In 2024, though, it does seem weird to think of spending a couple of months leveling and gearing a character in a new game just to have all that progress wiped so you can do it again. And again. And again.

The sweeteners for Seasons in Once Human are supposed to be a self-leveling playground that lets new players compete on an equal footing with veterans and a steady stream of fresh, new content. Since the game currently has nothing like PvE league tables as far as I know, the former really only makes sense for PvP but new content certainly ought to be an attraction for everyone.

Unfortunately, the official "second" season turned out to be a choice between a PvP-focused event or a cut&paste of the first PvE season with some knobs twiddled. I didn't see much feedback for either and I barely logged in long enough to register an interest before drifting away from the game altogether.

The Way of Winter, by contrast, offered a genuine and significant content drp - quests, storylines, items, features, the lot. It opened up the whole of the northern region for exploration and but doubled the amount of PvE content in the game.

Or it would have if it had been an expansion. As it is, since the seasons are separate and discrete, what it's really done is replace that amount of content with a near-exact equivalent, much of which I have now finished.

After more than fifty hours in The Way of Winter, even though there's still technically half the season left, I feel ready to sum up my thoughts. I'd be very surprised if anything happens from here on in to change my mind on very much.

The big question is Do Seasons Work? The big answer is... I dunno, maybe? 

I know! It's hardly a satisfactory answer, is it? I was hoping for something more conclusive, too. But that's just how it panned out for me. After a month of fairly intensive play I find myself still on the fence.

It all started well. Before the Season started, I was mildly excited at the thought of three new maps to explore and mildly curious to see how the temperature mechanic worked. When I got to play, that excitement ramped up enormously and I had a really good time in Phases One and Two. 

The oddest thing was how much it felt like starting a new game altogether. Even though I was playing the same character and meeting the same NPCs, the buzz was just like a new game had launched and I was deeply into it. The leveling process and the progression mechanics were just as much fun as they had been first time around and I became engrossed all over again in building a new base and gearing my character up to take on tougher challenges across the maps.

That energy began to dissipate around the middle of Phase Three, at which point I'd opened up most of the new territory and built my character up to where she could handle most of the overland content on all three maps. That was when a certain amount of ennui and disillusion began to set in.

It wasn't any kind of strong reversion. More a gentle falling away of interest and enthusiasm as I realised I was rapidly approaching an end-point. 

Even now, in the moment gameplay remains every bit as entertaining as it always has been. Once Human makes a great sandbox. I can drive around for hours and hours just listening to the radio, looking at the scenery and stopping to loot anything that looks worth taking. If you want a post-apocalyptic sim you can just live in, you could do a lot worse.

The problem is the looming sense of impermanence that pervades the later stages of the season. Yes, you can build amazing structures - I'ver seen some really incredible ones - and you can blueprint them for next season and for Eternaland. Yes, you can gear up to the max and hit all the Seasonal goals to make your character really powerful and you can take some small percentage of that power with you into the next Season. Yes, you can earn a great deal of all the currencies going and stash them in the bank for next time.

But none of it feels connected and for me that's a problem. I was really surprised by just how much this Season felt unrelated to the last two. I think the real capper was when I decided to try and ride my motorcycle south into the region where seasons One and Two took place. It's all part of the same land mass. You can see all the old places on the map and the highways still go there but if you follow them beyond a certain point you get a series of warnings and then you die.

That experience made me reassess what I was doing. It made it harder to maintain the necessary conceit that my character lives in a real place and more apparent that there were arbitrary rules in place that could change at any time. It makes it significantly less attractive than it could otherwise be to spend a good deal of time and effort on anything much more than the basics.

That, however, has atractions of its own. It takes the pressure off. It's quite counter-intuitive but the ticking Season clock actually makes everything feel less urgent.

For example, as I write this, I'm aware that I have almost a hundred and fifty unspent Ciphers, the currency that buys you Mimetics, the equivalents of Talents or Abilities in other games. In the first season I spent all my Ciphers as I got them and opened as many options as I could, partly because I didn't entirely know what they all did. 

Now I only buy the ones I intend to use plus any I have to take as pre-requisites. Similarly with Starchrom, the currency used to play the Wish Machine or buy blueprints from its internal Store. I spend only as many as I have to get what I want and then I stop. Making good choices is simultaneously easier through experience and seems to matter less through impermanence.

This attitude now pervades everything in the game. I'm not bothering to pursue the plot to the end because I know it will reach a point where I need to farm more mats to gear up enough so I can beat the necessary bosses and there just doesn't seem like a lot of point if it's all going to stop in a few weeks. I'm already just about tough enough to see every part of the map so I feel like I can do without a couple of instances. If I want to know what happens, I'll watch someone else do it on YouTube.

In a way that sounds negative but it's also oddly liberating. At the half-way point of the season I can now explore everything purely for fun (The maps are huge. Really, really huge. There's still so much I haven't seen.) I can take my time and just play for pleasure. With no real purpose to progression the world once again becomes somewhere to hang out and have fun - if you can have fun in a freezing/burning hellscape populated by monsters, that is.

It seems strange to say it after a hundred and fifty hours of play but I really don't know yet if this Season thing is going to work for me, long term. I do know that I'd prefer a traditional MMORPG set-up, with updates and expansions and content that sticks around but that was never part of the plan and I'm cool with it.

I can't argue that this season hasn't been loads of fun so far. Even now, after the intial rush has worn off and the doldrums of the "Settlement Phase" are just around the corner, I still have some things left I want to do and enough enthusiasm to get them done before I have to choose the next scenario.

That's the thing, though. I'll have to choose the next scenario. And the next after that. And the next after that...

How many times is that going to spark joy? It certainly didn't spark much in Season Two, when it was all the same stuff over again. Is engagement going to depend on genuine new content like The Way of Winter? How many times are we going to get a content drop the size of the original game? Not every season, for sure.

And even if somehow Starry managed to keep to a schedule like that, how frustrating would it be to have to choose between an ever-increasing number of disparate, unconnected regions in the same ostensible world? I'm finding it quite frustrating with just the two in play so far.

All of which gets us precisely no further ahead than we were before Season Three began. I still don't know if the seasonal structure is going to be satisfying enough to keep me playing steadily for months and years, the way I used to play MMORPGs in the past but then I don't know if that has more to do with my changing needs and desires than the way the game is structured anyway. 

How many new MMORPGs that use the traditional format have I stuck with for more than a few months in the last five years? Have there been any?  I can't think of one. Maybe eight-week Seasons do make more sense.

It very much looks as though I'm going to have to wait yet again, not just for the next season but for the next one that comes with a full slate of new content, before I can say whether it's possible to get swept up in the moment over and over in the same game. 

If I had to bet, I'd say it probably is but only for a couple of weeks at a time. If so, that's not so bad. A game that sits quietly on the back-burner, only flaring into life two or three times a year, pushing everything else aside for a few weeks, seems like it might be a nice thing to have in your Steam Library.

I await the options for Season Four with interest. If it's a redo with tweaks again, though, I think I'll pass.

You Mean I Have To Play Properly? Well That Sucks!

Following up on Saturday's post on the subject of my return to Wuthering Waves, I have good news and bad news. It's nearly all good news, though. Just one bit of bad. I'll get that out of the way right at the start.

The Bad News 

I finally hit a skill wall. No, not exactly. I guess it's more of a level wall or a progress wall or an upgrade wall. Whatever it is, I ran into a mob today that I needed to kill to carry on with the story and I couldn't kill it. Or I haven't been able to yet, anyway.

It's not a boss. It's not even a  sub-boss. It's just a regular mob, one of many that stand around all over the place, guarding chests you want to open, buttons you want to press, force-fields you want to remove. Anything you might want to get at either has a puzzle you need to solve or guards you have to kill to make whatever it is you want to open or switch on or turn off interactable.

Until now I've never had a problem with any of them. Sometimes the fights are longer than I'd like and sometimes it might take a couple of tries but generally it's just clearing the trash. You do it, you forget about it.

This time, there's this one big fellow I just can't seem to put down. Honestly, I can barely put a dent in him. He had three or four pals at the start and I saw them off easily enough but no matter what I try with the big one, he just shrugs it off then stamps on me. 

I'm not sure why he's so much tougher than the others. Part of it is level. He's level 56. But all the mobs in the areas I'm exploring now are mid-fifties and I've killed what I needed to up to now. 

Not that it's easy any more. My main character, if the term can reasonably applied to games of this kind, which I'm not at all convinced it can, since you can play as anyone in your currently selected team, is level 50 but all my other characters are level 40 at best. Also you have to level weapons in this game and I don't have any weapons higher than level 40 either. Or any very good weapons, for that matter.

I have turned the difficulty down but you can only drop it one tier and while that made me godlike for a while, I've now caught up and overtaken the benefits. 

There are two specific things I need to do overcome this roadblock. One is Ascend all three characters in the team I'm playing to level 50 (Or, better yet I guess, 60.) and upgrade their weapons likewise. The other is learn how to play.

Both easier said than done. Progression and combat in Wuthering Waves are, by my reckoning at least, insanely complicated. While I always prefer to do things the easy way for as long as I can, in most games I can buckle down and learn the ropes when I have to. In Wuthering Waves, just reading the guides on how to play properly melts my brain.

I am not going to attempt to outline the complexities. I don't understand most of them and without constant reference to a playbook I can't remember much, either. The point is, there are dozens of moving parts that need to be aligned before you hit an acceptable standard and all those parts have their own upgrade paths. 

For people who like this sort of thing I imagine it means countless hours of entertainment. From my perspective, having slacked off up to now, it would take me multiple sessions just to go farm the basic requirements to Ascend the two characters in my team who are stuck at level 40. A that would just be the beginning. 

Even so, leveling and gearing up looks a lot easier than learning how to play all three characters adequately, let alone well. Each character has a number of attacks that may revolve around stacks or counters that need to be monitored and sequences of moves that directly or indirectly affect each other but combat is also very much a team enterprise, with all characters having intro and outro skills that affect other characters as you swap between them. 

And that's just the basics. It gets far, more complicated than that. I foresee very little prospect of my ever being able remember the combos and moves required, far less having the dexterity and concentration to pull them off. 

I'm not completely hopeless. For some time now I've been capable of more than the mindless button mashing I was using at the start. I figured out I needed to keep the characters zipping in and out and I even managed to work out which of them were best at DPS or healing. I read some builds back in the summer and made some tweaks so my load-outs weren't completely random.

That, along with lowering the difficulty by a tier, was serving me pretty well up to now and even when I reached Mt. Firmament yesterday and the difficulty very noticeably ratcheted up several notches, I was still managing to win my fights without too much trouble. They were taking longer than I'd have liked but the results were never in any doubt. 

It looks like that isn't going to cut it any more. If I can't figure out a short-cut or find something on the web that tells me I'm doing something wrong that's an easy fix (Amazing how often that happens...) then I'm going to have little choice but to back off the main story quest while I spend a few sessions gathering the necessary materials and farming the appropriate bosses to stock up on enough ingredients to Ascend and level the whole team up to where they can handle the content I'm trying to do.

That's not a problem in itself. It's an achievable goal and the process involved is entertaining enough that I'm more looking forward to getting stuck in than I am dreading the grind. The real issue is that the next update is only a couple of days away and I wanted to get up to speed before then. 

I guess, though, that if I'm not leveled and geared for content when it arrives, there's no point being far enough through the storyline to access it. Assuming that's even required.

I noticed last night that there's a Returning Player program for anyone who hasn't logged in for thirty days or more. I've been away long enough to qualify and as well as some login rewards to encourage me to stay, one of the options now open to me is to go straight to the Black Shores at the click of a button.

It's tempting but I haven't clicked that button yet for a couple of reasons. The main one is that I've been enjoying the story a lot and I want to see it all. I'm a little worried that taking instant travel option might just auto-update everything before that point and mark it as finished. 

Even if it doesn't, I'm somewhat concerned that trying to skip the full story may mess something up, somewhere down the line. It's not as if that hasn't happened in other games. It's just safer to go through everything  in the order it was intended, if I can.

It's an option, though, in case I can't. I'm holding it in reserve for if I do get completely stuck. For the time being, though, my plan is to go back and do all the stuff I should have done ages ago, get my team to a minimum viable state and then go back, kick that big guy's ass, pick up the thing he's guarding and use it to open the next door I need to go through. Wish me luck!

The Good News

There's way, way more of it than the bad but I can sum it up in four words: this game is amazing!

Honestly, it's such great fun. And it looks so good. Yesterday I made it as far as Mt. Firmament, the mysterious, mountainous island just off the coast. Wuthering Waves is an extremely good-looking game all round but this has to be one of the most spectacularly beautiful zones I've seen in any game. 

I took more than fifty screenshots. I could have taken hundreds. Every view is a picture you could hang on the wall, which is something you can literally do in Once Human, by the way. Every game should let you hang your screenshots on the walls of your house.

Unfortunately, Wuthering Waves is one of those games that looks significantly more impressive when you're playing it than it does in the pictures you take so the screenshots here don't entirely do the scenery justice. I don't know why that happens in some games but I'd be interested to hear a simple explanation. 

Apart from the apparent lack of definition, there's obviously a loss of intensity from the absence of all those factors that can't be translated into flat images. Even lighting and visual effects rarely come across in stills and ambient scene-setting such as the sound of the wind in the trees, the gentle movement of the long grass or the reflections twinkling in the streams and waterfalls are missing altogether. The environment is deeply immersive to move within as well as absolutely gorgeous to look at but screenshots struggle to convey the atmospherics.

The plot, while never deviating far from the conventions of the genre, remains consistently intriguing. Even though I almost always read all the text in every game, too often I still don't care what's happening. Here, I'm quite keen to find out what's going on. 

As for the dialog, it's good and getting better but the voice acting really sells it. I'm so used, in other games, to being taken out of the moment by line readings and intonations that don't match the intent or even sometimes the meaning of the words but here it's just the opposite. The readings are so subtle they bring out nuances I hadn't always registered and add emotional depth to those I had. It's as good as a radio play much of the time and quite often better.

As for the gameplay, other than the aforementioned issues with combat difficulty it's been a total pleasure. Most of it is tactile puzzle-solving at a level of difficulty I find both satisfying and relaxing. I would have said I didn't like puzzle games much but clearly I've been playing the wrong ones because this is fun!

On Mt. Firmament there are also some new devices to play with, like the ring-cannons that shoot you into the air and the consoles that let you move time backwards and forwards. They're fun to play with as well as fitting very effectively into the storyline.

I could go on but since this was originally meant to be a screenshot post and since I really want to get back and play some more, I'm going to stop there. With luck, next time I post about the game I'll be in the Black Shores. I wonder what that zone looks like? 

If it's anything like Mt. Firmament, I'm going to need more storage space for all the screenshots.

When The Night Knocks, You'd Better Answer

Readers with long memories may recall I used to play a game called Wuthering Waves. I went on a good deal about how great it was (Which it is.) and how more people ought to try it. (Which they should.) If I was the kind of person who has a Main Game then, for a while this summer, Wuthering Waves would have been it.

It's been more than six weeks since I last mentioned Wuthering Waves. On September 23 I posted almost two thousand highly enthusiastic words about how much I was looking forward to a major content drop called The Black Shores. Since then, nothing. 

As I said in the post, "Wuthering Waves really is good and I ought to play it more consistently than I do." A prophetic observation. Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.

When The Black Shores update arived, I managed exactly one session before I got distracted by something else. I didn't post anything about it that the time because I hadn't seen any of the new content. As I suspected, much of it, including all the storyline quests, which was what I was most interested in seeing, required a certain amount of progress in the Main Quest. Progress I didn't have.

What I actually did in that one and only session was play through a whole Act of the MQ: Act V - Rewinding Raindrops. It was excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Why I hadn't carried on with the MQ before mystifies me now. I just kind of stopped and carried on playing the game without progressing at all. I guess that's another point in its favor; that it lets you.

I was still way behind. Three full Acts of the original story to go before I got to the new stuff. Even though the chapter I'd just done was so good, I didn't follow on immediately with the next for reasons that had nothing to do with Wuthering Waves itself. I got diverted first by the Nightingale reboot, then by the Way of Winter scenario in Once Human. The two of them together account for something like eighty or ninety hours of my gaming over the last month and a half.

All the while, I've been telling myself I needed to get back to Wuthering Waves, to push on to the Black Shores, without ever doing anything to make it happen. It wasn't until I saw there was a new, major update on the horizon that I finally shook off the compulsion to play Once Human every available hour and logged into Wuthering Waves instead.

This morning, I played through another Act of the MQ, followed by an Interlude. That took me a couple of hours and once again it was top-class entertainment. I've seen Wuthering Waves described as "story-rich" and it is, in more ways than one. There's a lot of story and it's mostly of very high quality.

In fact, as I've said before, the experience can often feel more like watching an interactive anime than playing a video game. There are many very lengthy cut-scenes and the fights are few and far between. 

You do have to be in the mood for that but when I am, I love it. Unlike Final Fantasy XIV, where I just couldn't wait for the ponderous, portentous, pretentious cut scenes to be over, with Wuthering Waves I sit back and just lap them up. The tone is light but exciting, the humor is actually funny and both the character animations and voice acting are emotionally involving. It's quality entertainment all the way.

And the action is great, too. I generally dislike boss fights but WW's variable difficulty options allow for combat that feels urgent and involving without being stressful. The fights are kinetic and explosive and require a little more than just plain button-mashing but not that much more. It's working for me.

There's also lots of interesting and varied non-combat action involving destruction or manipulation of the environment and all in all it's just jolly good fun, something that could well be said of the whole game. It's easy to see why it's been so successful, something confirmed by the trailer for the new update, When The Night Knocks, which has racked up more than a million YouTube views in just five days.

That trailer, like the one for The Black Shores, lists a whole slew of content additions but this time I don't intend to go through them all. Most of them don't really involve me although I'm sure they'll be of huge interest to players who take the core progression and upgrade mechanics a lot more seriously than I do.

What I am interested in is the storyline, which involves a part of the game I have only visited once so far and which I always meant to wrote about but somehow never did. There's a door out in a backwater province somewhere that I happened upon almost by chance. It hangs there, in the middle of an open plain, seemingly leading from nowhere to nowhere, but if you step through it, it takes you to a kind of surreal dreamworld. 

I found it fascinating. I always meant to go back ands see more of it but as usual that never happened, mostly because the door was really far out in the boondocks. 

Well, now we don't have to go there to see the dreamworld. It's coming to us. The name of that place is Somnoire: The Illusive Realm and the opening line of the trailer is "Somnoire breaks into world." I very much want to be there when it happens. 

Once again, though, I suspect I'll have to get caught up first. Then again, maybe not. It's hard to say until the update drops and the terms and conditions become clear. For example, I only realised today that Turquoise Moonglow,  the holiday event I had a great time with, back in the summer, was actually part of continuity, even though it didn't seem like it. 

There were no MQ requirements that I ever saw. I just jumped straight in. I only found out it assumed you'd already finished the storyline today, when I did the aforementioned "Interlude" after the big fight at the end of Act VI: Grand Warstorm. 

Spoiler incoming, just in case anyone is playing and hasn't got to this next bit yet. 

You should all be playing, by the way. 

Just saying..

So, at the very end of Act VI, at the climax of the Big Boss Fight, little Abby, the supercute creature with the odd-colored eyes and the dangly earrings that somehow lives inside Rover, the player-character, emerges to save the day. That's supposed to be the first time you actually see them. 

Except I'd seen Abby already. The flying cutie features prominently in several scenes in the Turquoise Moonglow. There have already been screenshots featuring them here on the blog. At the time I remember wondering why everyone seemed to know who Abby was, since although I had figured out they must be the mysterious force that had come to Rover's aid once or twice before, I couldn't remember ever having been introduced.

I put that down to my faulty memory but in fact the whole of that holiday event assumes you've already completed the MQ. The Interlude, which immediately follows Act VI, is when you get to meet Abby properly for the first time. 

At that point, the creature doesn't even have a name. Everyone just calls them "the Little One". There's a whole sequence where Chixia comes up with possible names, all of which receive the response "Absolutely NO!", until Rover, as a joke, suggests "Abby", short for that very phrase and the Little One, after some thought, decides to keep it.

End of spoiler. You can come back now.

So, clearly, it's possible that the new update may be both in continuity and not require specific progress in the MQ. It's also equally clear that it would be preferable for narrative reasons to be at the point the game expects you to be. Otherwise some things may just not make as much sense as they should.

As always, there is a hell of a lot going on, gaming-wise just now. It's been quite the year for that. There's still another phase to go in Way of Winter and the EverQuest II expansion, which I've bought and paid for, now has a surprisingly early launch date of November 20.

It's going to be tough to fit it all in but I hereby pledge to myself that I will do my best to get caught up in Wuthering Waves before the new update arrives on November 14. Okay, sure, that's five days from now. I said I'd do my best, not that I'd succeed.

I think I should definitely be able to make it through the original game questline but as for the Black Shore story, it's hard to say. I'm not even sure if there's a deadlne on that. All the special events that came with The Black Shore will go away when the new update lands but I'm hoping the story quests are permanent. Assuming that's so, then there's really no rush.

Still, I don't want to be doing this every time and given the quality of the content I'm being a fool to myself by not prioritising it over other games, many of which are, frankly, nowhere near as entertaining. (Not talking about you , Once Human. You're almost too much fun.)

We'll see. I know my butterfly mind. It only takes a light breeze to blow it off course and then chaos follows. Then again, I quite like a little controlled chaos, once in a while.

No-One Knows How Anything Works Any More

It's Friday. Let's grab a bag.

Pre-Alphas Are Like Busses

You wait weeks for an invite to a pre-alpha then two turn up at once... 

I signed up for Star Reach's testing program when it was first announced. I wishlisted the game on Steam at the same time. A little later I also received a couple of "Invite Your Pals" emails from people already in the pre-alpha. Long story short, I ended up with three registrations for testing, only one of which was for the email account linked to the Steam account where I'd wishlisted the game.

Despite all of that, I didn't get an invite to an actual test even though, for quite a while, Playable Worlds were sending me emails every few days, mostly asking me to send invites to friends so they could join the waitlist too and asking me to wishlist the game, even though I already had. I presume there's no visibility for developers to cross-reference which emails belong to Steam accounts. I guess that would kick up some privacy issues especially in the EU.

I wasn't about to create more Steam accounts just to wishlist Stars Reach on all three emails. I figured if I got an invite on any of them, I'd I'd just install the client through the Steam account I already had and worry about it later. Or more likely never.

After a while the emails dried up. I hadn't heard anything from Playable Worlds for a couple of weeks until yesterday, when I got one telling me about a half-hour video from a conference in which Raph Koster, with the occasional help of a very uncomfortable guy from AWS who's clearly not used to speaking in public, explains "how Playable Worlds is leveraging Unity Engine on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to embrace simulation for creating online worlds." 

I have it running in the background as I write this and frankly I'm not getting much out of it but then I'm not really listening and it's not particularly my area of interest. I'd link or embed it but it seems to be private. I don't think there's an NDA on the testing itself but there may be on stuff like this so let's forget I mentioned it.

I was a lot more interested in the next email that arrived, anyway. That was the one I saw as soon as I logged in this morning. It told me I'd been invited to join the testing program. On two of the three accounts as it turned out, although I didn't spot that right away. 

As well as providing the necessary code for me to download the game, it asked me to join Discord, which would have been fine, only my Discord account is tied to a different email than my Steam account so I had to make a new one and now I have two. This is my last quarter of a century playing MMORPGs in a nutshell. You would not believe the number of emails and accounts I have accrued in twenty-five years, all tangled together like the leads at the back of my PC, which I also can't keep separate.

Now that's settled, I'm looking forward to getting a look at the game itself, although not as much as I was before I read all of Wilhelm's posts on it. His reports make it very clear this is real testing, not just marketing, as indeed do the emails from Playable Worlds. I can't say that encourages me. My inclination to do unpaid testing work of this sort isn't as strong as it would have been twenty years ago. When I sign up for tests these days, mostly I just want to get some blog posts out of the experience. 

That said, if and when I play, I will do my best to test what I'm asked to test and to give feedback as appropriate. I do have some sense of responsibility. The email mentioned an upcoming test but by the time I got to read it, it had already happened. Not that I would have been able to attend in any case. It started at two in the morning.

As soon as there's a test at a time I can make, I'll give it a go and no doubt write up what happened here. Stars Reach will get a post of its own then, I imagine, rather than having to share.

If You Hated The Movie...

This turned up in game coverage from the NME yesterday. I hadn't seen it anywhere else and I thought it was interesting so I bookmarked it to share and now here it is.

The gist, in case you didn't click, is that the disastrous Borderlands movie apparently led to a spike in sales for the Borderlands games. As the NME article makes clear, the film was a disaster on all fronts: critics hated it, fans hated it, audiences probably would have hated it but since hardly anyone went to see it there wasn't much of an audience to do anything.

The movie was a commercial and aesthetic disaster and yet in one of those "financial meetings" that get reported sometimes, where the suits tell the investors how something that looks terrible is somehow good for business, the CEO of Take-Two, Borderlands' publisher, said that "Even though the film was disappointing, it actually benefited our catalogue sales."

I don't exactly know what "catalogue sales" are but I imagine he means all the buzz around the film, deeply negative though it was, made a bunch of new people curious enough to go buy the games. It'll be that old saw about "No such thing as bad publicity" I guess.

As it happens, I already own some Borderland game or other thanks to Amazon Prime. I haven't played it, of course. Neither have I watched the movie, although I did think the trailer looked pretty good and said so when it came out. I still think it'll probably be better than its reputation suggests and I would quite like to see it to find out if I'm right but I have several thousand movies on my watchlist I'd rather see first so it could be a while before I put that theory to the test. 

 

What Are They Doing In There?

As I was leaving a comment on Tobold's blog this morning, to suggest he probably knew AI didn't work quite the way he was saying it did, it occured to me that maybe I didn't know how it worked either. I mean, I thought I knew but I wasn't sure. 

Since it's always embarrassing to be caught out telling someone they're wrong while being just as wrong yourself, I did a little research. I didn't ask an AI this time, not so much because it would have felt weird, given the topic, more because I just seem to have fallen out of the habit. 

I googled around, looked at a few articles, then came across this piece, appropriately enough at a Substack site called Understanding AI.org ,and it made some things I hadn't been sure about feel a lot clearer than they ever had been before. So I thought I'd share. 

The article is called "Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon" and it does exactly what it promises, to the extent that when it says "a minimum" it means there is some math, not that there's none. And some jargon, too, but I like jargon.

I was able to follow it, even with the minimal math, and I learned a lot, the main thing being that no-one currently understands how LLMs work, not even the people who develop them and work with them. There are whole research projects dedicated to trying to figure out how the LLMs do what they do, a process that the authors of the article estimate will take "years—perhaps decades" to come to any kind of conclusion.

I am not going to attempt to paraphrase or precis the article. I could get an AI to do it. That would be amusing. But I won't because, as one of the two authors says in the introduction, it's "the result of two months of in-depth research" and it deserves to be read in full. It's very much worth the time. 

After reading it, I feel I now have a much clearer sense of what's happening when I ask an AI to do something for me. Well, an LLM, I should say. The terms are not synonymous.

I'm also going to be less fractious about using the term "AI" in reference to LLMs in future. I've very much been in the habit of making it quite clear I feel the term is a misnomer and that using it is misleading. After reading this piece I'm less sure that's as much of a linguistic hill worth dying on as I thought it was. 

They may not be conscious or self-aware but LLMs are capable of constructing a picture of the world in ways we can neither emulate nor understand. There's long been a widely recognized issue in scientific circles over rating or even acknowledging animal intelligence, an argument that of late has shifted to include plants and fungi. Machine intelligence is sure to join the list, if it hasn't already. 

It boils down to a problem of definition. Humans decide what constitutes intelligence and frame it in terms we understand but for the most part we either can't or won't look outside our own operating parameters. The chances of us recognizing different intelligences when they present, if they don't present as human, seems slim.

Agree or disagree, we're stuck with what we're calling AI now so we may as well try to learn how it works. It's interesting to think about, at least. I recommend the article to your attention.

And Now, A Song

And now, as is the tradition here, some music. I've spent much of the last month or so listening to Christmas songs in preparation for this years Advent Calendar so apart from the 100+ songs about snow and Santa I've bookmarked so far, pickings are pretty slim. Let's see... ah yes, this'll do...

Phone Booth - Telescreens

I missed The Strokes first time around. Nice to get a second chance. Surprised they were able to find a phone booth for the video. Maybe they built their own.

Takes a while to start. Stick with it.

I'm out.

*** Some notes on AI used in this post ***

Just that picture of a man in a white coat, produced by Flux Schnell via Nightcafe from a prompt originally reading "A very secretive computer doing something secret in a very secretive way. Line drawing. Color. 1950s.". I then evolved the result once, adding the phrase "Make the man look more puzzled.". I don't think he does.

November Spawns A Monster Offer From Prime Gaming

When the Prime Gaming blog listing the free games for November popped up in my feeds last week I was impressed with the selection. Enough so to write a blog about it, even though I said I wasn't going to do those any more. And so, here we are. A week late but never mind. 

What I am not going to do is go through the whole lot. Partly that's because most of them aren't particularly interesting to me so I don't have anything much to say about them but mostly it's because, oh boy, there are a lot!

Two dozen in fact. Twenty-four free games in one month. I haven't been keeping score but that sounds like it might be a record. Are there any good ones, though?

Well, yes, as it happens, there are. Or at least there are some that I've not only heard of but heard good things about. Of course, I'd have to reserve judgment on just how good they might be until after I've played them, which most likely will be never, but at least there are some titles there whose reputation makes it seem like it would be a good idea to grab them while they're going.

Except that under the now not-so-new rules you can't just grab everything you want on the first of the month and bugger off until next time. Someone in the marketing department caught on to that a while ago so now you have to keep coming back each week or so as they release a new tranche. 

The games hang around for about a month, waiting to be picked, like shivering kids in some purgatorial playground, so there's no real rush. There are still games I didn't want from October cluttering up this month's selection when I scan down the page on the website.

Yes, fine, but what are the games for this month, buddy? Hold on, hold on! I'm getting there. It's just taking me a while.

Whoever writes the blog (That's the Prime blog, not this one. I know who writes this one. I do. Don't I?) always includes what looks like a full list of hyperlinks to all the games, which seems like it would be a lot of work. Work that I'd sooner avoid, too, so I was happy to copy and paste it and save myself the trouble, although I was at least going to make some effort and split the whole thing up neatly into separate lines instead of leaving them as a muddled word-cloud the way I found them. 

Unfortunately, if you actually bother to click on any of them to make sure thay work, as I just did, you'll find they all go to the same exact place, the Prime Gaming home page. So that's dumb.

I include the list anyway, just stripped of the links. I left in the stupid commas because life's too short to edit other peoples' punctuation.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy,

Mafia: Definitive Edition,  

Dishonored — Definitive Edition,

Duck Paradox,

Close To The Sun,  

Disney•Pixar Cars,

Bang Bang Racing,

Snakebird Complete,

Ms. Holmes: The Case of the Dancing Men Collector’s Edition,

Chasm: The Rift,

House of Golf 2,

Tomb Raider: Anniversary,

Blade of Darkness,

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood,

Overcooked: Gourmet Edition,

Gloomy Tales: One-Way Ticket Collector’s Edition,

Super Meat Boy,

Moonscars,

RIOT — Civil Unrest,

Elite Dangerous,

Sir Whoopass — Immortal Death,

Jurassic World Evolution,

Mystery Case Files: The Dalimar Legacy Collector’s Edition

Shogun Showdown.

I imagine everyone can spot a few titles on there they've at least heard of, along with a franchise or two that has some traction in the culture. Always assuming we still have one. A culture, that is.

Touching on the franchised properties, I see we haven't quite run out of Tomb Raider titles yet. Never played one, not going to start now.

Pixar's Cars and Jurassic World bring a touch of Hollywood to the party but they don't do much for me. I think the last Pixar movie I watched might have been Monsters Inc. on TV at Christmas, maybe twenty years ago, and the only Jurassic Park movie I've ever seen was the first, also on TV at Christmas, back in the nineties.

I won't be bothering with either of those but I did see two of the three Guardians of the Galaxies movies on DVD not that long after they came out and I enjoyed them so I've already claimed that one. It was in the first batch to go up on the website at the start of the month. 

It's an RPG shooter adventure, apparently, which is just some disparate genres smushed together as far as I can see, not any kind of unified entity of its own. I've always liked RPGs and Adventures, though, and based on Once Human I think I like shooters now, too, so there's a fair chance I might enjoy whatever this is, assuming I actually play it some time.

Of the rest, the immediate stand-outs for me are Dishonored and Elite Dangerous. 

I've heard numerous good things about the Dishonored series, "winner of over 100 Game of Year awards". It sounds like something I might enjoy. Then again, I heard nothing but good things about the X-Com series and that sounded right up my street until I played it and found it really wasn't. I'd write a post about that if I had much more to say about it than ugly to look at, boring to play, annoying to listen to.

Still, I won't have to pay even the pittance I wasted on the two X-Com games to find out I don't much like Dishonored either, so I may as well chance it. It's supposed to be up today, although at time of writing it hasn't reached the web page yet. It comes with all the DLC, too, so it's a real bargain at nothing down and nothing to pay.

Elite is a game I remember with absolutely no fondness from the 1980s. I thought it was too expensive back then but I did very much like the idea of a trading and exploration game set in deep space so I bought another, cheaper title that ripped it off. I tried playing that one a number of times but never really got the hang of how to fly the ship. Also trading as core gameplay as opposed to a way to make money so you can do something interesting with it is hella boring in any setting. I have no clue why anyone enjoys it.

About the only thing I know about Elite Dangerous is from a couple of posts Wilhelm wrote about it ages ago. The main thing I remember him saying was how he couldn't get the ship into space or control it when he did. That seems to square quite well with my memories of whatever Elite clone I played all those decades ago so I have no real expectation of ever being able to "play" Elite Dangerous. I did enjoy my free flies in Star Citizen, though, and I managed to get the ship to fly there, so I'm going to claim it anyway, always assuming I remember. It's not due until the 27th so I may forget.

There are some other fairly big names on the list that don't really interest me but which I'm sure someone reading will want to grab, assuming they haven't got them already. Mafia, Overcooked and Super Meat Boy are all well-known titles I'm sure I've read multiple blog posts about over the years. None of them appeals to me though.

Of the remaining games, none of which ring any bells, I plan on claiming... none of them. There were several I thought might be interesting - Sir Whoopass, Ms. Holmes, Blade of Darkness - but when I took a closer look they all had something about them that made me sure I'd never play them so what would be the point?

There is one game on the list I haven't mentioned that I definitely would play, and yet I am not going to claim that one, either. Why's that? I'm glad you asked. It's a very interesting answer.

The game is Close To The Sun. It's a puzzle adventure, set on a quarantined steamship in an alternate 1897. As the Steam description has it "Deep in international waters, Tesla’s Helios stands still. An unbound utopia for scientific research, Rose Archer steps aboard in search of her sister, quickly to discover not all is as it seems. A single word covers the entrance… QUARANTINE!"

I read that and thought it sounded awfully familiar. I looked at the screenshots and said to myself  "I think I've played this...".  I wondered if perhaps I'd played a demo in a Next Fest event. I searched the blog to see if I'd ever written about it and guess what?

I reviewed the game on May 30, 2021, when I described it as a "visually delightful.. walking sim with puzzles". I was less impressed with the writing, which I called "not terrible but... jarringly ill-judged at times" but I loved the gameplay, describing it as "almost perfectly pitched to hold my interest".

And how did I come to have access to this game in the first place? It's not free to play. It retails at £15.99 on Steam. I know I would never have paid that much for it. Did I get it in a sale or something? 

Nope. As I said in that review three years ago it was "Another from Amazon Prime". They gave it away already. I can see it right there in the list of Claimed games on my account althogh it appears I uninstalled it after I finished, which is a lot tidier than I would usually be. 

So, are they recycling old games now? Or is it just a mistake? I mean, it was three years ago. I suppose it makes sense. There must be plenty of new Prime members who weren't around to grab Close To The Sun the last time it came round. 

Maybe there are more games on the list that aren't new. Maybe they're constantly rec-upping old offers and I just haven't noticed. Maybe I have noticed and I've commented on it before and now I can't remember doing it. That wouldn't surprise me.

It's pretty likely I'd never remember any giveaway I hadn't played, even if I claimed it. It's not that unlikely I wouldn't remember it even if I had played it and even written about it. Everything is so ephemeral.

It certainly would explain why there are so many games in the offer now. I thought two dozen games in a month sounded exceptionally generous. Perhaps there's a reason for that

I guess I'd better check more carefully in future. I wonder if it tells you when you try to claim something you already own? I ought to check. Close To The Sun is in today's batch. When it comes up I'll try it and see. Expect an edit later.

Or, if you're reading this after the seventh, here it is now.

Early Access Isn't Just For Christmas

I was just reading the combined September and October update for Monsters & Memories. I probably should say I was skim-reading because there's a lot of detail in there, everything from minor tweaks for individual classes to the re-writing of entire back-end systems.

As I was reading, I couldn't help making a few mental comparisons with a couple of other in-development MMORPGs seeking to bring back the experiences of the past. One of them went into Early Access years ago and is still there now. The other enters EA next month. M&M is proposing to join them in 2026.

I think it has an excellent chance of emulating the slow-burning, aesthetic success of the former, something I am not anywhere near as convinced will be the latter's fate, not after years of jumping around all over the place and not really seeming to know what it is or who it's being made for.

The longstanding Early Access game is, of course, the well-respected Project Gorgon, first mentioned here in December 2013 although, as Wilhelm pointed out in the comments, I'd left a comment of my own on his post about the same game over a year earlier. Technically, I've been writing about PG for a dozen years now.

The game about to enter Early Access is Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which made its first appearance on the blog just two months after Project Gorgon, in January 2014. I find it astonishing - scary, even - to see these dates put down in print like this. 

I was still in my early-to-mid 'fifties when these two games entered the public discourse. I'll have hit state retirment age before Pantheon makes it to Early Access and it's likely I'll be in my seventies by the time either of them meets an official launch date. If that doesn't tell you how ludicrously overcooked game development has become...

The huge difference between the two games is that for the whole of the last twelve years I've been able to play Project Gorgon as much as I liked. Even before it went into Early Access, there was an open alpha/beta client available to anyone who cared to download it. In the end, it turned out I didn't want to play it as much as all that but it was still great to have the option.

If nothing else, it gave me a great deal of confidence in the game and its development team. The game may not be "finished" in the eyes of the devs but it's as playable (And as feature-complete, most likely.) as many supposedly launched MMORPGs and I can say that with the experience of having spent many hours there.

Pantheon, despite being the same age, give or take, remains largely a mystery. It spent a decade in closed development, tucked away out of sight behind the money-wall of some hugely expensive buy-in options and even those for only limited test windows. The portcullis has been raised occasionally to allow the curious a peep inside and in the last year or two there have been some cheaper, limited passes available but the upcoming EA launch marks the first time the game will have been widely available to anyone who cares to give it a try at (What we assume will be...) a reasonable price.

Monsters & Memories sits somewhere between the two extremes but considerably closer to Project Gorgon's ready accessibilty than Pantheon's gated privacy. There have been numerous open tests, some lasting several days, with many more promised as the team behind the game readies it for it's EA launch on Steam the year after next.

They seem to have a very clear idea of what they want to achieve and a very realistic timetable in which to achieve it. I've played the game in open testing several times and it already does a surprisingly good job of recreating the era it seeks to emulate. So does Project Gorgon, coming from a slightly different perspective.

Pantheon, by contrast, on the one occasion I was able to play it, felt weird. It didn't look right and it didn't feel right, something the other two easily manage without seeming to try. I also found it quite astonishingly dull, even for the hour or two I spent with it, which was absolutely not the case with either of the others and not at all what I expected.

Visionary Realms released a newsletter a few days ago to say there's been a big uptick in people interested in playing, that the current round of testing has been extended to the end of the month and that there is now a European server. It also warns us all that the Pledge packages will cease to be available on December 1st.

What it does not say is how much EA access will cost, so it remains impossible to judge whether it would be better to buy the cheapest Pledge now (It costs $50.) or wait for the EA package itself. It's very hard to imagine any basic EA access costing more than $50 though, and the fifty dollar pledge now comes with a "Buddy Code", meaning if there are two of you it's effectively $25 each.

Although I think Mrs Bhagpuss's MMORPG days are probably over, this was one of the few new games she was interested in, once. I wouldn't mind having that Buddy Code just in case she fancies giving it a go sometime. On the other hand, if EA turns out to cost $25, as I suspect it might, it makes more sense to wait for that and then just buy a second copy if and when she does express an interest.

In practice, though, I wouldn't mind betting she'd get more enjoyment out of Monsters & Memories, which, in my brief exposure so far, feels closer to the original EverQuest experience and not that disimilar to Vanguard, the game I think Mrs Bhagpuss and I both hoped Pantheon would ressemble a lot more than it appears to at the moment.

I'll have to make an effort to play more during the next Monsters & Memories test. See if I can get a bit further than the starting city. I hope there's a test soon, preferably before Pantheon opens the doors, just so I can get some data for a comparison. If M&M would only go the full Project Gorgon route and have a client up for testing all the time I think I could strike Pantheon off my wishlist altogether.