Free like a butterfly, free like a bee

I’m currently juggling an assortment of regular games, quite different at first glance: a combat vehicle simulator, a match-3 puzzle game, an idle dungeon crawler, a collectible card game, and a music trivia game. They’re all free-to-play, though, so share many of the persistent elements that tends to bring – rewards/unlocks, achievements/badges, daily/weekly missions, experience points and resulting ranks/levels. Some combination of those seems to be the key to holding my attention long-term, so I thought I’d do a little compare and contrast.

The oldest faithful is War Thunder, I’ve been regularly playing over nine years now which is pretty staggering. New vehicles are frequently added, now pushing well into the 1980s, but thankfully my Second World War focus means I can happily bimble about the lower tiers where it doesn’t take hundreds of hours to nudge up a progress bar. Each month a set of historical decals are made available with various challenges, typically getting a number of kills or a certain score with appropriate vehicles, and I’m finding those are a perfect hook – achievable in a sensible amount of time, and a nudge to play various different countries and vehicle types to mix things up.

I’ve been ticking along in Marvel Puzzle Quest for four years now, also a pretty decent run for a match-3 game. There’s a regular drumbeat of new character from across the Marvel pantheon to unlock and level up; after a couple of years I worked my way through the whole backlog, and now keep pace with the newcomers. It’s my mobile game of choice for killing five minutes when waiting around, or when half-watching something on television or half-listening to a call. There’s something about matching 3 things that remains strangely compelling, with the powers of the characters to mix things up a little and the ongoing levelling and unlocking for a sense of progress. Characters range from one to five stars in power, and while I’ve unlocked all of them I haven’t got any 4* character up to maximum level let alone a 5*, it’s calibrated to really slow things down in those higher levels so there’s no danger of ‘completing’ it.

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms has just passed the one year mark since I started with it. It also has a regular release of a new character per month, with options to acquire older characters, and I’d just finished unlocking everyone before the event that introduced their 100th champion – the Dungeon Master from the old cartoon series. As an idle game it’s well suited to starting up and leaving it to tick along in the background, occasionally popping back to slightly tweak a formation or start a new adventure, and there’s no shortage of additional elements to progress – character levels, achievements and so on that, like MPQ, slow right down at higher levels to ensure there’s always something to progress.

KARDS hasn’t hit the one year mark yet, and slips in and out of rotation a little; it can still be enormously enjoyable, but also enormously frustrating when you hit certain decks and/or have bad luck with your draws. I tend towards flavour-of-the-month decks in ranked battles but it gets a little stale doing the same thing each time; drafts, unranked battles, the PvE campaigns, or training mode allow for much more experimentation, and are better venues to tackle the daily missions that give a small amount of currency for playing with certain nations or using certain unit types.

SongPop is the newest kid on the block in my rotation, though the oldest game as it approaches its tenth birthday; I played the original incarnation on Facebook, then took about nine and a half years off before getting hooked again. It’s very cross-platform, with Android and iOS clients as well as Windows, but it’s not so much of a “kill five minutes” mobile game – tenths of a second can make all the difference to your score, and of course you need to be listening intently.

As well as head-to-head matches there’s a Party Mode that pits you against up to 300 other players in themed parties (60s, 70s, 80s, pop, rock, etc etc) lasting 24 hours. The top player (occasionally top 3) on the leaderboard at the end of the it gets a badge, with tokens, power-ups and XP distributed to everyone else. You compete against other players in brackets based on your level, and as I was starting off only the most popular categories had more than 50 people playing them; the hinterlands of jazz, blues and reggae were very sparsely populated. Joining right at the start of a party I might have been the only player for a while, so even if I couldn’t tell Miley Cyrus from Cyrus Vance I was still racking up bonus points for being in first place every time. I was absolutely smashing it, then levelled up to the final player bracket.

When you pitch up to a well-established MMO there’s often some sort of PvP skirmishing, and it’s often a bit of jolly old knockabout fun as you level up alongside a smattering of other new players and veterans trying out alts. Then you hit the level cap and are confronted with the other 99% of players, including highly co-ordinated teams of lightning-reflexed killers who’ve spent the years since launch honing their skills, characters and optimal positioning to maximise the insult value of particular emotes. SongPop turns out to be the same, except with a nice old lady called Doris who has an encyclopedic knowledge of 60s music and several hours to kill each day. Suddenly every party is full, many times over, and the top scores are in the hundreds of thousands. If you’re strong across every playlist in a party I reckon you can average about 2,000 points per minute, so we’re talking a good hour or three (considerably longer for those who can’t reliably win every round) of hammering the same category time after time. Not ludicrous, in the grand scheme of gaming time expenditure, but hardly a casual dabble any more. I’ve given up my dreams of a full set of badges, not that it was ever the grandest ambition, and have settled back into the basic pleasures of song recognition and the occasional nostalgia rush that evokes.

So there are persistent elements that, alongside the core gameplay, keep me coming back to those games. The publishers are probably more concerned about the other ubiquitous elements of free-to-play: in-game currencies, earned by playing and/or bought with real money; purchasable unlocks; gacha/loot boxes; advertising; premium/VIP status. Do they keep me paying as well as playing?

Premium vehicles in War Thunder are (I presume) one of its main sources of income; instantly available without needing to grind, and slightly more rewarding to use in battles. They’re separate to the standard vehicles obtained by playing and shouldn’t offer a clear advantage in battles, though there’s a bit of a furore now and again when battle ratings seem to be particularly favourable. I bought a few back in the day, particularly bundles of vehicles/currency/etc on sale, though haven’t felt the need for a while now. MPQ and Idle Champions both offer specific heroes for purchase, but in both cases exactly the same heroes can be unlocked by other means so they’re not so tempting in the cash shop; I have bought a couple of bundles, but only when steeply discounted in a sale. KARDS offers PvE campaigns and expansion sets that can be bought with either in-game currency or cash, and come with themed cards that can be very useful; I’ve bought an assortment, but with in-game currency rather than cash. For MPQ, Idle Champions and KARDS, though, specific unlocks take a back seat to random rewards from their various implementations of loot boxes (tokens, chests and card packs).

Personally I’m not a fan of spending real money on random rewards; all three games allow you to earn loot boxes by playing as well, and the results make me even less likely to spend real money. Once you’ve unlocked all the characters and basic equipment in the first two games opening packs is essentially an admin exercise of duplicate items giving incremental improvements with very occasional slightly more useful rewards. It’s most disappointing in KARDS, where booster packs should really be central to the CCG element, but while at first it’s great to be able to slot any sort of upgrade into your starter decks it doesn’t take long at all before you’re constructing specific decks that need specific, often rare, cards. With an ever-expanding pool of cards, the chances of getting something you really want from a random booster get ever-lower; I can’t remember the last time I got a new card from a pack that went straight into action. Fortunately there’s a wildcard system that lets you craft chosen cards, so at least you’re not entirely at the mercy of the randomness. I bought a few Steam bundles including card packs for KARDS at a good discount, and the Epic store giveaway that first tempted me to Idle Champions included a few stacks of chests, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to spend serious money on more. War Thunder also introduced crates requiring premium currency to open, but they seem tacked on, like it’s expected of a free-to-play game so they might as well shove them in, I’ve never bothered with them at all.

The only game that doesn’t sell random loot is SongPop, and it’s also the only one that does include advertising. More of a staple in mobile games, a free player of SongPop gets to enjoy an advert after every round they play. In the Windows Store version this consists of a static screen that can be immediately dismissed, there appears to be a pool of four or five other games that might pop up, none particularly recent; it smacks slightly of a forgotten bus stop still advertising Gods Of Egypt In Cinemas Now!! The Android/iOS versions have more intrusively irritating animated ads, occasionally immediately dismissible, more frequently unskippable. It’s pretty much unplayable on those platforms for any length of time without going slightly mad, whereas the Windows adverts are so easy to skip they might as well not be there; Goldilocks wouldn’t be impressed. The adverts can be avoided by upgrading to a VIP subscription.

Premium/VIP status is on offer in War Thunder, MPQ, and SongPop. In War Thunder it gives a significant boost to mission rewards and research speed, and is all but essential to unlock vehicles in the higher tiers; I kept it up for a few years when playing more, grabbing it at a good discount on a yearly basis, but it’s not really needed when bimbling around the lower tiers. I also took out a VIP sub in MPQ for a couple of months towards the beginning of my run; it gives out a daily bonus of tokens or in-game currency, particularly useful when frequently unlocking new heroes but not so necessary any more. In SongPop it removes adverts, allows you to select any playlist for matches, and has a few other perks; for about £4 a month it wasn’t a bad deal at all. SongPop also offered a Diamond VIP tier for four times the price that didn’t include a whole lot more; whether there to make the regular VIP status look better value, or for those who really loved the game and wanted to chuck more cash at it, it seemed a little odd.

On the whole, then, I much prefer to buy a specific known item or some sort of subscription with defined benefits, and am a dreadful cheapskate who mostly buys things in sales. I presume I’m in a minority, with loot boxes being so prevalent, but I only have a sample size of ‘me’ to work with. I’d hesitate to call any model too generous, but I’ve reached a point in all five games where it doesn’t feel necessary to buy anything; I would have said SongPop had ideal monetisation, no random loot boxes and a cheap VIP subscription as a way of showing support while also gaining a few benefits. Ironically, though, they just announced a new structure, doing away with regular and Diamond VIP in favour of a single SongPop Plus option for twice the price of the old VIP, so £8(ish) per month is steep for a light dabbling game. A two-tier system would seem to make sense, with a cheap option to remove adverts and get a few bonus rewards coupled with a pricier tier to access all playlists as well; I might’ve kept subscribing for a while under a fiver, but I guess it’s back to adverts for Sniper Fury.

Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind

Lockdown is starting to ease now, though I can’t see there’ll be too many changes on the personal front for a while; it’s not like I’m desperate to rush out shopping or anything, though I guess a haircut wouldn’t go amiss once barbers can open again. I can see homeworking continuing for the foreseeable future, the technology is holding up surprisingly well, and when I’ve got a clear task to focus on I think I’m rather more productive at home. The difficulty is when things are more of a slog – trying to co-ordinate with other systems or people – when suddenly the myriad distracting possibilities become all the more tempting. Hopefully things will be a bit flexible in the future allowing for one or two days at home alongside office work.

Game-wise, not much to report. Borderlands 3 ticks along; the writing doesn’t seem quite as sharp as for previous games, the series was always a close-run thing between funny and grating, and this one errs towards the latter a bit more often. Still, plenty of silly guns and explode-y type fun to be had. War Thunder thunders along; I generally stick to Second World War era prop aircraft in there, but with a bunch of Cold War jet additions I’ve started to poke more of a nose into jet gameplay. There’s a new season of Destiny 2 bearing a striking similarity to previous seasons of Destiny 2, but it’s a comforting formula of nudging up gear levels, and I still come back to its gunplay over pretty much anything else. On the Oculus Quest it’s Beat Sabre all the way, I should probably have a look at some of the other music/rhythm games on it, and with the good weather maybe get out in the garden for a bit of Superhot VR with less danger to the furniture (counterbalanced by more danger of alarming the neighbours with peculiar flailing).

Away from games there’s been a bit more time for other media. I haven’t been reading much fiction, even less fantasy fiction recently; Joe Abercrombie has the first of new trilogy out, but I’m waiting for all three before diving in and bingeing (my poor ageing brain has trouble picking things up a year apart) so instead I picked up Ed McDonald’s Raven’s Mark trilogy and enjoyed them a lot. Televisually the third series of Westworld was disappointing, it felt like they threw too much in and it failed to gel. I finally got around to Altered Carbon and felt that did a pretty good job, the second season took a while to get going but overall a nice adaptation of the books. There’s been something of an explosion of lockdown-produced media; on the BBC Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe and Staged with David Tennant and Michael Sheen were both excellent, on YouTube Alex Horne’s Home Tasking and John Finnemore’s Cabin Fever have been a lot of fun. I’m sure there must be more, but nothing else immediately springs to mind.

Stay safe out there!

Black! Like the procession of night that leads us into the valley of despair!

My gaming world has been pretty MMOGless for a while now, depending how exactly you define a MMOG; I had a good run with the Sunday morning gang in Guild Wars 2 and Neverwinter, and a bit of a canter in The Elder Scrolls Online though it didn’t quite grab me in the same way. Star Trek Online provided a brief diversion with some entertaining character design and ship naming possibilities, and the others had a fair go at Rift but I don’t think I even got to level 10. After a bit of a break, though, and with Black Desert Online on sale for a few pounds it seemed like a good time to give it a crack.

I thought the development or initial release of BDO might just have made it into a blogpost here, back in the days of vague topicality and frequent posting; I recall previews of the character creator causing a bit of a stir with the sheer number of sliders to control cheekbone angularity and earlobe density. Either my brain or the search facility are faulty, though, and I know which my money is on. Character creation is certainly impressive, but as with so many games rendered somewhat pointless when you’re mostly staring at the back of your head from a distance when actually playing. Once into the world it’s a mixture of familiar old MMO tropes (accept quest, kill mobs, get loot) and the bewildering array of lore and skills and currencies and points of a several year old game. I’m not sure if it’s localisation or translation, several quests involve “learning about” types of creature so I was preparing a short questionnaire to work in conjunction with observation and assessment, except it turned out the questgiver was using “learn” in the sense of “kill to death” in the grand MMO tradition, it’s going to get very confusing if they start mixing their euphemisms (“look, when you said ‘learn about’ I thought you meant ‘get to know’, you know, ‘know’… in the biblical sense?”).

Combat is joyously messy, a fast paced action system of clicking or keys plus directions, like a fighting game in some ways with combos and the like. I would imagine some sort of cautious technique is advisable later on, but at least in the early game jumping into a pile of mobs and mashing random buttons produces satisfying flurries of sword slashes, kicks, punches and such, even more fun when there’s a few of you piling into a fight. There’s something deeply satisfying about mowing through large numbers of easy to kill mobs; course there still needs to be a bit of threat, but I prefer it to slogging through smaller numbers of tougher opponents. The Division 2 is a case in point; it too was on sale, and at 80% off I thought it’d be rude not to. It’s been fun enough, the world continues to be well realised and interesting to explore, but at the end of the day the hide-behind-low-walls combat where even standard minions soak up plenty of gunfire doesn’t grab me like the faster paced first person shooting of Destiny 2, so the latter is still where I’ll usually drop in if I’ve got half an hour, and The Division 2 will probably sit alongside Far Cry 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and heaven knows what else in the ever growing “should probably get around to having another go at” pile that waits only for someone to add another two or three days of free time to every week.

The Quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning

Happy New Year, one and all, as we tumble at ever-increasing speed into the crazy world of the future with flying cars, hoverboards, robot butlers, and better-than-life virtual reality. More or less. I got an Oculus Quest for Christmas which is pretty darned impressive, if not quite the total immersion of Red Dwarf and other sci-fi. Home VR seems to be really taking off with the Quest, Rift, Vive, Playstation VR and such hitting that “pricey but not completely ludicrous” price-point, but then VR seemed to be taking off in the early 90s and didn’t get very much further than Lawnmower Man and Craig Charles shouting “Awooogah!” in Cyber-Swindon.

I’d tinkered a bit with Google Cardboard, which was fun and all, but with only rotational movement tracking and limited interactivity it was a bit ‘updated View-Master‘. The six degrees of freedom of the Quest plus its Touch controllers are quite literal game-changers; with my fondness for rhythm games I dove straight into Beat Saber and have been having a whale of a time flailing away at flying coloured blocks. I poked a nose into a demo of Dance Central – funny how dance pad games like Dance Dance Revolution just used feet, giving everything a slightly Riverdance feel, while Dance Central is all about the hands. I’m sure cyber-shoes can’t be too far off, though. Slightly more my speed is the rail-shooter with extra beats Pistol Whip, most enjoyable and not a bad workout with plenty of ducking and diving to avoid incoming fire. Superhot VR is amazing, a real demonstration of the power of VR; its “time moves when you move” mechanism gives it something of a yoga flavour, holding a pose while considering your actions. I haven’t bought the full version, though, as it’s also the most dangerous of the games I’ve tried so far, requiring reaching, grabbing, throwing and punching around you. Even in a recommended 2m by 2m space (which was only clear due to kitchen refurbishment, there’ll be a fridge taking up a chunk of that space shortly) I’ve had slight knuckle bruising, in more confined spaces there’ve been close calls with a lamp and ornaments.

I think the last “classic” adventure game I really enjoyed was Discworld: Noir, before the combination of increasingly stretched Use Random Thing From Inventory With Other Random Thing From Inventory (And/Or Random Bit Of Environment) logic and ease of looking up solutions on the internet put a bit of a crimp on things. VR offers an opportunity to bring some physicality to puzzles: levers to throw, wheels to turn and such, almost Escape Room-type elements; I’ve picked up Shadow Point for the Quest as it sounds intriguing (and features voice work from Patrick Stewart) but haven’t had a chance to give it a proper try. The Quest streams to phones or suitably equipped televisions, I’m hoping it might work for some collaborative puzzle solving.

The Android-based Quest is wireless, which is a big plus, but is locked in to software available in the Quest store (unless you sideload applications in developer mode, which proved pretty straightforward and useful for a wider library of Beat Saber tracks), though that’s a pretty good selection. Another big plus is that Oculus introduced Link, whereby the Quest can be hooked up to a PC with a USB-C cable to work with Steam VR and Rift software, expanding the catalogue and taking advantage of heftier PC graphics (with suitable specs). I haven’t delved too deeply into that side of things, but a quick jaunt in War Thunder was most impressive.

Overall I’m not sure it’s going to become my main gaming device by any means, but it’s great for something different and a way of being a bit more active, particularly handy as the aforementioned kitchen refurbishment has resulted in a significant increase in takeaways and eating out, not terribly conducive to resolutions to eat more healthily.

It's A Right Royale Knockout

Battle Royales are quite the In Thing these days. I imagine publishers are frantically trying to find the next mega-hit even as we speak…

“Grand Theft Auto is history, Minecraft is old news, the kids are all playing Fortnite now and we need something to compete. What have you got?”
“So we had a racing game that you wanted turning into a massive open world, and then you wanted players to be able to dig and build stuff, and then you wanted zombies, so we’ve just finished adding them to… Zombie Death Build Race World 2000!”
“Fantastic! Love it! Perfect! Just a couple of really minor tweaks: ditch the zombies, set it on a small island instead of a massive world, and instead of racing have the players shoot each other. Great! What else have you got?”
“Well… I mean… the AI department spent the last seven years working on a chess program so fiendishly advanced that it can beat Deep Blue two matches out of three, we’re almost ready to unveil that.”
“Amazing! Chess! Perfect! Totally fits the vibe we’re shooting for. Just a couple of really minor tweaks: the board needs to shrink by one square every three minutes, and add crates of gear the pawns can pick up to upgrade themselves. Oh, and dance emotes for the bishops. Just copy some crazy popular dance fad, that’ll be fine won’t it legal team? Legal team? Anyone seen the legal team? No? Not to worry, I’m sure there won’t be any problems. What else have you got?”
“That was it, really. Apart from a retro reboot one of the team was working on: there are these invaders, they’re from space, the player has to move left and right and shoot them.”
“Nah, retro stuff is so passée, kids aren’t interested in it unless… wait a minute! What about… if there are one hundred of these invaders? And they arrive on the screen from above. And gradually the distance between the player and the invaders gets smaller, so the action gets quicker! This could be gold dust, get on it right away!”

I haven’t tried PlUnkBat or Fortnite, but when Apex Legends burst onto the scene with minimal hype and racked up record player numbers in short order (including Melmoth) I thought I’d pop a nose in and see what the fuss was about. It’s a very solid game, the context sensitive ‘ping’ function that allows you to rapidly communicate the location of supplies, suggest directions, and warn of enemy activity is a great systems that hopefully will make it into a lot of other games. I’m not a fan of universal voice chat, and specific “equipment crate here!” messages are much easier that trying to work out some sort of mime system with basic movement controls:

“Hmm, Skippy’s jumping up and down and shooting at the floor over there… either he’s found a crate and is trying to convey the location, or he’s hyperactive and bored.”
“Or he’s slumped over his keyboard with his face on the spacebar and finger on the left mouse button, should we send help?”
“Better check if there’s a crate there first”
“Good point, it would be bad to waste everyone’s time if he doesn’t need help”
“Uh, yeah, that’s definitely what I was worried about rather than the danger of a crate despawning and not getting some loot..”

Roaming around gathering weapons and equipment is nicely done, reminiscent of Survival mode in The Division (or even Rogue/Nethack, going a wee bit further back) but at some stage comes the shooting, and once again my poor aged reflexes are a bit of an issue here. I manage the odd kill here and there, support the team a bit, but on the whole I’m more shootee than shooter. It might be something I dip a toe into now and again, but I’m not sure I’ll be a regular.

Wouldn’t it make a nice change if, instead of hunting for guns and other tools of violence, players were instead scouring the map for clotted cream, cucumber slices, a selection of preserves, bread, assorted varieties of tea, scones, ornamental cakestands and teapots, and then all got together in the centre of the map for a lovely afternoon tea? Much more wholesome. Apart from the horrific violence that would result from disagreements over whether the jam or cream goes on the scone first…

Everyone has got the fear

Anthem seemed like the least-braniest of no-brainers. Do you like ARPGs[1]? *nods* Do you like Bioware games? *nods* A Bioware ARPG? To the pre-order-tron for the super deluxe diamond-with-strontium-edging edition featuring a sticker, some gear you’ll use for about seven minutes before replacing it, and digital download concept art just in case you run out of things to look at on the internet!

I’d tried out beta tests of The Division and Destiny 2, in part to check their performance, and ended up buying and playing both of them heavily. The recent Anthem demo/beta/stress test weekend was surely mere formality before deciding whether to just buy it or opt for some sort of EA/Origin subscription-thingumy, but after a couple of hours with the demo I think I’ll be holding off on the strontium edging.

I’m a PC gamer, have been for 30 years, man and boy, hardest game in the world son. Getting used to different control schemes can take a while; digital joysticks on arcade games were intuitive, but with a ZX Spectrum at home there was just the keyboard. Moving a bat left and right in Thro’ The Wall wasn’t too tricky, for ludicrously advanced games involving moving in more than two directions I seem to recall a fairly standard scheme used the left hand on “Q” and “A” for up and down and the right hand on “O” and “P” for left and right with a thumb or two on space for jump/fire/invade Belgium. When moving to the PC I remapped game controls to the same layout where possible, but many games insisted on the dedicated number/cursor pad. For a while I used both hands on that in an awkward interlocked-fingers pose; *one* hand for all *four* directions??/? Madness! I adapted after a while, though, for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom cursor keys were the way to go. The mouse was fine for something like Civilisation, clicking on maps and what-not, but you’d never use it for a fast-paced action game. Then games had this mad idea that you could look up and down, and that necessitated a whole bunch more keys; either that, or you could use the mouse to look around. I think it was Quake II where I first encountered mouselook, I’m not sure if that still used the cursor keys for moving or if that was also when I started using the now traditional WASD, it took a bit of time to become proficient but I’ve never looked back since (except with a mouse). There were strong reasons for most of the changes, the ability to hit more buttons as games needed more input, or more precise control.

I’ve never owned a console[2], which I only point out to justify my lack of gamepad skills rather than some misplaced sense of quasi-religious fervour. I’ve occasionally fiddled with a friend’s (fnarr, missus, etc.) and been fairly hopeless when it comes to pointing shotguns at evil hell creatures; I’m sure it would come to me with time, but mouse and keyboard have seen me through until now.

All that digression is partly just ‘cos I’m terribly old and forget what I’m talking about and start randomly reminiscing (who remembers Spangles, eh?), but mostly because many of the Anthem previews I’d seen had emphasised that movement in the game was what really made it stand out, the ability to fire up a jetpack and swoop through the skies at any moment. So I fired up my jetpack and… PANGK! (That’s a Javelin hitting a cliff, not to be confused with Mr Stevens, Head of Catering, breaking up a fight between Darth Vader and God.)

Opinion on flying in the Anthem demo is divided between those able to fly through the air with the greatest of ease (predominantly using gamepads) and those who PANGK! (mostly with keyboard and mouse). The mouse acts as a virtual joystick, moving it outside a circle in the centre of the screen causes deflection, you have to manually return the mouse to the circle to stop moving. It’s a system used in a number of other PC games (though Anthem layers on some further difficulties like negative acceleration) and I’ve never fully got to grips with it, I tend to go full Krypton Factor Contestant Attempting To Land A 747 Simulator After Ten Minutes Of Training; flying in a straight line not too bad, minor course corrections OK, but any sharp manoeuvres rapidly result in violent overcompensation – notice he does not fly so much as plummet. At least hitting the ground in Anthem results in a Superhero Landing rather then an explosion of certain death. I seem to recall a similar flying mechanism for the fighters in Planetside 2 where I could just about fly from A to B while others were able (whether with mouse or alternative controller) to dogfight with irritating agility. I’ve tried dusting off my old analogue joystick in the past but it’s not easy to switch back and forth between it and other controls, and my stick-skills have rather atrophied since X-Wing versus Tie Fighter, especially since I found War Thunder.

War Thunder (except in Simulation mode) cheats – you don’t really fly an aircraft, you point your mouse where you want to go, and an ‘instructor’ takes care of the minor business of actually making the aircraft point the same way. It’s one thing to have a particular control system for a sense of realism, or to try and balance a PvP playing field between users of different devices, but call me lazy, if there’s a choice between a system that needs several frustrating hours to get the hang of and a system that’s immediately easy to grasp allowing you to focus on positioning, tactics and such rather than just Not Crashing, I’ll stick with option 2.

At least you can see where you’re going while flying, there was a short swimming segment in the Anthem demo that seemed to use the flying controls but with zero visibility half the time; I guess, on the plus side, after going through that I’d think “at least it’s not annoying as swimming” while PANGK!ing into a mountain. The developers have acknowledged issues with flying and swimming using mouse and keyboard (plus some more minor irritations of the gamepad-centric interface), and apparently the full game will have improved controls but that’s not much help unless there’s another trial. It’s a bit of a worry that the game got as far as its big demo with them in that state, I’ve no idea on the relative number of PC players versus consoles these days so it probably makes more sense to focus on the latter first; it’s hardly the first game that might need frantic patching in the first week or seven up to and after release.

Flying isn’t the whole game, you can run, jump and shoot with a mouse perfectly happily without PANGK!ing, but the rest of the game didn’t particularly grab me. Combat was reminiscent of the duller fights of The Division, mobs soaking up large volumes of fire, whether that was down to lacklustre default weapons or everything being intended for a group of players I’m not sure. I’m not averse to chunks of group content, especially with an effective matchmaker to bring random players together, but sometimes I just want to take things in my own time, at my own pace, in my own clothes, and Anthem seemed to be very focused on groups of four; four there shall be, and not three (lest it be on the way to four); five is Right Out. I tried a four-player stronghold/strike/trial/dungeon/thingumy that ticked along well enough, shot some bugs, got some loot, but it didn’t fire me up to try it again on a daily basis plus weekend matinee. There wasn’t much to latch onto story-wise, Bioware’s traditional strength albeit not so much the focus of Anthem, the demo dropping you in at level 10 to get straight into the action. It seemed like a fairly generic sci-fi world, some elements between missions held promise, but again not enough to make me desperate to pick up the full game.

All in all I think I’ll hold off for a while on Anthem. It’s not terrible, but it looks like it could do with a bit more work and I’ve got plenty of other stuff to be getting on with in other games, like picking up shiny loot in Destiny 2 and getting my flying (and boating) fix in War Thunder. In this games-as-a-service world releases are more akin to a TV series than a one-off movie and not everything hits the ground running from the start, it can take a few episodes (or even series) for things to bed in, but not everything gets a chance; I really hope it works out for Bioware and Anthem finds its place.

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[1] Trying to nail things, whether music, games, food or ornamental hatstands, down to specific genres can be rather unhelpful, leading to bickering over genre definitions rather than other, far more important, bickering (custard creams or bourbons?) Shorthands are handy though, and I’m not sure there’s a universally agreed genre for the current crop of Games Where You Run Around And Shoot Things And Get Cool Guns And Level Up And Stuff like The Division, Destiny and Anthem (or predecessors like Defiance and the late lamented (at least in some quarters) Hellgate: London). MMO/MMOG was always a bit vague, more so now that Multiplayer and Online are common if not ubiquitous for big releases; Wikipedia seems to go for Action Role Playing Game so I guess I’ll use that over Rootin’ Tootin’ Lootin’ Shootin’ ‘Em Up.

[2] Not strictly true, I have a Wii (not a PROPER console, though, right???/?), but that hardly helped with gamepad skills as I only ever used it for the Guitar Hero series and Wii Sports. My imaginary-tennis-racquet-flailing skills have come on leaps and bounds, though.

Why hast thou Forsaken me?

As mentioned last time around I got Destiny 2 patched up when it was made available for free at the start of November, and Melmoth took advantage to introduce the game to Mini-M (not quite so Mini any more…) We hopped around together, I had a splendid time, and with the Forsaken expansion discounted I thought I might as well grab it. The first two pieces of DLC felt rather slight, one of the reasons I didn’t hurry to pick up Forsaken immediately on release, but I’d sunk a good amount of time into the original game and enjoyed it

Forsaken has a bunch of tweaks to weapon categorisations, the modification system, perks (now randomised) and what-not, nothing too radical. It freshens up the gear grind a little, by and large it used to be a case of getting one particular set of stuff you liked the stats or (more importantly) the look of, then using random drops to infuse and boost its level up. Now infusion is much more costly, a last resort rather than the default option, and something of a dilemma when you have one coat that looks really good but has sub-optimal perks compared to another strange bundle of rags. There’s a new competitive PvE (with a bit of PvP) option, Gambits, quite fun; quick PvP Crucible matches are now 6v6 instead of 4v4. I’m not sure if it’s the increase in numbers, change in the weapon meta or just general rustiness, I used to be at least adequately mid-table most of the time in the Crucible but find myself frequently and frustratingly blindsided now. Perhaps the most important change is that I have a new emote to deploy. Until Forsaken I more or less exclusively utilised the Bureaucratic Walk, a pretty reasonable effort at John Cleese’s classic Python Silly Walk; I can now pair it with Silly Salute, a fine demonstration of a Rimmer Salute. I’m hoping for a couple more options to fill the entire emote deck with British comedy, perhaps cocktail shaking in the style of Stephen Fry as a starter.

At the end of the day, though, it’s still a game of Gradually Making Numbers Go Up, with the same capricious loot gods balancing every shower of useful items with another evening that ends with three almost identical pairs of boots and not a decent weapon in sight. It’s enjoyable enough making those numbers go up, though, so I imagine it’ll see me through at least until the new year.

Elsewhere the usual gaming suspects continue to tick along – War Thunder, mostly the naval combat; Neverwinter, though lack of time means I’ve barely done more than the odd daily dungeon; Battletech is even more neglected, I really must get back to overthrowing the usurper (or usurping the overthrower, or… some Bad Sorts needing taking care of one way or another, that was the gist of it). Fallout 76 seems to be having a rocky old time of it, a prime candidate for the Six Month Rule after which it should (hopefully) be beaten into slightly better shape, or if not then at least heavily discounted (or part of a Humble Bundle) for a curious nose around.

Away from games I’ve managed to catch up with a few books. If deciding on a game is tricky, picking a new book to start massively ramps up the paralysis of choice. I used to grab things from jumble sales or charity shops with suitably interesting titles or covers – “don’t judge a book by its cover” is fine as idioms go, but presents no useful alternative when riffling through a stack of paperbacks as to how they should be judged; number of pages? Font choice? I guess you could read the first couple of chapters, but the people at jumble sales got in a bit of a huff if you unfolded a picnic chair and took up residence for the afternoon. Anyway! A table full of books could be skimmed over pretty quickly, and for 50p or less it didn’t really matter if it wasn’t much good. Digital distribution gives a nigh-infinite choice now, and though there are various reviews and suggestions on top of the thumbnail image of a cover to assist with selection they can only go so far. My new version of the jumble sale rummage is the sub-£1 filter on various web stores where heavily discounted great works rub shoulders with overpriced tat. Most of what I’ve picked up is… fine. First books in fantasy or sci-fi sagas that are decent enough but don’t inspire me to rush into the rest of the series and end up swirling about in a generic stew of wizards and spaceships and swords somewhere in the back of my brain. Police procedurals, secret agents, vampires, secret agent vampire police… Seldom bad enough that I’ve given up entirely (though there have been a few) but not too much worth shouting about. 99p is probably no more sustainable a price for books as it is for games, but at least compared to charity shop purchases the author gets something (at least I hope they get something and it’s not all swallowed up by the platforms) and, as with the old system, when I find something I like I’ll go and buy more from the author at a sensible price. Recently I found a gem in Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson, near-future espionage set in a Europe fractured into hundreds of micro-states, great stuff, I’ll be picking up the rest of the series forthwith.

'Cause you're really only after seventy four, seventy five

I never played Fallout or Fallout 2. Not sure why not, they seem like the sort of thing I would’ve been into at the time – Baldur’s Gate was quite the revelation – but Fallout passed me by. I tried Fallout 2 many years after release but things had moved on and I couldn’t get past the interface and difficulty; haven’t managed to get into Pillars of Eternity either despite my fondness for its spiritual predecessor. Sometimes you just can’t go back.

Fallout 3 was where I really got into the series as it changed from isometric turn-based gameplay to a 3D real-time sort-of-Elder-Scrolls-with-guns system; I thoroughly enjoyed Fallout 3, New Vegas and Fallout 4 and finished the main story in all of them, something I never managed in an Elder Scrolls game after Daggerfall.

Now Fallout 76 is imminent. In a rather fundamental change it’s multiplayer-only, something I’m not too sure about. I contemplated a multiplayer version of New Vegas back in the day (bonus prescience marks to Jim in the comments for suggesting 20/24 player caps) and the difficulties it would have, and nothing I’ve read so far about Fallout 76 has worked me up into a pre-ordering frenzy. I think Belghast summarises the coverage I’ve seen rather well: “You need to set your expectations at “this is a Fallout 4 multiplayer mod without NPCs” and if you can sufficiently do that you will probably not be disappointed.”

That does sound like something I wouldn’t mind taking a look at, but not for £50-odd right at release. I think I’ll let the radioactive dust settle for another month or twelve, if it’s going strong enough then and maybe a bit cheaper I can always jump in; in clear contravention of Stanley Rogers’ advice I’m going to be a procrastinator, and have my apocalypse later.

I seem to recall a bit of kerfuffle around the time of Fallout 3 and the change in game style. Imagine that! A bit of a kerfuffle over a beloved franchise taking a different direction to previous instalments, seems a ludicrous notion doesn’t it? [Note to future self: this is sarcasm following a bit of a freak-out over Blizzard announcing a mobile Diablo game.] The news of Fallout 76 was hardly met with untrammelled joy either; as I say I’m not entirely sure it’s for me, but I’ll give it a chance, see what reviews say, try it out if there’s some sort of demo or trial.

It’s not like there’s a dearth of other options. I’ve got quite into naval battles in War Thunder. There’s a bit of a rock/paper/scissors/torpedo/depth charge/autocannon situation that’s satisfying when you have the right weapons to take out a particular opponent, frustrating when you don’t; the interaction between aircraft and ships in particular seems to suffer from sod’s law where enemy dive bombers fly around with impunity and your ship gets hit by a bomb you never saw coming because you were zoomed in on an enemy ship, but then the second you jump in an aeroplane every flak gun within three miles opens up on you, and if your pilot isn’t killed right away by a fluke long-range shot then a pair of enemy fighters flying CAP finish you off… For the most part, though, it’s good stuff. Destiny 2 is free for a while, which prompted me to get it patched back up and poke a nose into in case there are some new people to team up with, the basic shooter gameplay remains very sound. Neverwinter has just got a new module, so presumably another bunch of numbers to increase in a new campaign. There’s also Battletech, I rather enjoy it every time I manage to find time for a couple of missions, but it can be week or two between sessions. Maybe I’ve become overly dependent on daily login rewards and the dopamine hit of loot crates and can’t enjoy just playing for the sake of it like I used to. Sometimes you just can’t go back.

He'll cheat without scruple, who can without fear

If forced at gunpoint to describe my current gaming situation with reference to an item of furniture, in a bizarrely improbable mugging where monetary gain is secondary to eliciting tenuous metaphors, I’d say it was a battered old armchair, nothing new or dramatically exciting but familiar and comfy to flop down on at the end of the day. Then I’d ask my assailant what the ruddy heck they thought they were playing at, terrifying innocent people on the street and demanding abstract imagery, but they would merely smile and vanish in a blaze of light, their task of inspiring a wildly exciting and attention-grabbing opening paragraph complete (though a later review by the Imaginary Advertising Standards Authority would find no evidence to support claims of “excitement”, wild or otherwise, and forbid any further use of such terminology).

Zubon talked about coasting, which describes things quite well, dabbling in games and keeping them ticking along without really diving in deeply. Neverwinter is one of my coasters-in-chief, where if nothing else I’ll log in, ‘Invoke’ for some minor rewards, and kick off some lengthy crafting tasks. Most days I’ll also run a dungeon or skirmish or two; the game rewards joining a random queue that, as the name suggests, throws you into a random encounter with a suitable number of players. The other day I was in the Temple of Tiamat (bit of a flashback to the old cartoon), presumably the ultimate final raid encounter at one stage requiring careful co-ordination and the very best gear in the game, but a few years down the line the usual MMO power inflation has rendered it a bit less challenging, the main difficulty now being keeping up with the crowd as they rush from head to head. There can be something of a tension between highly experienced/geared players trying to whip through things as quickly as possible for whatever currency is on offer vs. newer players trying to take things at a slightly slower pace or seeing boss mechanics for the first time, but I think, in general, the game has done a reasonable job of keeping older content relevant/populated. Sometimes I’ll settle in for a good hour or two, there’s no shortage of bars to incrementally increase, numbers to embiggen and flowcharts to flow, but it takes a bit of a run-up to both develop the enthusiasm and pick something to focus on.

The expansion of the naval forces beta in War Thunder means I’m mostly coasting in there along the coast in an armed coaster – the only way things could be coastier would be if the ships were modelled in such detail that you could see the protective mat on which the Captain’s cocoa was resting (which they might be, I should zoom in on them sometime to check). The naval beta has been dragging on for a while now, undergoing a couple of reworks to introduce larger ships. It’s interesting as a change of pace, but it seems like a tricky balancing act to allow the various types of vessel, and also aircraft, to all play their part. The main appeal is that it’s very quick to hop in and speed along at 40 knots, chucking torpedoes hither and yon, ideal fast-paced action when that’s what I’m in the mood for.

At the other end of the scale, for slower contemplation of tactics, Battletech is ticking along nicely. My first run through the game started well enough, but while fully getting to grips with the various mechanics I made some poor decisions with pilot training and mission choices, eventually leading to a negative feedback loop of scraping through missions with heavy damage then not having the time and money to fully repair or replace everything before needing the cash from another mission, making that mission more difficult and resulting in more damage, etc. I often find it’s useful to restart a game once you’ve got a better handle on how everything works, and sure enough second time around I’m a lot happier with the situation after six game-months. There was one sticky moment, where I took on a nice, straightforward “defeat enemy Lance” mission; I got a warning at the start that there might be reinforcements, and immediately found myself outnumbered two-to-one. I’m not sure if there was a glitch and the “reinforcements” should have turned up later in the battle; tackling two Lances sequentially would have been fine but simultaneously was too much for my poor old mercenaries. Because things had been going so swimmingly I didn’t have a recent save game to fall back on; I should probably just have withdrawn from the mission, but decided the AI was being terribly unsporting and went looking for a way to even the odds. Until then I’d only used saved games to preserve progress rather than keeping on reloading games until a snipe to the head with a 5% chance of hitting came off. A bit of “save scumming” improved the situation but was terribly laborious thanks to the slow load time so I figured I’d take the nuclear option – digging out a registry setting that enabled debug mode, including an option to take down the enemy with but a click.

Battletech is refreshingly old school; turn based, single player, a story conveyed largely in text. A “debug mode” or cheat codes in server-based multiplayer games would be anathema, especially in PvP; even without the ability to directly attack other players virtual economies are now almost ubiquitous. Giving yourself unlimited money in a single player game is one thing, in an online game with some link between virtual and real currencies it’s a whole other kettle of fish. With nobody else affected the toughest part can be putting the genie back in the bottle, turning off debug mode again. A bit of self discipline is needed there. To me it’s a bit like Fighting Fantasy books, keeping a finger marking the previous paragraph (or three) just in case Turning Right down the corridor ended in an Inescapable Trap of Doom (with or without Sumo Rabbit) is fine, flipping straight to paragraph 400 rather defeats the purpose. It can be an interesting group dynamic in board games. Obviously when there’s competition then, again, cheating is a Bad Thing and policed by everybody. We’ve got a few co-operative games, though, most notably Pandemic: Legacy, where there could be more of a temptation but so far we haven’t (knowingly) bent the rules. I guess peer pressure kicks in with the group; there’s doubtless an interesting experiment to be conducted (or already conducted) about willingness to bend or break rules, depending on the fairness (or perceived fairness) of those rules and whether alone or in groups of different sizes. I’ll leave that to the psychologists, though, as I have a group of mercenary Battlemechs to lead into (rule abiding) combat.

It's like déjà vu all over again (again)

I was checking back through the archives to see if I’d written about a particular game, and happened across a strangely relevant post from May 2016. On the gaming front at the time I’d just wrapped up an event in War Thunder, and right now I’m Thundering away in a Warlike fashion, mid-way through grinding for a free plane or two. I hadn’t really bothered about the last few events in the game; Gaijin have added yet another type of currency and a player-to-player market for vehicles, skins and such, not something I’m terribly fussed about (except when hats are on offer). The big summer event earlier in the year seemed a bit convoluted and grind-heavy, involving market-tradeable bits, and only had tank rewards so I skipped that entirely, but perhaps sensing some discontent from people who prefer aircraft they added an old school challenge with nice straightforward requirements (get kills, drop bombs on bases, etc), with a British plane as a low tier reward. I’ve been playing a fair bit more than my customary game or three each week, which I doubt will continue post-event, but it hasn’t felt like a chore as some MMO events can.

On the shooter front I was dabbling in The Division and Planetside 2 at the time; I’m not sure I’ve fired up the latter since, but The Division was fun. I’ve started to see some bumph about The Division 2 including a variety of extra-deluxe-bonus-anorthite-with-strontium-edging pre-order editions but I doubt I’ll pre-order, more likely hold out for a sale of some sort to give it a try. In the meantime, fulfilling the role of something to pop into when I feel like blasting away is Destiny 2. I was vaguely aware there was an expansion on the way but hadn’t realised quite how close until I fired it up and found a colossal update lying in wait. There’ve been some changes in weapon types, mods and such, but from a quick glance it doesn’t look like Forsaken will fundamentally shake things up too much, and the slowly-upgrade-gear endgame gets pretty stale. If there’s a good deal at some point I’ll probably pick it up, though, as the basic shooting gameplay in there is very sound, running around shouting “DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA!” In fact – top tip here – you don’t even need to shout! The guns actually make noises in the game, how’s that for attention to detail?

Looks like I was on an MMORPG break at the time, which is one difference. I’ve been playing a fair bit of Neverwinter for the last few months, rolling up a new character along with the Sunday morning gang. It’s been a pleasant diversion, zapping around zones I vaguely remember from three or four years ago and exploring new areas, certainly no shortage of content, though it can get a little overwhelming. I like some structure in a game – I tend to wander around aimlessly then drift away from the most open worlds – but the myriad tasks, campaigns, tokens etc. of Neverwinter veer into heavy duty To Do List and Flowchart Admin sometimes. Assembling a non-veteran party is less “Ye have my axe!” “And my bow!”, more “Ye would have my axe but I need to unlock it by completing an introductory quest sequence in two other zones!” “And my epic bow requires another four or five daily quests to open the weekly event that enables progression to the next tier of tasks!”. Still, the quest log appears to be unlimited (at least I haven’t hit a cap yet) so you can stack up piles of options and (hopefully) find some common goal.

In boardgames, we were a few months in to Pandemic Legacy – a variant of Pandemic where the rules evolve over the (game) months. Unfortunately that stalled before we could finish the whole thing, with that pesky old Real Life business getting in the way of get-togethers, but a couple of weeks back Tim picked up a shiny new copy so once more Bumblechunks and The Spon are sweeping the globe and our valiant team of disease-battlers are trying to stop them.

Back then I’d pledged for Soupy Twists!, a crowdfunded history of Fry & Laurie from Unbound, and just last week an e-mail arrived to announce that despatch is imminent, I’m thoroughly looking forward to that. Crowdfunding seemed to have settled down a bit in that post, and continues to be quiet on the game front; nothing has really jumped out in the past couple of years, the last thing I backed was the game I was searching for in the first place – Battletech. As I said at the time, “my track record of actually playing Kickstarted games for more than half an hour is terrible so far”, and when Battletech released earlier this year it didn’t look like it was going to break the streak. Some reviews suggested combat was rather ponderous, and with everything else going on it got shoved on the “To Play Sometime” pile.

Casting around the other day for something to play I recalled it had got a patch or two to speed things up, and on a bit of a nostalgia trip (Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge was one of my formative PC gaming experiences thirty-odd years back) I got it updated and started up a campaign. I’m only a few missions in, but it’s been thoroughly enjoyable so far. Enough of a story to get you going without interminable monologues, turn-based combat when you’re in the mood for slightly more relaxed and thoughtful gameplay rather than hectic action, good stuff.

Things are ticking along nicely enough, then, even if they haven’t changed much in the past couple of years.

Spitfire

Usually around this time of year there would have been a post about the Chalke Valley History Festival and I was particularly looking forward to this year’s festival, booking tickets covering two great passions: military history (John Nichol on his latest book, Spitfire: A Very British Love Story, and James Holland in conversation with a veteran of the Burma campaign) and Terry Pratchett (who lived in the Chalke Valley; his writing studio was replicated on site along with various Pratchett-ian talks and events).

Unfortunately the car decided it would be an excellent day to pack in, so we had a slightly less exciting morning of Standing By The Roadside then being towed home. Gutted is an understatement. Still, shortly after I noticed that a new documentary about the Spitfire was on the way and would be in cinemas for one day, so I snagged a couple of tickets for that, some minor recompense.

It’s an excellent documentary that worked both for me (owner of a medium-sized pile of books about the Spitfire, banger-on at tedious length about all things Battle of Britain) and my wife (tolerantly puts up with being dragged along to such things). It combines archive footage, interviews with veterans, and modern air-to-air sequences with restored aircraft (mostly Spitfires, obviously, but there’s a Hurricane in there as well so they’re not completely overlooked). The modern footage was stunning on a big screen; I believe it was only on general release for a day, but if you spot it at the cinema again I’d highly recommend it, or it’s available for download now. A word of warning for it or other documentary/event screenings: there wasn’t the usual interminable collection of adverts, trailers and suchlike before it started, and the first quarter of an hour was slightly disrupted by late arrivals, in particular a whole row of septuagenarians who took some time to ascend the steps and find seats in pitch blackness.

The interviews are incredibly moving, not just RAF pilots who flew in combat but also female ATA (Air Transport Auxilliary) pilots who flew Spitfires (and a great many other types of aircraft) from the factories to operational airfields. They’re all the more poignant as a number of the participants have passed away since filming; Nigel Rose and Joy Lofthouse last year, Tom Neil the week before the film came out, Geoff Wellum just days after, and most recently Mary Ellis who was 101 years old, beating the RAF itself by a year. As The Few get ever fewer I feel very fortunate to have seen Geoff Wellum at Chalke Valley in 2014, he was very sharp, extremely engaging, and funny. I’m looking forward to the line-up for the 2019 festival, and will be giving the car a thorough check-up beforehand.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities

Many free-to-play MMO-type games have a daily reward just for logging in; The Elder Scrolls Online just added them recently. I’m not sure if there’s scientific research showing that players who log in each day are more likely to play and/or spend more, or it keeps numbers up when reporting active player totals, or just that Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? Whatever the reason, I have a small stable of games I’m actively playing (or have been until recently) dangling such daily carrots: TESO, War Thunder, Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter etc.

The rewards are seldom life-changingly incredible individually, but most build up over time to something quite desirable; they wouldn’t be much of an incentive if not. For games I’m actively and regularly playing they’re a nice bonus. For games I’m not-quite-so-regularly playing they’re more of a dilemma; if I really get back into them then I’ll be glad of whatever rewards I accumulate, but the time it takes to log into each game and claim the reward all adds up, time that could actually be spent playing something else rather than doing admin (though that “actual playing” might itself turn out to be more admin, like trying to sort out an inventory cluttered up with daily login rewards, hunting out the worthwhile bits amongst the tat…) There’s also Murphy’s Law of Daily Logins to contend with: if you religiously start up a game and claim every reward up to and including the Super Shiny Thing Of Great Joy And Wonder for 500 continuous days of logging, you’ll never play that game (past the login reward screen) again. If you uninstall it or stop logging in, though, then 501 days later you’ll fire it back up, really enjoy it and start playing seriously, and greatly lament the lack of a Super Shiny Thing Of Great Joy And Wonder that would make life so much easier. (It’s a variant of Murphy’s Law of Pre-Order/Founders Packs, that states that the more you spend on such a pack the less likely you are to seriously play the resulting game.)

Melmoth has turned to technology for assistance, asking his smart speaker to remind him to log in to TESO each day. That put me in mind of the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:

“The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself”

I wonder if a bit of scripting might be possible to further enhance things… “Alexa! Log in to Elder Scrolls and claim the daily reward. Then talk to the stablemaster and improve mount speed, then do the daily crafting tasks, and if you wouldn’t mind running a couple of dungeons, equipping any high level gear you get as a result, and finishing off the main story quests that would be great thanks.”

Random Roundup

It’s been another quiet month of gaming, being away for a few weekends putting a bit of a crimp on free time. A bit of progress in Elder Scrolls Online quest lines, a few War Thunder flights; Destiny 2 got its new Warmind expansion, so I headed back in there for the enjoyable, though (as pretty much everyone has observed) rather short, story missions. The basic combat remains eminently satisfying and a month or two off is sufficient to freshen up the somewhat repetitive nature of late-game number-nudging, and as an added bonus Stephen Fry makes an appearance in voice form. Not many lines, but always a treat; a Fry-voiced Ghost would be an excellent addition in best Jeeves traditions: “Perhaps sir would care to try a Void weapon against this particular target?”

Being away from the PC Marvel Puzzle Quest has been soaking up a fair amount of time on the mobile. The random nature of match-3 games can make things a bit frustrating when cascades of matches fall for the opposition (pure luck, of course), but satisfying when you get them (thanks entirely to play skill, it goes without saying). When energy and/or patience runs out I switch to Wordscapes after Melmoth tipped me off, a crossword-ish anagram type of thing that gives the old grey cells a bit of a workout.

Away from games I’ve done a bit of a technology refresh with a new phone (the Honor 9 Lite was quite a bargain) and television (a 4K Sony running Android for a bit of smart-ness). Running an HDMI cable from the PC to the telly gives a cracking picture, and a very compact wireless keyboard with touchpad works pretty well to control things from the sofa, though it’s not ideal for fine work – trying it with War Thunder resulted in some involuntary looping-the-loop and a distinct lack of defying the ground.

Further still from games, the city of Wells is a lovely place for a weekend with a rather impressive cathedral and Hot Fuzz locations to spot. Better still when there’s a comedy festival on, we caught shows from James Acaster, Rhod Gilbert and Hal Cruttenden between enjoying stone carvings of grape-scrumpers being beaten. We’ve also, over the past while-and-a-bit, started doing a few Escape Rooms which have proven to be most enjoyable, including all three of the rooms at TimeQuest with Melmoth & family. They are, as the name suggests, time-travel themed rooms, really well decked out with period (or mythic) props and puzzles, highly recommended if you’re ever in the Kent area and fancy being locked in the past for an hour.

Gaming Roundup

I’ve been playing The Elder Scrolls Online for a couple of months now, wandering around, saving villages, delving into dungeons, bopping the odd monster or two on the head, carefully hand-stitching hundreds of pairs of identical shoes then carefully taking apart hundreds of pairs of identical shoes for the raw materials. In common with the single player games of the series I’ve rather lost track of the main story. I think it started with being dead, or in prison, or both; Dumbledore and Basil Fawlty got involved somewhere along the line, maybe it was a boarding school rather than a prison. Or a hotel in Torquay. After escaping I started helping out Queen Kate Beckinsale (in the real world, not the underworld, or indeed the Underworld (2003 film)) and her right-hand he-man-cat-type-Razum-dar, and also popped back now and again to give Michael Gambon a hand whenever he left an Obi-Wan style holographic voicemail. Confused? You won’t be, after I abandon this random mish-mash of cultural references!

When TESO launched, as I understand it, zones had specific level ranges, so levelling followed a more straightforward path. Since the “One Tamriel” update quests and mobs scale according to your level, so the world is your proverbial mollusc of choice. This has worked exceedingly well for our little Sunday morning group. There’s been no need to try and keep character levels in step, everyone can play as much or as little as they like, and it’s very straightforward to teleport to another member of the group, share quests, and pile in to a public dungeon or world boss. A minor drawback of the system is that it can result in overchoice and I find it difficult of an evening to decide whether to pursue a quest line (and if so which one), or do some crafting, or potter around exploring the world. The quest journal is limited to 25 spots and more than half of mine is filled with Stuff I Really Must Get Around To Finishing Off Sometime, more of a To Do list than source of epic adventure. I don’t really want to drop any in case I have trouble picking them up again; I can’t remember where I last saw Razum-dar to continue that line, and holo-Michael Gambon has gone very quiet, I must head back and see if there’s more of that story to finish off… just as soon as I’ve levelled my blacksmithing skill a bit more, and stolen some more stuff for the Thieves Guild, and….

Away from TESO things are pretty quiet on the gaming front. War Thunder ticks along, the old reliable. Just Cause 3 offers quick hits of grappling-jetpack-wingsuit mayhem. I haven’t fired up Destiny 2 in while, leaving it in the “probably ought to have another look sometime” pile with The Division. Sea of Thieves looked promising, and is almost certainly a lot of fun with a like-minded crew, but from a quick jaunt around the ocean in the open beta it didn’t seem to have much for a solo player and not a great deal of depth, not really enough to justify the hefty full price tag at release. Far Cry 3 was diverting enough a while back but I haven’t got around to Far Cry 4 yet let alone the fifth, good candidates for a deep discount in a sale or Humble Bundle.

On the mobile side of things I do like a bit of a match-3 game, back to Bejeweled on Palm OS, and Candy Crush Saga had kept me going for a few hundred levels but bogged down when power-ups became all but mandatory. Looking for a replacement in the App Store/Google Play was a whole new level of overchoice with seemingly endless streams of clones of anything vaguely popular; I grabbed Marvel Puzzle Quest in the end, having vague memories of the original Puzzle Quest on PC. With all the standard free-to-play elements (multiple currencies, crates of loot, yada yada) it hooked me for a few days of “look what shiny thing you unlocked!” dopamine hits and is now settling down into a levelling grind. I played Doctor Who Legacy for a fair while before it got slightly stale, a similar tile matching game with teams of characters; developers Tiny Rebel Games have a successor on the way, Doctor Who Infinity, so if MPQ bogs down too much that might well be another option.

Overall, then, I’m drifting through the gaming doldrums as Melmoth so accurately described them, not for the first time and doubtless not the last. I’m sure something will come along to fill the sails again, hopefully before delirium kicks in. [Before? You’re already hallucinating a non-existent editor. Ed.]

What a shocking bad hat!

Rummaging around the seldom-less-than-fascinating AskHistorians subreddit the other day turned up a question about the line “Who are you?” in Alice in Wonderland, the answer leading to Charles Mackay’s 19th century Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds that documents it as “… a phrase repeated with delight, and received with laughter, by men with hard hands and dirty faces, by saucy butcher lads and errand-boys, by loose women, by hackney coachmen, cabriolet-drivers, and idle fellows who loiter at the comers of streets. Not one utters this phrase without producing a laugh from all within hearing. It seems applicable to every circumstance, and is the universal answer to every question ; in short, it is the favourite slang phrase of the day, a phrase that, while its brief season of popularity lasts, throws a dash of fun and frolicsomeness over the existence of squalid poverty and ill-requited labour”.

Mackay details a number of other phrases that swept through London, all the rage one moment then rapidly replaced. I rather like “Quoz!”, it has the sound of sci-fi swearing along the lines of “frak” and “smeg”. “Walker!” was common enough to be exclaimed to Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol but seems a bit mundane compared to “Does your mother know you’re out?”, “There he goes with his eye out!”, or the short-lived “Has your mother sold her mangle?” (one for Arthur Atkinson there).

My favourite, though, which I think deserves a revival is “What a shocking bad hat!” Attributed by Mackay, possibly apocryphally, to a hatter seeking election who tried to sway voters with the line “What a shocking bad hat you have got; call at my warehouse, and you shall have a new one!” The hatter was hoist by his own millinery-petard when crowds drowned out his attempted speeches with “What a shocking bad hat!”, and the phrase rapidly spread so that “thousands of idle but sharp eyes were on the watch for the passenger whose hat shewed any signs, however slight, of ancient service. Immediately the cry arose, and, like the war-whoop of the Indians, was repeated by a hundred discordant throats.”

With hats no longer de rigueur in public there are fewer chances to employ it, but of course there is one area where headgear is still all but required: the MMO. I urge all readers (both of you), as you explore the land, slay fell creatures, and make bars go up a bit, to gaze intently upon all and sundry, player and non-player alike, and if you detect a displeasing helm to exclaim at once “Lawk what a shocking bad hat!”

Team Fortress 2, of course, would be another game with ample cause to cry “what a shocking bad hat!”, but surely War Thunder would present minimal opportunity? Unless zoomed in upon a pilot, who admittedly may have a shocking bad flying helmet, or perhaps the crew of an open-topped armoured vehicle, you’re not going to see much; after all you cannot put a hat on a ta…

What a shocking bad hat!

… nk. Until, that is, developers Gaijin added tank-hats as one of this year’s April Fools.

Good day, sir!

This does present a cautionary tale, though. One should beware the reaction of a sharp-tempered hat-wearer equipped with a 75mm cannon as this Panzer IV rapscallion found to his cost…

PANZERKAMPFWAGEN IV: Sir, you have a shocking bad hat!

M4 SHERMAN: And you, sir, have a shocking bad case of being exploded to death! But in the morning, I shall be sober. And may have removed my hat.

Gaming Roundup

Things have been fairly quiet on the gaming front recently. War Thunder continues to soldier along with impressive longevity, over five years now; the only game I can recall playing regularly for anything like as long is City of Heroes back in the day. I don’t play a massive amount of War Thunder, maybe four or five matches a week, it’s ideal for dropping in for a quick round or two when there isn’t time for much more. I’m mostly working on the new(ish) Italian and French air trees and happiest pottering around tiers III and IV, where you don’t feel too guilty about facing brand new players but upgrading and unlocking progress isn’t as glacial as the late game. Beta testing of naval combat continues, and makes for an interesting change of pace as the balance between torpedo boats, destroyers and aircraft is tweaked. The Winter Olympics in February also saw the return of a couple of special events, Biathlon being a particularly enjoyable combination of racing and shooting with the added complications of a hostile team. Is it really four years since they first appeared? Blimey and indeed Charlie etc. Update 1.77 has just gone into testing, much attention being on the new Tier VI ground forces as the tanks get ever more modern, but aircraft are much more my bag (baby) so I haven’t been working up much frothing excitement on that front.

Destiny 2 is still ticking along as well, though the longevity issues are pretty apparent. I’m scarcely the hardest of core but still managed to get a character of each class up to power level 335 a while back, and with each also kitted out with a suitably snazzy set of armour or two from events there’s not a whole lot of gear-based incentive to keep grinding. Repeated runs of Flashpoints and public events get a little stale, so it’s mostly the PvP of the Crucible that I keep going back for. I feared my poor aged reflexes might not be up to a PvP shooter but I seem to do well enough, seldom topping the leader board but even more seldomly at the bottom, thankfully. Special events like the Iron Banner and Crimson Days seem to funnel enough people into the Crucible that either there’s reasonable matchmaking or enough equally poor players by luck in most matches to balance things out, at least towards the start of events; Crimson Days was a bit painful when I popped in on the last day to tick off an achievement with one final character and bumped into a succession of cookie-cutter power-spamming guild teams, but that’s been the exception rather than the rule so far. Bungie have put out a roadmap with their future plans, some of which look fun enough (6v6 Crucible matches), but nothing that particularly grabs me as a “must play loads more!” sort of addition.

My new Chillblast PC is running quite splendidly; the one game that my old rig struggled with was Just Cause 3, so I fired that up to see how it ran (nicely), and have been rampaging around its islands in a grappling-type frenzy. It’s another one that works well for a quick drop-in session to free a town, take part in a race or two, or just beat whatever random statistic pops up in the top right of the screen (the high score table based on Steam friends being a cunning way of inspiring competitiveness; “sorry, I know I’m supposed to be on my way to help a bunch of rebel fighters but I’m just going to take some time out to see how high I can climb with a parachute and a grappling hook…”) Should it start to pale then The Division had a big update fairly recently that I ought to try and have a look at, and Elite: Dangerous is sitting waiting to be installed after a Steam sale; too many games, too little time, as per usual!

On the MMO front our little Sunday group have drifted away from Guild Wars 2, being stuck in a bit of a Fractal-limbo where pushing forward is quite a slog and replaying current tiers a bit tiresome. Casting around the almost endless list of other options The Elder Scrolls Online jumped out, a game I’d briefly tried a couple of times (but not to the point of hitting double-digit levels), so we’ve been pottering around in there for a few weeks. A recent(ish) “One Tamriel” update changed much content to be scaled for any level, as I understand it, removing a lot of restrictions on grouping and such, enabling us to progress at our own pace during the week but still team up without anyone being over/underpowered. The more structured story side of the game hasn’t really grabbed me any more than last time, but like a single player Elder Scrolls game there’s no shortage of other things to do in the world. This week I have been mostly engaging in larceny for the Thieves Guild, next week I might look in to the Mages Guild, or do a bit of crafting, or hunt down some vampires; it’s a bit like Mr Benn, really, only with more hats.

New Year, New PC

From hazy memory and patchy records I believe our family first got a PC in 1988, an Amstrad PC1512, so I thought I’d celebrate the 30th anniversary by buying a new computer as is time-honoured tradition and in no way a post factum and incredibly flimsy excuse to upgrade. Adapting the xkcd 2011 Guide to Making People Feel Old[1], the IBM System/360 came out closer to the Amstrad than this new PC; if you have no idea what a System/360 might be ask a grandparent and/or Wikipedia, whichever is less likely to shake a stick at you and reminisce at length about punched cards and paper tape.

I’m pretty sure this is my tenth system in total; for a while new PC purchases were a more-or-less biennial affair, from that first Amstrad sporting an 8086 processor screaming along at 8Mhz in 1988 through a 386SX (16Mhz) in 1991, 486DLC (33Mhz) in 1993, Pentium P133 in 1996, Pentium II 350 in 1999, Athlon 1400 in 2001, Athlon 2800 in 2003 and an Athlon 64 in 2005. The first few stick in the mind, also covering the shift from Mono CGA in 4 shades of grey, an occasional “beep” from a PC speaker, and 5.25″ disks to the glorious technicolour of VGA, symphonic Soundblasting, and vast hard drives holding upwards of 100Mb of data. After that it’s a bit hazy, a bland batch of beige boxes from whoever looked cheapest in the back of Computer Shopper, up to the Athlon 64. I built that one myself, with a bit of help from Melmoth (i.e. he built it and I fetched the occasional screwdriver, a couple of daiquiris and a mojito) and it was going strong when this blog started in 2006, taking things through to 2009 and my previous system, a Core i7 that’s done sterling service for the last eight years.

You could always upgrade bits and pieces – I remember inserting 128Kb memory chips into the PC1512 to bring it up to a staggering 640KB of RAM, and a 32MB hard card (combined hard disk and controller) was bliss after frequent swapping of 360KB floppies. The 486 entered the amazing world of “multimedia” when fitted with a CD-ROM drive and Soundblaster card, and somewhere in the early 2000s LCD screens became affordable so you could contemplate a monitor larger than 15″ without needing a six foot deep desk with structural reinforcement. The CPU was always a major bottleneck, though, needing an update every few years if you wanted to keep up with the latest games, and new generations of processors typically needed a new motherboard and assorted gubbins (to use the technical term). With the dedicated 3D graphics card becoming commonplace from the late 90s and eventually taking over as the key component for games performance it’s been easy to just pop in a new card when things started slowing down, so though there have only been a couple of whole new rigs since 2005 I’ve still been updating graphics cards every couple of years, making the extended lifespan of the Core i7 slightly less impressive. Still, eight years is a great run, and it could still cope quite happily with games like Destiny 2, albeit at lower graphics settings. It wasn’t that an upgrade was absolutely vital, but it felt like the time was about right (as much as the time is ever right to buy new technology) and I didn’t have any other ideas for a slightly belated birthday present.

It was most instructive building the Athlon 64 with Melmoth, and I’ve upgraded or replaced enough power supplies, graphics cards and hard drives over the years, but time and convenience are more of a priority these days (along with a nice comfy pair of slippers and a short nap in the afternoon) so it’s easier to buy a pre-assembled system. The previous one was a 3XS from Scan, and I certainly can’t fault it, but browsing around I opted for a Chillblast system this time. They offer a range of silent PCs, quiet performance being one of my priorities, and were very helpful via e-mail and on the phone to precisely tailor everything. It’s a Core i5, but several generations on from the i7 (this one is a “Coffee Lake”, apparently, presumably a code name rather than an innovative caffeinated liquid cooling system) with a GTX 1070 and a tiny M.2 SSD (physically tiny; a rough calculation suggests it can store more than ONE! MEEEEEELEON! 5.25″ floppy disks), and is really rather lovely. Early days yet, I’ve only got as far as installing a few things, but it doesn’t bat an eyelid running them with all the graphics options turned up to 11. Fingers crossed it’ll still be going strong in eight years!

[1] Did you realise the 2011 Guide to Making People Feel Old came out closer to the start of xkcd than the present day?

No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.

I wrapped up the story part of Path of Fire the other day. It was pretty standard stuff, really; get killed, return from the dead, slay a god, pick up some random items and hand them to an NPC ten or even twenty paces away, that sort of thing. As I’ve posted about a couple of times before the story of Guild Wars 2 really hasn’t engaged me. I should probably just skip it; I’m not sure there’s any gated content that depends on having completed the story, and the rest of GW2 continues to offer plentiful activities. Pottering around exploring maps (greatly helped by the new mounts), fractals, adventures, crafting, the Mad King’s Halloween event and what-not. I’d taken part in a fair bit of Structured PvP (5 vs 5 matches) last time I was playing heavily but I think I’d risen to my level of incompetence and reached the stage where I was more of a hindrance to my team, so I’ve been doing a bit of the more open World vs World mode recently, tagging along with sufficiently large blobs. It’s frustrating sometimes, spending a while running across a map only to bump into a larger enemy blob and get squished, but being part of a large scale coordinated team attack is most impressive, especially when friendly Mesmers open up a teleportation portal for surprise flanking manoeuvres. I don’t do an awful lot apart from follow everyone else and drop AoEs on the designated location, but I feel like I’m involved at least, even if only as a very minor cog.

In the story, on the other hand, though I’m theoretically the largest dragon-slaying cog around I don’t feel involved, I’m a title, a cipher with a generic personality regardless of race, class and shoulderpad size. A bunch of NPCs dump some exposition, you fight some stuff, repeat. For me the story of an MMO world is best handled with a light touch, a bit of a push to move players from zone to zone with some interesting lore in the background for those that want to delve into it, less of the lectures. I’ve just started Destiny 2 and that seems to be handling it fairly well so far, even though I never played the original so don’t have any background there. It’s not staggeringly original; Big Nasty Aliens Invade, get the band back together, we’ll see where it goes, but it supports the core running-around-shooting-things requirements well enough. “You” are strangely mute while your robot chum does all the talking, reminding me a little of The Secret World, a game that had almost the opposite problem of Guild Wars 2: an interesting story and world but the levelling grind and rest of the game weren’t strong enough to support it (I should probably have a look at the relaunched Legends version).

It’s a tricky thing, combining an engaging and personal story with a more free-form game, becoming trickier as online multiplayer becomes ubiquitous and open-world map-mopping seems to be a bit of a default template. Paul “Mr Biffo” Rose wrote a strong defence of games as a storytelling medium in light of EA “refocusing” a forthcoming Star Wars game, and while I enjoy a multiplayer shooter or MMO as much as the next man (probably a fair bit more than the next man, unless the next man is a County-standard MMO-enjoyer in which case not quite as much as the next man but more than a composite average man, or indeed woman, assembled from a sufficient sample size) I do like to break things up with more story-driven titles, and recent games like Mass Efffect: Andromeda have been a bit disappointing on that front. Perhaps monetisation strategies are having a negative effect, it’s quite the hot topic (particularly loot boxes) as the wider industry grapples with issues that had previously been largely confined to the free-to-play ghetto. We’ve been talking about these things for years, and obviously games companies have to be held accountable, but I can’t help feeling a little disappointed that players have embraced the idea so enthusiastically that, from a business perspective, it looks mad not to crowbar them in. Rob Fahey on gamesindustry.biz is confident that the games will be there as long as the audience demands them, hopefully the industry can find a happy medium that keeps some variety in AAA titles.

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening

Path of Fire, the new Guild Wars 2 expansion, is enjoyable enough so far, but it hasn’t really got its hooks into me. Mounts are fun, a new way of getting around; each class has a new elite spec, but unlocking it involves grinding a goodly number of Hero Points so it’ll take me a while longer at my current, rather slow, rate of exploration. Most immediately there’s more story, but as outlined previously that’s not really a plus point. I hardly paid attention to the story of the first expansion, or any of the Living World since; something something dragon something another dragon something something god of war something dragon (possibly the second dragon or maybe a new one) seems to be about the gist of it. I almost came a cropper during one conversation as the game asked me to make a decision about which faction a Mayor (or General) (or costermonger, I dunno, I wasn’t listening when he introduced himself) should support. At that point my character should really have said: “Look, I’m going to be completely honest here: I have no idea who you are. I have no idea why I’m here. I don’t even know where ‘here’ is, there was probably a briefing or a letter or something but I don’t really care. I expect you think I’m fully au fait with the current situation as the previous stage of the quest involved running around the map and talking to a load of people, but I’ll let you into a little secret: they’re all so dreadfully tedious I started playing Candy Crush as soon as any of them started expositing. I should probably go back to that office (or warehouse) (or ice rink, I dunno, I wasn’t listening) and apologise for not immediately leaping to the defence of whoever it was I was talking to when they were ambushed, but I was doing rather well on level 764 at the time. Now, if you’d be so good as to assume I’ve selected whatever option offers the best rewards, why don’t you pop a green asterisk on the map, I’ll run along there and attack anything with a red name or click on anything clickable, I’m not fussy, then I get stacks of XP and loot and stuff and everyone’s happy, OK?”

Inexplicably that wasn’t an option, though, so I just clicked the middle one, trusting that the fundamental nature of the game meant it would make approximately bog-all difference in the grand scheme of things, and toddled off towards the nearest green asterisk to click on a thing…