Oh, and then the spell was cast

I’ve just finished watching The Last of Us on television. Being a PC gamer I hadn’t played the game but the series got rave reviews, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo were particularly effusive on their Take podcast, so I was expecting great things. It was very strong, carried incredibly well by Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, with some real standout episodes. I don’t know that it completely lived up to the hype, but that’s almost certainly an expectation management issue as much as anything.

With the game finally making it to PC in its recent remake, I wondered if it was worth a go – assuming a patch or seven can sort out the technical issues flagged by initial reviews. I was intrigued by how closely the series stuck to the game. Some parts of the show seemed very game-like such as driving to escape unfolding events in the first episode, and Joel picking off targets with a sniper rifle later; much of it was more dialogue or mood based, which I assumed to come from cut scenes or to have been added for the series.

I found a play-through video and zapped through to some of the key parts, and sure enough there are elements of the two that overlap shot-for-shot both visually and in the dialogue. The game features more sneaking around, fighting, and crafting weapons as you’d expect; it also uses more common game techniques like overheard conversations, audio recordings, and notes and journals to avoid over-reliance on cutscenes. Not having played I wasn’t sure if there were choices to be made in conversations but the story is linear (though you may miss some background in notes and recordings).

Coincidentally PC Gamer posted a link to an old article about the explosion of Full Motion Video and “interactive movies” back in the 1990s, which got me thinking – have games like The Last of Us actually cracked it? (Welcome to “Revelations From About 15 Years Ago”). Stories and characters can move between film, television, books, games, comics, each taking their own approach, sticking very closely to each other or diverging wildly as is most appropriate. Musicals and opera have songs, ballet has dance, games have plenty of chest-high cover and mobs to mow down (there are interesting articles with the creators of The Last of Us talking about the amount of combat in the two versions and the different requirements of the mediums). Obviously there’s no guarantee of quality, any version of anything can be great or terrible in its own right, but with the Super Mario Bros film riding high in the charts game adaptations are hitting both commercial and critical highs.

With the game and series of The Last of Us sticking so closely to each other I’m not sure I’ll worry too much about playing it (though never say never, if it’s patched up to a good standard and turns up on sale in the future). It’s a ridiculous comparison in a lot of ways but with a linear story you could look at it like Dragon’s Lair, only with compelling gameplay in a beautifully realised world instead of pushing a button to see the next clip from a laserdisc. One way that games can really stand out is through choice; not all of them, for all of their openness the story elements of e.g. the Grand Theft Auto series are pretty much pass or fail and The Last of Us was never touted as an RPG, but it would be really interesting to see that version, the different relationships between the central figures that could evolve with different choices.

The amount of effort would be mind-boggling, considering the impact of branching choices, and it would be quite the challenge for actors to convey the gamut of resulting emotion. It’s not hard to see a Dragon Age type approach most of the way through – some flexibility in where to visit and who to ally with or betray, but perhaps that would have made it decent rather than exceptional RPG, as opposed to the precision of the story that gave it its impact.

For the moment, on the games front I’ll keep going with State of Decay 2. It still has its irritations (particularly the inventory) but there’s enough to outweigh them, particularly mowing through hordes of zombies. In its own way it also manages to tell neat little stories here and there, though the majority of missions don’t have the strongest of dramatic arcs. It would need a hell of a dance sequence to elevate “Give us a rucksack full of stuff!” “OK!” into awards contention…

Inventory Systems I Have Known And Loved

For as long as mankind has battled orcs, zombies, and dragons, so there has been a greater foe: ones own limitations. Specifically carrying capacity. Why battle the monsters in the first place if not to nick all their loot, after all? Encumbrance has been around in RPGs from the start with rules on how much a character can carry, though in pencil and paper games it can always be augmented with a Bag of Holding, glossed over entirely (especially if spending more time creating characters than actually adventuring with them), or a bit of common sense can be applied if everyone is on the same page (“yes, as per the rulebook your high strength would let you carry a glaive, a guisarme, a bill-guisarme, a glaive-bardiche and a glaive-glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaive without being encumbered, but they’re all twice your height, how would that even work? Over your shoulder in some sort of bundle? Well, OK, but they’re not going to be immediately ready for combat. Also, if anyone attracts your attention it’s going to be a 2d4 Plank Gag Slapstick Attack on the person behind you unless they make a reflex save.”)

CRPGs also tend to include encumbrance, though obviously without the wiggle room of a DM; back in the good old AD&D-based party games I’d furiously re-roll virtual dice to get a Fighter with a nice high 18(90+) Strength (ideally boosted by rings, bracers, and whatever other magical jewellery was kicking around (Labret of Stone Giant Strength? Yes please!)), partly for the bonus damage in melee attacks, partly to load up with every scrap of loot it was possible to hoover up (including the Wizard’s share, as they used Strength as a dump stat and were struggling under the weight of a couple of scrolls and a pointy hat). First Person Shooters didn’t bother about such things, you had the fixed array of possible guns, and nobody was worrying where Doom Guy was storing the chain gun, rocket launcher and BFG9000 when he whipped his pistol out (matron). As CRPGs became more visual than text-based so the inventory evolved into the good old grid of graphical objects, sometimes with the concept of weight as well, often not, so you could quite happily be carrying 20 polearms but if you wanted to swap one for two daggers, or a ring and a gemstone, no dice. A slightly evolved version of the grid has larger items taking up more slots, the original Deus Ex being a fine example, giving the added joy of playing Inventory Tetris, especially if some items had irregular shapes. Someone even turned that into a standalone game, it looks quite fun in itself, but in the wider sense it’s quite the irritation if you only have space for one of a magical gold-plated dragonfly that grants wishes or the holy grail. A variant has containers that can only hold certain items; that makes sense with, say, a scroll case that can hold a bunch of scrolls, but is less explicable in Far Cry 3 with its baffling range of very specific luggage made from very specific animal parts (a grenade can be placed in a pack made out of deer hide but not a pouch made out of tiger skin, obviously).

With loot being such a vital part of many current games, especially MMOGs, inventory space is inevitably in high demand. In World of Warcraft there was a clear path for making money; “I am the most skilled tailor in the realm! I can sew the most elaborate robes you have ever seen, or a cape with the deepest magicks embroidered into its very essence, or… a bag. sigh Yes, all right, the biggest bag I can stitch together, coming right up.” Expanded inventories are often rewards or available as a real money purchase, highly desirable for players, and comic asides apart realism isn’t really a concern. You can always handwave things away with magic or sufficiently advanced technology, or come up with alternative explanations for present(ish) day games. In The Division, for example, just out of shot there’s the Gun Caddy wheeling around a modified golf trolley crammed full of weapons for different scenarios. “Ah, Jeeves, a wide open space with excellent sightlines, I’ll take the niblick for this one.”
ahem “Sir…”
“Now, Jeeves, I know that tone, you’re going to say a mashie-niblick would be more suitable, aren’t you? Well I’ve jolly well made my decision, hand over the niblick.”
“Actually, sir, I was going to suggest the SOCOM Mk 20 SSR with 8x scope, but have it your way.”
“That’s better. RAAAAAAAAGH!”
Bertie Wooster charges off towards the Black Tusk mercenaries waving a golf club

All this has been on my mind as I’ve started playing State of Decay 2. Inventory systems tend to be more restrictive in survival games, yet scavenging for weapons, components and other items is crucial, deliberately forcing difficult choices. Fair enough. I don’t think anything has implemented a ludicrously realistic system (I mean Completely Accurate Rucksack Simulator could be another interesting spin-off standalone game, where you desperately need to heal yourself using bandages you’re carrying but can’t remember quite where you packed them so have to go through all the side pockets, then empty everything out and rummage through it, finally find the bandages right at the bottom of the pack, then have to carefully re-fold and re-pack everything again afterwards), but you’re unlikely to be able to casually tote around 50 spare guns.

The State of Decay 2 system is a bit messy, though. First of all it’s slot-based with one item per slot and characters able to equip backpacks of six to eight slots, with all the inherent quirks (“my inventory is completely full, but I really want that assault rifle. I shall remove this single 9mm bullet from my pocket and now have room for it!”) exacerbated by stacking (“I have eight cartridges, each of a different calibre, so my backpack is completely full and can store nothing else. Unless I drop them and pick up 20 cartridges of the same calibre, now I can carry seven stacks of other things too…”) Items also have weight, so you can be overloaded carrying particularly heavy items and run out of stamina more quickly (again, fair enough, but emphasises the fact that the eight individual cartridges weigh almost nothing unlike the eight stacks of multiple containers of liquid for crafting). Fortunately you can drive vehicles, and offload that weight by putting it in the boot (trunk, if you’re an elephant). Unfortunately a car can, apparently, hold slightly less than a backpack. Apart from supply rucksacks, they can’t fit in a backpack but can be carried one at a time by a character; several of those fit in a car boot.

It’s not as if it’s a terribly different system to any number of other games, but the limited space makes the quirks chafe that little bit more. Setting out on a trip to gather supplies, if you kit yourself out with a bunch of weapons, ammunition, health packs and other consumables then you have enough space to clear out a single sock drawer in an abandoned house before you have to return to base. Take nothing but a rusty screwdriver to maximise your carrying capacity, you’re screwed if you misjudge things and end up swarmed by a mass of zombies. Difficult decisions are one thing, repeated trips back and forth to empty a single toolshed are another.

All of that wouldn’t be quite so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that you barely get five minutes of peace. It seems like I can’t head out to explore without some random band of survivors getting on the radio and asking if I wouldn’t mind getting them a rucksack of supplies. Sure, fine, building relationships with other groups is important. Then two minutes later they’re back on the radio checking up, and if you haven’t dropped absolutely everything to pander to their demands shortly after that they get in a huff. Then some trader is visiting for a limited time somewhere else on the map, another survivor has a mission they’d like assistance with (with no indication if it’s a persistent thing that you can get around to later), and then there’s a warning that zombies are gathering to attack your base and you have ten minutes to get back there and defend it. OK, a zombie apocalypse shouldn’t be the ideal environment for chilling out, but I was hoping to slowly build up my base, explore the immediate surroundings and secure them, expand from there, rather than constantly dashing hither and yon at the whim of other survivors. It hasn’t completely put me off, I’m enjoying it enough to keep plugging away, but it has got to the point that I was glad when one group demanded stuff rather than asking nicely, it made it much easier to ignore. They subsequently turned hostile, so when I happened to be in the area later and they attacked I didn’t feel at all guilty taking them out. In fact it was a bonus, as I got to take all their stuff rather than having to trade and pay for it. Or at least it would have been a bonus, if I could have carried any of it, but sadly my backpack already contained a small bottle of painkillers, a grenade, a matchbox, two nails, a butter knife, and a toothbrush, so was completely full.

Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”?

After wrapping up Deathloop I was having a poke around for something a bit loot-y and indeed shoot-y to accompany my regular card games. Darktide is tempting, but ludicrously expensive (i.e. more than a fiver in this world of crazy pricing). There’ve been a few seasons in Destiny 2 since I hung up my warlock’s boots but I couldn’t really get back into it when I got it updated recently, I think that porridge may have cooled. I seem to have got stuck in the ‘D’ section of the library, as the next thing that popped up was The Division 2. I can’t actually remember when I bought it, pretty sure it was a sale rather than at launch; I’d given it a go on a couple of occasions but hadn’t made it past level 10.

It seems to have stuck this time. I don’t know if they’ve made combat a little easier, or if my playing style is better suited coming to it from the cautious and stealthy Deathloop rather than the running-around-shouting-DAKKA-DAKKA-DAKKA Destiny 2. I’ve hit level 30 and am slowly working through the World Tiers, playing solo; I’ve tried occasional matchmaking but without the patience to leave it for more than 30 seconds looking for group members, I presume most of the action is further in to the endgame. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of activities, the map is absolutely littered with caches to uncover, side activities, control points and what-not. It’s ideal for dropping in, plinking a few ne’er-do-wells and wandering off, or settling in for a longer session tackling main missions.

As with similar games, finding a weapon and skill combination that clicks is pretty crucial to its longevity. While levelling I’d equip whatever new guns happened to drop so got a bit of a feel for most types and my favoured primary weapon is the L86 light machine gun, a solid all-rounder. This shouldn’t have been a massive shock, as one of my go-to weapons in The Division was… the L86. There are plenty of little tweaks and enhancements, but The Division 2 hasn’t changed things terribly radically since the first game (fair enough, turning the sequel into a platforming puzzle game with 8-bit sprites would have been a brave/insane choice). The four year old Division 2, not so different from the seven year old Division, hardly feels ancient; I haven’t got a particularly good eye for these things but the graphics seem perfectly comparable to current releases. Things seem have reached something of a plateau; a good game always lasts (I was playing Nethack after Baldur’s Gate came out, though in no small part due to it being less obvious to spot on a monitor in the office at quiet times), and the game-as-a-service model means games now can evolve over numerous updates, but looking at 1993 (e.g. Doom and Myst) there’s not much that would still seem (more or less) current in 2003 (compared to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Star Wars Galaxies), whereas there’s plenty of 2013 still soldiering on today (Grand Theft Auto Online just got an update a week back, I missed out last month on the tenth anniversary of my first War Thunder post).

I was listening to Kermode & Mayo’s Take and they were discussing haptic suits that would allow you to ‘feel’ what characters on screen can feel, gunshots being an example. I think the idea is understandable in games (as long as said gunshots are toned right down) but really quite odd for a film, unless it was in the first person. There was a brief discussion of the frequent agent for technological change (mostly to introduce the word ‘teledildonics’ to a wider audience), and Mark Kermode said that in his opinion cinema technology reached the ideal with widescreen, technicolour and surround sound (I may have the specifics slightly wrong). 3D, 4DX and similar fripperies were, at best, a passing fad to try and get people into cinemas. Perhaps we’re approaching a similar point with games; the underlying technology is, if not perfected then heading that way. Perhaps the next big advancements will come in how games are produced; with all the buzz around AI art and chat games could be next, produce a blockbuster game at the click of a mouse without needing all those pesky (and expensive) humans, if you don’t mind it being a bunch of other games squished together but looking a bit weird around the edges. Perhaps this very post has been produced by AI as a precursor, seeding the idea. Except if that was the case it would never draw attention to itself by making that suggestion, would it? Unless it was some sort of fiendish double bluff. But it couldn’t be, could it? No, it couldn’t. No AI would ever end a post with a poor version of The Red Hat of Patferrick that oh-so-few readers would recognise and still less give a fig about, would it? Or would it? Perhaps it would. Except it hasn’t. Has it?

(no, it hasn’t)

(or has it?)

(no)

Oops There Goes Gravity

Not too many changes on the gaming front over the past few months; Desperadoes 3 fell by the wayside, but I looped around Deathloop to the end of the story. It’s a great premise, has a really strong design, and the story, mechanics, and puzzles kept me hooked in. It held my hand enough that my poor aged brain could cope with gaps between sessions when I might not remember exactly what I was supposed to be doing where (and when); I could see it being a satisfying challenge to have to keep extensive notes and work out everything without a handy mission journal and big orange map markers, but also tricky and/or frustrating to the point that I doubt I’d have bothered to see it through (at least not without downloading a walk through).

It feels rather Old School, playing a single player game from start to finish then moving on to something else. Less than optimal from the publisher’s perspective, I guess; there is a multiplayer mode, where you can take control of the game’s antagonist and hop into other players sessions, but it’s not for me. I don’t know if it has a strong player base but it feels like a slightly tacked on element to try and increase the longevity with unlocks and PvP, albeit entirely understandably considering the effort required to produce the game and popularity (and resulting sales) of e.g. the multiplayer mode of Mass Effect 3 or the longevity of other looter-shooters.

Elsewhere cards continue to be something of a theme. Monster Train, the roguelike deckbuilder from the same Humble Monthly bundle as Deathloop, is great for a quick run here and there, the combinations of the various factions offering different approaches to the game: sending out wave after wave of cheap minions whose deaths power up other units; spiky tanks damaging and debuffing the enemy when they get hit; powerful spells further boosted by trinkets and units. Combined with the usual card game variance of how you build a deck and what you draw it really mixes things up. I still play a bit of KARDS as well, but it’s been overtaken as my favoured PvP deckbuilder by Marvel Snap.

After its deceptively simple start there’s a lot going on in Marvel Snap. In a previous post I linked to a Twitter thread of the lead designer explaining why they don’t have mulligans and how they addressed player feedback about it, and there’s an interesting interview on Kotaku about the first three months. It’s a good point made there about the Marvel theme being a nice hook, even if not strictly relevant to most of the mechanics; the Second World War theme is the reason I started playing KARDS, then it’s the deeper gameplay that keeps you going. I might’ve tried a generic hero card game with Stabby Hands Guy but I doubt it would have acquired such a buzz and player base, even if the gameplay was excellent.

The complexity of Marvel Snap is introduced neatly as you unlock new cards. To start with it’s mostly Play Card With Biggest Numbers; then there are fairly straightforward abilities, like gaining extra power if you don’t play another card on the same location the next turn, that introduce a little more forward thinking. Then you get into mechanics with more synergy like moving, discarding and destroying; discarding your own cards usually isn’t great, leaving you less choices, but a few cards have beneficial effects when discarded. Some cards move cards, other cards benefit from being moved. Of course there’s the usual card game shenanigans where you have to cope with the cards you draw; in KARDS I have a deck that’s about one third tank units, most of the other cards focused on buffing those tanks, and I swear I’ve had matches where I haven’t drawn a single tank in the first ten cards more often than is statistically likely. With decks of just 12 cards in Marvel Snap I’ve never been quite that frustrated, you might not draw the exact card you were hoping for but with a little thought in deck construction it’s hard to end up with a totally useless hand. Unless…

The next layer of variance is the three locations you play over, with various random effects. Some tie in with card effects such as destroying or moving cards, assisting decks built around those, others stop certain abilities or trigger them twice, others really throw a spanner in the works by having players draw from each others decks or adding random cards to hands or the board. Between the locations and card abilities it can be quite involved working out exactly what will apply to which cards and when; “the last card I played moves the next card one location to the left, so I’ll play this here, that allows other cards to move to its location (the original one, not the final one), then it’ll end up there, so I play this other card there to buff it…” There are subtleties as well, such as the difference between not being able to play a card in a location (but still being able to move a card there) compared to not being able to add a card to a location (including movement). Setting everything up for a grand shift thinking it’s the former when actually it’s the latter is a mistake you only make once. As long as you’re the sort of person to learn from their mistakes; I still miss location or card effects that entirely ruin my grand plans every now and again.

I can’t be too cross about that, being entirely my fault and all; what can be more frustrating is when your plans are undone by a card played by your opponent. KARDS could be particularly bad for that, having a whole bunch of orders and countermeasures designed for locking down the other player, playing against certain decks (when they get the right draw) is just turn after turn of watching your units being pushed back to your hand, discarded, or otherwise nullified, no fun at all. Marvel Snap does have cards that adversely affect your opponent but not a huge number, and with all the other potential effects going on I’ve seldom found them to be rage-quittingly annoying. Speaking of quitting, the snap mechanic also takes some of the sting out of it. If you retreat from a game before the final round you lose a ranking point and the other player gains one; see it through to the end and it’s a two point gain/loss. Like the double cube of backgammon each player can also snap once, doubling the reward/penalty, so a double-snapped game played to the end is worth eight points. That means if you end up in a terrible situation either through dumb luck or your own dumb play you can retreat without a major hit to your rank. Bluffing is another option, snapping even if you have hopeless cards, but as the stakes are hardly life-and-death it’s not the trickiest decision to call what looks like a bluff.

If there is one issue I’m finding after a few months it’s lack of new cards, as PC Gamer observed. Without spending anything I’ve built up a decent collection, new cards are plentiful as you start building your Collection Level, but later it slows to a trickle; I haven’t picked up a new card that I’ve actually included in a deck for a while now. I can field a decent variety of decks with different specialities, but there are a few cards out there that would work very nicely that I can’t just go and acquire. It’s a tricky balance; one of the appeals of Marvel Snap is the relative simplicity of building decks so releasing too many cards spoils that, but of course you need to keep things fresh and interesting as well. It’s admirable that they don’t sell specific cards for silly money, but £90 for a stack of in-game currency to (visually) upgrade your cards with slim chances of acquiring new ones in the process doesn’t feel great. The £8.99 Season Pass is more tempting, one of the few ways of definitely getting a particular card, and I feel like I ought to contribute something for the time I’ve played. Overall the positives considerably outweigh the negatives for a nice, quick, snack-sized card battler that works very well on a mobile as well as desktop, even without new cards there’s plenty of variety in the battles.

Time is money, but also money is money

I came to William Gibson in the late 90s, with cyberpunk well-established (even erring on old hat) and cyberspace in vogue to describe the early fumblings of the web. Neuromancer wasn’t on such a cutting edge as it must have been ten years before and didn’t quite connect as it might have done, but I loved the Bridge books and come 2003 there was a new release, Pattern Recognition. The blurb didn’t sound promising; set in the present, no nanotechnology or all-powerful Artificial Intelligences? Something about brands and fashion? Oh dear, no, not my sort of thing at all. A 2007 sequel in the same world, Spook Country, had more overt espionage elements; that was more my sort of thing, and I was sure the last of the series, 2010s Zero History was equally strong.

I hadn’t thought much about Gibson until The Peripheral arrived on Amazon video. It’s incredibly well done, a strong cast hooking you into the story and strong production values to bring the near and not-quite-so-near future to screen convincingly. The book had flown under my radar when it first came out, and after a couple of episodes of the series I debated reading along. I decided to wait, and instead re-read some of his earlier works, building up to the book of The Peripheral after finishing the series. I don’t get as much reading done as I’d really like these days, so going right back to Neuromancer was a bit much; I had half an idea I’d read Pattern Recognition after enjoying its follow-ups (commenters here had recommended it when I posted about Spook Country) but couldn’t remember any details if I had, so that seemed like a good starting point. I’d work back through the Blue Ant books.

It turned out I never had got back to Pattern Recognition. The old memory is getting a bit patchy so I don’t tend to retain much from books I read years ago, but after a chapter or two I’ll get some spark of recollection unless there’s been some sort of serious mind-wipe, and I didn’t recognise any of the patterns in Pattern Recognition. Entirely unsurprisingly I’d done it and myself a terrible disservice dismissing it based on blurb alone, the commenters were right, it’s an excellent book. It’s almost 20 years old now, a longer gap from publication than when I’d first read Neuromancer, but didn’t feel archaic, perhaps as it wasn’t set in the future (“Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future”, as Neil Gaiman said). Technology has moved on but not unrecognisably so. The protagonist reads message boards from a laptop connected to a mobile rather than social media on a smartphone, but 2003 doesn’t seem so far from 2023.

Moving on to Spook Country the key plot points did come back to me, a bit of a relief that my memory wasn’t entirely faulty, then starting on Zero History… blank again. I never had it read it. It had just been sitting on a shelf. It was probably around the time I switched almost entirely to e-books, having completely run out of space, and at some point assumed I had read it. It was a strong end to the series, tying threads from the first two together. Oddly enough, the current psychodrama not being out of place for a Gibson novel, Twitter makes an appearance; two characters using it for surreptitious communication, their accounts (@gaydolphin1 and @gaydolphin2) actually exist, protected, sitting there since 2010.

So now I’m caught up on the Blue Ant books it’s time to plunge into a world of pandemic, climate disaster, and political instability. And after the news, I’ll start on The Peripheral. Ahhh! And then I got off the bus! And that was just the teachers!!1!

In Memoriam Twitter

Funny how time and memory work. In my mind my blogging is an Old Thing that pre-dates more widespread social media and Twitter is a New Thing, but it turns out I started Twitting in 2008, the same year we set up KiaSA. Reading a post from 2009 reminded me that things were a little creaky to start with but it didn’t take too long for the blue bird to spread its wings, especially as its natural habitat of the smartphone became nigh-ubiquitous. My early Twitter feed closely mirrored MMO folk from the blogroll but as the world and their proverbial (or indeed literal) dogs (and cats) got into Twitterating so it expanded to a motley collection of comedians, authors, mathematicians, historians, journalists, sportspeople and such.

Things were generally fairly chilled in the early days, there was a novelty in the interactions between disparate folk. Of course it’s not the first time that “the masses” have been able to interact with “celebrities” (see Greg Jenner’s excellent Dead Famous for more on the history of celebrity and fandom, Greg being someone I discovered through Twitter). Internet-wise you might have bumped into Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett on Usenet or Vin Diesel in World of Warcraft but the scale of Twitter went mind-boggling pretty quickly. A hundred followers? Sure, small beer. A thousand? That’s a lot of potential interaction. A hundred thousand? Shortly after my first post grappling with the newfangled thing Ashton Kutcher edged out CNN to be the first to hit a million followers, the signal to noise ratio must be crazy at those volumes. Some folk started scaling down their presence or heading off entirely as it all got a bit exhausting, countless hordes ready to pounce on a wilful misinterpretation of the most innocuous statement, not to mention more orchestrated maliciously motivated campaigns. It’s not something I’ve personally experienced, thank heavens, but you get occasional glimpses in looking at a trending hashtag or replies to more popular Twittites.

I’ve never been a terribly prolific Twitterist of original content. There’s the vague ongoing worry over putting anything too personal online, probably unfounded, but who knows when some disciple of a long-dead game tracks down a mildly sarcastic comment about it from 2011 and launches a blood vendetta? It’s more that I don’t have much to say in a pithy format (hence this being a blog post rather than a thread of Twitterage). For me it’s become more of a combination of rolling news, an aggregator of interesting links (picking up where RSS feeds left off, in some ways), and commentary. The commentary often arrives first which can make for interesting attempts to reconstruct news stories based on reactions and spoofs, like George Smiley divining true Soviet interests by subjects suppressed by a double agent. If Smiley was working with memes of A Man Walking Down The Street With A Woman Labelled ‘Naval Manoeuvres In The Baltic Sea’ But Turning To Look At Another Woman Labelled ‘Hungarian Atomic Research Facilities’.

I don’t think I’m too misty eyed about the evolution from a scrappy assortment of vaguely tech-savvy folk to the corporate behemoth favoured by politicians, I’ve managed to curate a comfortable feed where there’ll always be something interesting or funny to scroll through on a break without too much existential dread (though you can hardly entirely avoid it these days). The effects of the Filter Bubble are always a concern, a good percentage of the people I follow appear to be of broadly similar ideology, but slightly counteracted by the variety of spheres from which they’re drawn so they’re not an entirely homogenous mass.

All in all things seemed to be bimbling along happily enough from my specific perspective, until The Event. The purchase of Twitter by the Unspecified Billionaire. It’s probably excessive caution again, but a brief glance at replies to just about any sort of commentary on the situation turns up the sort of ‘spirited defence’ of the chap that would make K-Pop stans say “steady on, now”, so it’s not entirely outwith the realms of possibility that there are teams crawling obscure blogs desperate to start a civil conversation about that statement. I hadn’t thought a huge amount about identification and verification, there’d been the odd bit of furore over who did and didn’t get a blue tick but it seemed to have settled itself down, until The Event. Oddly enough Terry Pratchett and Bill Gates had talked about the difficulties of “the parity of esteem of information on the Net” in a 1996 interview, I’m not sure if Gates might re-evaluate his prediction that “The whole way that you can check on somebody’s reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today” in the wake of the Blue Tick ‘Parody’ Chaos. Further decisions appear to have been made with the consideration and delicacy of a toddler with a chainsaw so heaven knows what the future holds. Perhaps we’re on the verge of a new age of unparalleled enlightenment, but it seems rather more likely to be a coin flip between the whole thing vanishing in an explosion of hubris or slowly falling apart as anyone vaguely competent and insufficiently zealous drifts away.

I’ve started glancing around for alternatives, and set up over on a UK Mastodon instance. It’s got that early days vibe again, for better and worse. The federated nature obviously has its strengths, but already there’ve been some rumblings over moderation policy and interactions with other servers, I don’t envy volunteer admin teams in the slightest. Data protection and security becomes quite the thorny issue. I still don’t have much to post, but I’m trying to make an effort with the odd dog photo at least. These things come and go; Bulletin Boards, Usenet, Slashdot, Livejournal, to pluck a few examples, I’ll see where folks head to and probably drift along myself. I’m partial to a bit of E. J. Thribb, so over to @ToneHannan for the eulogy (though I’ll copy the text here, just in case):

So.
Farewell then
Twitter

You were funny on
Eurovision night

Keith’s mum liked that
blue tick
she bought

At least I think it was
Keith’s mum

One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards

If there’s been a theme to my recent gaming it would seem to be cards. Well, cards and stealth. I forgot about stealth; I was going to include it at the start but then it crouched in some bushes for 30 seconds and just popped clean out of my head. Desperadoes 3 was in the same Humble Monthly as the Legendary Edition of Mass Effect, got good reviews, and I like a bit of real time tactics now and again so I fired it up. It’s very stealth-heavy, much more Commandos than Close Combat, and though I enjoy silently crawling around as much as the next chap I usually like to mix it up with a firefight or two. That’s not entirely out of the question, you can always pull out the trusty old six shooters, but limited ammunition and weight of enemy numbers tend to make stealth the preferred option. I’d played through the first few levels, but then like a guard hearing a coin being thrown within earshot I got rather distracted and wandered off to investigate something else: the current headline Humbly Monthly offering, Deathloop.

I was aware of the time loop premise (the title’s a bit of a giveaway) and intrigued at release, but had avoided too much further information to experience the story fresh. It’s proving most interesting so far with elements of other media that’s right up my street, things like STALKER, Memento, Lost, Bioshock, and of course time loop classics such as Source Code, Palm Springs, and Edge of Tomorrow/Live Die Repeat/Saving Private Groundhog. Presumably there’s a dollop of Dishonored in there as well as it’s from the same developers, but for some reason that never clicked with me, I have an hour and a half of play time back in 2013 that I can’t really remember at all (thank heavens for Steam data). The design of Deathloop is very stylish, and while stealth is certainly an option and well catered for through awareness systems, silent weapons/takedowns, the ability to hack cameras and cause disturbances and such, it feels more forgiving if you prefer to let your fists (and machine pistols, shotguns, and grenades) do the talking. A minor irritation is the lack of a mid-level save option; game-wise it certainly makes sense, to allow the looping mechanics to take care of that side of things (a neat reflection of the way Edge of Tomorrow and its source All You Need Is Kill were influenced by the idea of saving and reloading in games to keep trying different things), but not ideal if you get called away. At least it can be paused in single player mode; there’s obviously some sort of PvP possibility in the future, telegraphed on the starting screen, but I haven’t got that far yet, as I managed to get distracted again…

Another current Humble Monthly offering is Monster Train, a roguelike deckbuilder, another genre I have some fondness for. I thought I’d take a quick peak, and have ended up playing it more than anything else recently. Slay the Spire is the obvious comparison: various factions to select from, some specialising in brute force, others magic; a set of basic cards augmented with new drafts and upgrades; merchants; random events. It plays differently enough to be its own thing, though, with a tower-defence-ish twist of assembling your forces over three floors. I’ve really been enjoying mixing the factions to take very different approaches, from having a really solid tank shielding glass-cannon damage dealers to throwing out wave upon wave of disposable minions before reforming them for another attack. Again like Slay the Spire the challenges are equally varied, one battle might be a complete cakewalk where you annihilate the invaders without them laying a finger on your champion, the next suddenly features foes with abilities that nullify your most important tactics. Very well worth a look, if that sounds like your sort of thing.

Also on the cards front I’m still enjoying a few rounds of KARDS most days, I’ve found a deck that really clicks for competitive play with good results, though is by no means invincible; I had one of those days last week where every opponent seemed geared up to counter it, but that’s the luck of the draw. I’ve also got a collection of other decks covering the various nations when daily tasks pop up, less effective but they keep things fun, variety being the spice of Second World War digital card games and all that. I didn’t think I needed another, but then Melmoth mentioned a Marvel CCG had just come out, so I had a look around. I’d seen a couple of headlines about Marvel Snap but assumed it was some kids game; it seems the simple matching game we call ‘Snap‘ in the UK isn’t really a thing in the US (cursory googling suggests similar sounding games go by ‘Slapjack’ or, weirdly, ‘Egyptian Rat Screw’), so it’s not just a case of shouting ‘SNAP!’ when Iron Man turns up twice (Iron Mans? Iron Men? Irons Man?) Probably for the best, that could get messy (“no, not ‘snap’, both cards may be Venom but this one is Mac Gargan and that one is Eddie Brock…”) Anyway, I gave Marvel Snap a quick try and it seemed pretty basic, I was ready to file it as a perfectly adequate but fairly uninspired cash-in. Just this morning, though, somebody retweeted one of the developers talking about how they’d dealt with mulligans, and it was rather interesting. The thread outlines some of the goals: small decks, quick matches, but keeping the variance high (a key reason for not including mulligans, instead making a basic low-coast card with the ability to always feature in a starting hand, thus addressing the underlying complaint of not always being able to do something in your first turn). It made me take another look at the game, and sure enough there is plenty of depth to it. Deck building in a game with a vast card library can be quite a headache; I can certainly throw something together in KARDS but my serious decks all started out from templates, albeit with tweaks here and there. A smaller deck without multiple instances of the same card is quite a refreshing change, if I can find the time I might well add it to the regulars.

Gilded tombs do worms enfold

With Mass Effect 3 wrapped up, I’m casting around for something to get my teeth into on the gaming front. Maybe not another RPG, ME3 felt a bit of a chore towards the finish. Playing all three games of the Legendary Edition in quick succession might have contributed to the fatigue and the ending is still pretty anticlimactic, a slow trudge before that fateful choice. I fired up Destiny 2 for the first time in a while, I hadn’t played since the Witch Queen expansion and it was quite comforting to slip back into, but didn’t really sink the hooks in. Melmoth pointed out that Titanfall 2 was on sale, and rather good; it’s proving most enjoyable, quite a throwback to be playing a single player FPS campaign for the sake of it rather than to slowly upgrade loot and abilities. I’ve dipped the briefest of toes into PvP, which involved an entirely expected number of deaths and few kills, I’m not sure it’s for me but seems very well done.

Elsewhere SongPop has slipped out of my regular free-to-play rotation after it dropped its cheap monthly subscription option. It has a daily login reward, and a long enough streak of those gives a pretty decent bonus to progression; miss a day, though, and the reward gets reset. As there are, shockingly enough, odd days when I might not have a burning desire to recognise short snippets of music, that sort of thing has booted it from a “maybe now and again” to a firm skip. Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, on the other hand, has seen me splurge an unprecedented sum of cash (£7.99) after it introduced a season pass. Very similar to seasons/battle passes in other games it comes with a bunch of themed quests/goals that give out a currency to buy rewards with, some available to everyone but the best locked behind a paywall. I’d spent very little previously – most of the cash offerings are for stacks of chests of random loot – but for a ten week season with defined rewards it looked like a decent deal. There was a bit of vocal protest on its introduction (“gamers in vocal protest shocker”), including some classic If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next-ing (“this particular pass might look reasonable enough but give them an inch and you’ll have to pay ONE MILLION POUNDS just to LOG IN to the game soon enough”), but things seem to have calmed down a bit now as everyone gets down to grinding through 1.14 x 10^58 enemies.

Maybe I’ll get a bit more reading in; the third book of the Locked Tomb not-a-trilogy-any-more has just come out, so I’m re-reading the first two of the series, and if ever a series warranted re-reading it’s that one. I’d forgotten a fair bit over the past two years (like the whole climax of the first book), but enough has stuck around to make it a little less disorienting and I’m thoroughly looking forward to getting my teeth into the third.

Please turn on your magic beam

I’ve been poking away slowly at the Legendary version of Mass Effect 3, with one more chunk of DLC to wrap up before heading off to the final confrontation, but heatwaves bringing record temperatures to the UK haven’t been terribly conducive to finding the energy for such herculean efforts as moving a mouse around. Watching television has just about been possible, with a good half hour or more to recover from the exertion of pressing buttons on a remote control before having to do it again (and most streaming services don’t even need that, conveniently playing next episodes automatically).

I’m a bit late to Stranger Things, not being subscribed to Netflix when it first came out, but thought I should give it a go as the world went crazy over series 4, and I can see what the fuss was about now. Over on Amazon The Boys continues to deliver, smoothing off a few rougher edges of the comics but with no shortage of “I can’t believe they still went there” moments, skewering both current politics and blockbuster superhero franchises. Most recently I’ve whipped through The Sandman; it had been quite a significant omission in my comic reading so I came to the series fresh, and have since gone back to the source. It’s beautifully done and feels like a very “comic-y” adaptation, with self-contained episodes and arcs corresponding to issues and volumes of the comics.

One reason ther hefty bingeing, particularly on Netflix, is that the proliferation of streaming services is getting a bit much. I had Disney+ for a year, then let that lapse to switch to Netflix; after finishing The Sandman I’ll cancel Netflix, probably go for Disney+ again in the future for a few series there, maybe another service or let things lapse for a bit, then Netflix again for the final season of Stranger Things and anything else that turned up in the meantime. You slightly miss out on ‘event viewing’ if catching up on series later, but with the market so fragmented it’s not like television is such a common currency of conversation anyway, it’s a bit like waiting for games to come up on sale.

There are some parallels back to the earlier days of MMOGs, when most had a monthly subscription; Netflix has to be World of Warcraft in this scenario, the runaway success prompting everyone to want a slice of the pie, and now we have Disney+, Apple TV, Prime Video and all manner of other offerings, something like the late 2000s when subscription MMOs were everywhere. Actually we may have hit the early 2010s, with the potential subscriber base fairly well saturated and alternative pricing models coming to the fore, though the parallels aren’t exact – no other game managed to really dent the numbers of World of Warcraft but Disney+ has (by some metrics) overtaken Netflix. It’s going to be interesting to see how streaming services adapt, as the prospect of households maintaining large numbers of streaming subscriptions doesn’t seem more likely than players maintaining many game subscriptions. Lower priced subscriptions with added advertising are on their way, could you get to a fully “free to watch” model akin to “free to play”? Five minutes of adverts every five minutes of a programme? Loot crates containing a random drop (0.5% chance of a highly rated film, 75% chance of a random episode from series 27 of some scripted reality nonsense)? Premium content like extra episodes for subscribers?

Podcasts are in that sort of space, tending to be free to listen, often with advertising, and sometimes paid-for options such as bonus content. Generic third party adverts I tend to skip rapidly but I have a strange fondness for the ones voiced by the host(s). It’s particularly fun when the same product is advertised on a number of shows and you can compare and contrast the approaches, seeing how they weave key phrases they’ve obviously been instructed to include verbatim into skits, or playing things pretty straight. The king of the genre has to be Adam Buxton, turning them into mini-dramas, sketches or infuriatingly catchy songs; I’m not sure the approach would quite carry over to a drama series, though…

“I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, and the answer will be… because they slept so well on their new Leesa Mattress! Use the code SANDMAN50 for a discount when ordering yours!”

The most complicated and difficult that has ever occurred

I picked up Mass Effect: Legendary Edition when it turned up in the Humble Monthly bundle, and I’ve been happily pottering through the trilogy for the last couple of months. The overhaul of the first game made it eminently playable for something 15 years old, though it still has a few rough edges; the combat is a little clunky, a lot of side missions occur in strangely similar rooms, and driving around planets in the Mako hasn’t magically transformed into a wildly exciting experience.

There are mods aplenty for the Legendary Edition and in hindsight I wish I’d installed some for the first game, particularly the ability to continuously run rather than getting puffed out after jogging for 30 seconds (come on, Shepard, you need to hit the gym a bit more) and skipping the decryption minigame (interesting a few times, pretty tedious towards the end). I thought I’d just stick with the main story and whip through things to remind myself of how it all started, but some inner compulsion (noble work ethic or masochistic streak of self-loathing?) drove me to every last planet in the galaxy; I might’ve missed out on a few grams of beryllium here and there but cleared up almost everything that showed up in the mission journal. I remembered a few of the main story beats (unlike Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I more or less forgot even existed, let alone anything of the plot or characters) but fair swathes had faded from my memory. I had a vague recollection of a slow start, and was slightly surprised by how quickly the main party assembled; a few key planets and one existential threat to the galaxy later, it was off to the second game.

The improvement in combat in Mass Effect 2 was particularly noticeable following immediately on, everything flows a little more smoothly. I remembered a little more of the story as well, what with the story essentially being “recruit a whole bunch of people and sort out their problems before finally tackling the galaxy-threatening menace”. There were chunks of content completely new to me, though, with the Legendary Edition including all DLC. The first game only had one pack that was included in the original PC version anyway, the second had a fair few more and I’d only played the free stuff included at launch (back in those heady days when I actually bought games as they were released rather than finally getting round to them a few years later). It was nice to catch up again with Liara properly in the Lair of the Shadow Broker, but I didn’t feel like I’d missed out on too much back in the day without the DLC. The hover-tank felt particularly extraneous; granted it was better than the Mako but that’s such a low bar to clear that hovering was hardly necessary. I also installed mods to skip the decryption mini-game and planet-scanning (having done it all manually the first time around I had no desire to stare at spectrograph readings again), and most importantly to allow female Shepard to get to know Jack much better.

On to the third game, and combat is polished that little bit more to the point that it could carry the multiplayer mode. That’s not in the Legendary Edition, a bit of a shame in some ways but there’s hardly a shortage of alternative multiplayer looter-shooters, and the maps pop up as missions in the single player game. They probably gave me the strongest flashbacks – I’d played through the story once but roamed each multiplayer map for tens, if not hundreds, of rounds of horde-type skirmishing and I’d recall a certain favourite console that offered good lines of sight on one map, a route to an extraction point via convenient ladder on another.

Again there’s plenty of DLC that I didn’t have first time around, so far I’ve played through Omega, which was a nicely self-contained story. I have slightly bogged down in the middle of the game, though, I’m not feeling terribly driven to push on through. Something I rather miss is the ability to take a completely different class out for a spin; in multiplayer you could flip between a melee-heavy biotic and sneaky sniper as the mood took you, in single player (barring a fair amount of faff with respeccing and/or mods) I settle into much more of a groove, which does get a bit samey after a while. I also wonder if the ending has something to do with it. First time around I was aware of the General Miffedness of a bunch of folk but managed to avoid specifics, so with expectations suitably lowered I didn’t find the ending that bad. Not particularly good, but not garment-rendingly awful. This time, knowing what’s coming, a lot of the schlepping around the galaxy to gather resources feels a bit pointless, but having ticked off all the side missions in the first two games I’m not going to stop now.

I’m mixing it up with my previously outlined regulars, and was almost tempted to add another to the mix when the Epic Store gave away a bunch of loot for Shop Titans. I installed it to see what was what, and it was fun enough to craft things to sell to level up to craft better things to sell for more to level up further to craft even better things to sell for even more to level up to… well, you get the idea. When you get to level 15 it may suddenly unlock a new mode that deconstructs the very nature of reality but I rather suspect not. It was fun enough but I haven’t really got time for any more virtual admin, and the “over $100!” value of the giveaway was hardly encouraging – a few chests and random virtual currencies would cost that much? Getting on for twice the full price of Mass Effect? Madness.