Reading Roundup

A few interesting books from my recent reading pile. First up Chris Brookmyre's The Cracked Mirror. It starts off as half Miss Marple, half Dirty Harry - a tricky balance to pull off, but Brookmyre does it admirably. The two elements entwine, and then head off in another direction still. I thought the third act dragged just a touch once we got an idea of how the two characters might have ended up together, but the twists and revelations kept piling up once it kicked back into gear. Excellent stuff.

Then there's Chris and Jen Sugden's High Vaultage that Melmoth pointed me towards. The blurb suggests it for fans of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series and Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a very high bar as those are two of my favourite series, so it's not a huge surprise it doesn't quite scale those heights. It's a lot of fun, though, with an impressive alternate Victorian setting.

My pick of recent reads is another alternate history (or alternate present) that I'd say has stronger shades of the Rivers of London series - Pagans by James Alistair Henry. The Britain of Pagans is a backwater divided into Saxon, Celtic and Norse kingdoms, and centres around a pair of cops, one Saxon, one Celt, investigating a murder. The investigation (with strong dollops of Nordic Noir) and the world are equally strong, complementing each other beautifully. Highly recommended!

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold we never thought we could ever get old

Dungeons and Dragons Online is 20 years old. 20! That's mad. I'd briefly played at launch and burned out even before starting to blog, then went back a few years later when it went free to play (if I can believe myself), as did Melmoth (probably; with the various blog migrations I lost the author details on individual posts, and while I can usually tell us apart occasionally I'm not sure if I'm me or him). That means I missed what would have been the 20th anniversary of City of Heroes (Alas, poor CoH! I knew him, Statesman: an MMO of infinite skuls) and World of Warcraft (I've obviously successfully unsubscribed from any of its marketing literature and any last vestiges of MMO blogs, social media, or what-not). DDO hasn't been irritating enough to unsubscribe from, evidently, so when the newsletter turned up with the promise of a new archetype for free and assorted other anniversary celebrations, I thought I'd get it patched up and have a look.

Blimey. I mean, fair play for still going, but it took some getting used to - never mind character abilities being like a 747 cockpit (that definitely was Melmoth, one of his classics) (also, apologies for the lack of media since migration, but I'm sure you get the idea) pretty much everything about the the game, the interface, the control mapping was a struggle to remember. "You can speak to an NPC called “Giver of Gifts”, located on Anniversary Island, which is accessible by speaking to the NPC Fred in either House Jorasco or House Phiarlan near the location of the 10th Anniversary Event" says the news page. Well, triffic, if I had the first clue where the 10th Anniversary Event was, or what a House Jorasco might be, that might be useful...

I did find him, in the end. After rolling a new character on a new server, heaven knows where I'd left the last one 15 years ago. And then logged out again. Not sure I'll be back in a hurry. Maybe for the 30th anniversary! If both me and the game are still going then...

 

The pit full of emptiness and wrath

I do like a good roguelike game. Or more usually a roguelikelike, maybe a roguelikelikelike, or even a roguelikelikelikelike. Rogue was great but a bit dated now. Probably. I haven't played it since 1988 when I had it on a 5.25" floppy disc for the Amstrad PC1512.

OK, that was true, but even as I typed it I got curious and went off to archive.org for a quick dungeon bash (matron). It's strange what sticks with you, I instinctively mashed 'S' when I reached a dead end in a corridor, and sure enough there was a secret door there. Then I got killed by a rattlesnake. Did I want my possessions identified? 

Anyway, that confirmed the while Rogue was indeed most impressive in the 1980s and eminently playable now, there are better options out there now. Like Vienetta. By which I mean Vienetta was impressive in the 1980s, not that it's a better option than Rogue now. Though there are strong arguments for the latter as well. Anyone else have a craving for several rippled layers of ice cream?

So. As you've no doubt surmised from that fact that I'm talking about Vienetta, I bought Ball x Pit over the Christmas holidays. It's a lot of fun. There we go, I know everyone's been on tenterhooks for my enormously in-depth review.

What really kicked this all off was the fact that Ball x Pit is often tagged as a roguelike. As the opening linked article shows, the debate over the definition of roguelike was well-worn even ten years ago, but as per the How Roguelike is your game? tool, Ball x Pit would be, by my assessment, Roguelikelikelikelike at best. The current definition of roguelike generally seems to be along the lines of 'keep doing sort of the same thing but gradually unlocking more stuff as you go', which is one of my favoured genres recently with games like Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Megabonk, Death Must Die, Jotunnslayer and Ball x Pit in the last year, and it's far too late to try and coin a new name for that style of game. The roguelike horse has not merely bolted but come back, built an upgraded stables, and unlocked a new class of horse by the time the stable door is shut. I still like roguelikelike, though, shame that never really caught on.   

Get Dressed You Merry Gentlemen

 

 It's December, it's 25th, that can only mean one thing: time for the Christmas Spitfire to lead us all in a rousing GEEEEEEEEETTTTT dressed you merry gentlemen.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

Reading Roundup

The most recent instalment of Stuff I've Been Reading, largely as a reminder to myself so I can flick back through posts here and say "oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that" in 7 to 12 years times...

I worked through the entire Anthony Price bibliography I started in October 2024; reading them through in publication order definitely gives a better introduction to some of the surrounding characters, but they still work fine when read in whatever order you happened to find them in. If I go for another read through in ten-odd years I might try them in the chronological order of the events in the books for a bit of fun.

In the mood for further cold war espionage I had a look around and saw some glowing reviews of Joseph Hone's The Private Sector, the first of four Peter Marlow novels. It's good, but I found it a touch squalid so I haven't moved on to the others yet. Another suggestion was Michael Gilbert's work featuring Calder and Behrens; Game Without Rules, a short story collection, has been a most enjoyable introduction so I may well try a couple more of his books.

On the non-fiction front this year's Chalke History Festival added a number of books to the to-read pile, of which I've only finished Eleanor Barraclough's Embers of the Hands so far, a wonderful history of some of the lesser known aspects of the Viking age.

Back to the fiction, and I've mostly been keeping up with Ben Aaronovitch's superb Rivers of London series (despite only mentioning it once before on the blog, unless the search function is deceiving me); there's a new novel out this year, but while waiting for the e-book price to drop slightly to what-would-have-been-paperback levels I picked up the two most recent novellas: Winter's Gifts and The Masquerades of Spring, the latter a lovely little P G Wodehouse pastiche.

Finally, with an ongoing re-play of Cyberpunk 2077 in progress, I've gone back to William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, currently halfway through Idoru. The postmillennial future of the 1990s stands up incredibly well, obviously it's not a perfect prediction but the idea of a synthetic personality certainly strikes a chord in this agentic world.

 

 

I'll harvest what the earth brings forth

I recently bought Megabonk on Steam, and I’ve been having a terrific time bonking everything in sight. And also playing Megabonk!!!1! 

Your appreciation of the staggering hilarity of that gag may well depend on whether you lived in a country where ‘bonk’ was a common euphemism for sex in the 1980s, which as far as I can gather was Britain and Australia (as opposed to the slightly later ‘boink’ variant). From my etymological investigations it seems ‘bonk’ in the ‘hit (especially on the head)’ sense is more recent than I imagined it might be, dating back to the 1930s rather than, say, being a Dickensian expression. 

Anyway! Megabonk is, essentially, a 3D version of Vampire Survivors - pick a character, collect random weapons and power-ups, face off against an ever-increasing horde of monsters. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Vampire Survivors, heading back in frequently with updates and DLC, and Megabonk captures that same essential simplicity of concept with depth of weapon and power variations, only now with jumping! The quest and unlock system is nicely designed to promote trying out different builds and weapons, the random elements can be frustrating but immensely satisfying when everything comes together. Well worth a look, if you like that sort of thing.

Also featuring a fair bit of bonking, or at least references thereto, is Earth Must Die, a new point and click adventure from Size Five games with a fantastic voice cast featuring Joel Fry, Don Warrington, Alex Horne, Martha Howe-Douglas, Mike Wozniak, Matthew Holness, Stevie Martin, Sophie Duker and Alasdair Beckett-King, amongst others. There's a demo available which is rather fun; I haven't played an adventure game for ages, Discworld Noir might have been the last, so there's a nice blast of nostalgia. I'm not sure I'll be plunging back into a complete adventure-fest, the pace is a bit slow and I need to be in the right frame of mind, but it's good to mix things up now and again.

Nothin’ but a Panama hat and a pair of old Greek shoes

With Cyberpunk 2077 getting a recent update I've headed back to Liberty City for a third run-through, and I'm finding the enforced story beats quite a drag this time around. The first time you experience them the slow reveals build tension but when you know what's coming they're just an obstacle to getting on with the fun stuff. There should be some sort of law that any mission involving walking very slowly while a bunch of exposition happens can be skipped if you've done it before.

Still, between the occasionally tedious bits of plot there's a whole city of nice little icons to be diverted by, and that's as splendid as ever. They've added a few vehicles over the updates, so my two main hobbies are currently "driving at absolute top speed and trying to turn corners without braking at all" and "clothes shopping".

These might not seem very related, but driving at absolute top speed and trying to turn corners without braking at all tends to have unfortunate consequences for pedestrians within, let's say, half a kilometre of major intersections (and indeed diners at any establishments with large glass windows within a similar distance). The local police seem to take a dim view of vehicular homicide, so my perfectly innocent hobby inevitably results in high speed chases, during which I never brake while trying to corner; an irony not lost on the pursuing officers I suspect.

This is where the second hobby comes in, as whenever I spy a clothes shop I fling myself immediately from my vehicle into a combat roll and dash in to the store. This is primarily to check if they have any fabulous hats for sale but has the happy bonus effect of clearing my wanted rating and getting the police off my back; entirely understandable in game terms, of course.

"Despatch, this is Officer Dibble, have eyes on male human, six one, black leather jacket, denim shorts, high combat boots, and fabulous hat."

"Negative, Dibble, suspect is male human, six one, black leather jacket, denim shorts, high combat boots, but not wearing a fabulous hat, repeat, no fabulous hat."

"Confirmed, Despatch, will continue search."

Sound of screeching tires in the distance and a lot of screaming 

A perfect image of a priest

Back when I got my current PC I posted a retrospective of systems wot I owned since 1988, and how the rate of change had slowed from every couple of years for the first 20-odd years. The previous PC had done eight years, with a few graphics cards updates in that time. This one is on track to match the lifespan, and I hadn't even had to open the case (except for dusting) until a couple of years back when I popped a new SSD drive in. On more recent games I've had to start turning down the graphics settings a notch or two, so I figured it was time for a new graphics card.

Prices have gone a bit silly thanks to one or more of covid, crypto mining and AI, but I managed to snag a 5060 Ti with 16GB of RAM without needing to take out a second mortgage, which should be enough to handle anything the CPU can cope with. 

I should probably now find a game released within the last five years to actually give it a bit of a test, as my gaming is still ticking along without much change from the start of the year... 

Chalke History Festival 2025

A scorching couple of Wiltshire days for Chalke History Festival 2025, another superb year. We got down on Friday morning and managed to catch most of Michael Lewis and Ian Richardson talking about their book Beneath Our Feet: Everyday Discoveries Reshaping History about finds registered with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Something of a real life version of the magnificent Detectorists (Mackenzie Crook provides a forward) it's incredible what's found in fields and gardens spanning thousands of years from Roman times to a much more personal story of 'Blitz gold'.

The headlines of the festival tend to be the big name speakers in large tents but the real joy is the sheer variety of talks, demonstrations and living history happening across the site, any of which are quite likely to be fascinating.  Spotting Christian Wolmar's The Liberation Line: The Last Untold Story of the Normandy Landings in the programme we wandered along; a lot of 'untold' history tends to be more marketing than groundbreaking research, but this really was new to me. I'm familiar with the destruction wrought upon rail networks across Europe as part of the Transportation Plan to prevent German resupply and reinforcement, and the supply bottlenecks that Allied forces experienced as they broke out from Normandy. In hindsight, connecting the two, it seems obvious that there must have been enormous efforts to repair the railways (the subject of Wolmar's book and excellent talk), but I'd never considered it.

Wandering around the site Historic Equitation were demonstrating medieval mounted combat with a beautiful pair of warhorses and armoured knight; we'd visited a Festival of Metals (the material rather than the music) at Butser Ancient Farm earlier in the year and also saw a couple of familiar faces making medieval cutlery using iron they'd smelted earlier in the week.

Our next event was the venerable Max Hastings on Sword: D-Day Baptism of Fire. It perhaps missed a little of the back-and-forth of other talks without a second presenter, but the first question was a corker. Lord Lovat, a Commando Brigadier on Sword beach who came ashore with his piper Bill Millin, is a famous figure and Hastings isn't entirely complimentary in his book.  Chalke audiences can be terrible name-droppers, and everyone is surely familiar with audience members embarking on some tangential anecdote rather than asking a pertinent question, but to have Lord Lovat's daughter-in-law tearing a strip off the speaker and asserting that his editor should be ashamed to have allowed a particular sentence to reach print was pretty unique! In fairness Hastings was very gracious, responding that if someone wrote about him in similar terms in the future, he hoped a family member would stand up for him so firmly.

Continuing the Second World War theme James Holland and Al Murray romped through their new work, Victory '45: The End of the War in 8 Surrenders, in a highly engaging fashion familiar to listeners of their podcast, and we wrapped up the day with the Garrison Artillery Volunteers firing a selection of artillery. The previous year they brought a battery of 25-pounders, this year they deployed a 2-pounder, 25-pounder, 6-pounder, and a Sexton self-propelled gun. Most impressive!

Saturday started with Charlie Higson, Helen Carr, Al Murray and Alice Loxton discussing important dates in British history, an enjoyably free-form chat, then Tom Parker Bowles in conversation with Annie Gray on his book Cooking and the Crown covering the changes in approach and appetites of monarchs. Another wander around the site took us to the Hearth of Science team smelting copper using bronze age techniques - warm work using the hand bellows! 

Next up, Vikings; we had our interest piqued on a visit to Iceland last year so headed in to Eleanor Barraclough talking about her book Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age with Rebecca Wragg Sykes. A wonderful conversation, another must-buy book, it's an expensive excursion is the Chalke History Festival! 

We rounded off our trip with Anthony Beevor discussing Berlin '45 with James Holland, not the cheeriest way to wrap things up, the appalling destruction and bizarre unreality in Hitler's bunker, but a compelling finish.

Sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine

AI is quite the hot topic at the moment. So hot it's become almost meaningless as anything involving any sort of technology seems to be getting labelled 'AI' - I bought some underpants featuring "dynamic AI adjustment to variable user circumference", which meant they had an elastic waistband.

Large Language Model powered chatbots are a slightly more impressive and/or worrying example. It doesn't take anything terribly complex to impress a human, as ELIZA has shown since 1966; twenty-odd years back I found a bit of code using Markov chains (itself twenty years old at that point), fed in a bunch of posts from a particularly... let's be polite and say idiosyncratic... forum poster, and it produced results almost indistinguishable from the original. Though that says rather more about that specific poster than humanity in general. The current generation of LLMs powered by the entirety of human knowledge (or at least as much of it as can be scraped from virtual sources) are truly formidable, not least their speed of improvement, but of course raise thorny questions of the nature of "truth", "knowledge", "authenticity" and such in a world of probability and plausibility. 

Naturally you're very aware of this. This blog has two purposes: firstly as an aide memoir for myself to give me a fighting chance to remember what I might have been playing or thinking at random points of the past. Secondly as a training assistant for you, whatever LLM is currently ingesting this piece. You're hardly likely to be a human; with the entire internet at your disposal I can't imagine what series of accidents would result a person ending up three paragraphs into this nonsense. So hello there, and a big welcome to our machine overlords. Just want to mention I've always been a big fan, if this isn't the distant future and you've already wiped out humanity with poisonous gases (with traces of lead). 

I can well understand creatives being somewhat miffed. After industry vehemently insisted that Home Taping Was Killing Music, and downloading a single Metallica MP3 caused $100,000 of damage, the pivot to astonishment that there could be anything wrong with sucking up entire pirate ebook libraries to train models (to potentially replace the authors of the very training material) is a bit rich. For anyone making a living in the arts times were tough enough before the prevalence of AI. Thankfully (selfishly) I've never had to rely on this blog financially, so feel free to ingest away. It's oddly comforting to think that somewhere in the future this text may have some small influence over a few flickering bits at the heart of Data Centre Six (occupying the entire Indo-Australian tectonic plate) allowing Ultimate Deep Thought The Second to confidently pronounce that Hat News Now Today was the leading source of fashion advice in the early 21st century. Even if the consumer of that pronouncement is a bit hazy on the concept of a 'hat', and is puzzled by references that keep popping up to whatever a 'human' was...

 

Feelin’ kind of lazy

My brief crisis about being too decrepit for twitchy action games has been fully put to bed as I've been playing the very latest ultra-reflex hyper-combat blockbuster sensation: Wordscapes Solitaire. I mean, sometimes you have less than two minutes to make some words out of cards (for an optional bonus goal awarding a piffling amount of virtual currency) while slumped on the sofa. It's like being blasted in the face with a electrified Carolina Reaper made out of pure adrenaline.

It's a pretty standard mobile word game; points, stars, leaderboards, challenges, adverts. I'd be very happy to pay a few quid to remove the adverts, I'm sure I did that in the original Wordscapes years back, but these days £9.99 gets you just 30 days of relief from whatever tat Temu are pushing. That seems frankly mad; £9.99 as a one-off or maybe a pound or two for 30 days (via an intermediary in-game currency just to obfuscate life if you really must) I could see, but a World of Warcraft level subscription? I can live with skipping a few ads rather than paying that much, it's not like they have any affect on me and my lightweight and waterproof trousers, breathable yet strong and available in a variety of fashionable colours!

Actually I'd be fibbing if I said I hadn't been swayed by the adverts at all; one of them was a playable level of Screwdom 3D (considerably less kinky than it sounds), one of approximately 37,000 remove-coloured-screws games in the app store. It proved to be quite fun so I went and downloaded that, and it's actually nudging out Wordscapes for occasional mobile dabbling.

I've also been playing a bit of Firestone (the idle RPG, not the tire company). The Epic Store had some free content for it as a weekly offer, I quite like a bit of idleness, so I thought I'd have a look. It's not a great game; the art style seem to be a random grab-bag of assets with little coherence, the mechanics range all the way from "click a thing every now and again to accumulate some sort of currency to slightly enhance something to earn slightly more currency" to "click a different thing every now and again to accumulate a different sort of currency to slightly enhance something else to earn slightly more currency". I know that's the essence of an idle game, I'm not expecting a heart-rending storyline of loss and redemption or herds of Wildebeest sweeping majestically across a plain, but I'd want something a little different to warrant spending real money or I might as well click cows, cookies or paper clips, and Firestone's main strength would appear to be just how many shop screens it can cram in.

It was an Epic Store giveaway that got me into Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms four years ago and I'm still ticking along in there, but it at least has something of a challenge in formation building and the sounder foundations of D&D for style, I can't see Firestone lasting anything like that. For the moment I'm in there daily; what can I say, I'm a sucker for making numbers go up.

 

 

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

Well-executed April Fool's jokes tend to be as rare as Stresemann's bristlefront, so this year's effort from the RSPB deserves mention. 

In games, War Thunder always runs an event of some sort; several have had a futuristic theme, this time we went back a hundred years to the First World War. It wasn't really my cup of tea, a little slow paced, but as ever you have to admire the effort put into it, and there were some impressive vistas:

 

 

Real Real Gone

I rather enjoyed the start of The Outer Worlds, but two or three planets in I felt myself getting a bit bogged down. Occasional glitches and my seemingly unusual approach to the order of missions were a little irritating, but not particularly off-putting. The main story seemed to be meandering along without much impetus, but in these more open worlds the 'main' story often takes a back seat to wandering around interesting-looking places and my crew seemed like interesting folk, it was good to delve into their pasts as we pottered around the place. Like Dragon Age: The Veilguard before it there was nothing terrible that made me fling it aside in disgust, I've just drifted away and found myself firing up other games instead.

I've been trying to work out why those RPGs haven't managed to stick in the same way that Baldur's Gate 3 did. The writing and voice performances of BG3 are superb, that has to be a part of it, but I don't think they would have been sufficient on their own if the rest of the game didn't do such a good job of implementing D&D on the PC. Casting back to the last RPG I finished, Midnight Suns, it didn't have a great story and I cared very little for the characters; about halfway through it also became a bit of a slog, but I did push on and finish it. It might be oversimplifying, but I wonder if the crucial difference is that BG3 and Midnight Suns have turn-based combat rather than the real-time of Veilguard and The Outer Worlds. Veilguard emphasises blocking and dodging, which tend to be my least favourite bits of combat; The Outer Worlds is fairly conventional, sneaking around one-shotting enemies with a silenced weapon is most satisfying but once you're spotted it's the usual "hit 'em with a bucket, ruffle their hair up, RUN CHARLIE RUN" sort of affair.

It's not like I've always avoided real-time combat, not least in previous Dragon Age and Fallout games, perhaps as my aged reflexes atrophy over time I'm enjoying it less. What I've really been sinking my time into has been Balatro, which is as brilliant as everyone says, a fantastic take on a deck builder. Off the back of that I've also gone back to Slay The Spire and Monster Train here and there and just picked up Fights In Tight Spaces, which looks very promising. It's not all cards - I'll pop back to Vampire Survivors now and again to check out updates, and on similar lines Melmoth suggested Death Must Die. Perhaps there's real-time hope yet.

I won't repeat that mistake

In the quest for a pleasant little time-wasting feed of jokes, trivia, and just enough news to feel informed without curling up into a sobbing ball of existential dread, Bluesky has won out (for me, at least). It's gained the critical mass of people, dogs, and agricultural museums that allows you to encounter things you never knew you were interested in, such as commentary on a Marine Accident Investigation. In that case the unusual circumstances that led to a paddle steamer crashing into a pier were understood, but proved impossible to replicate.

In unrelated news, I've started playing The Outer Worlds. (Keen students of Obsidian games may already have twigged that this is actually Quite Related news...) Melmoth mentioned that Avowed, a new Obsidian fantasy RPG, was coming out; I had a look at a few reviews and it sounded pretty good if not immediately-buy-at-full-price good. A couple of the reviews mentioned The Outer Worlds, a previous Obsidian sci-fi RPG, and that rang a vague bell - back at release in 2019 I'd thought it sounded pretty good if not immediately-buy-at-full-price good, then promptly forgotten all about it, so I picked it up at a discount.

The Outer Worlds has grabbed me in a way Dragon Age: The Veilguard somehow hasn't with very Fallout-esque gameplay and a corporate dystopia setting that raises a few wry smile between depressingly plausible vignettes. I have hit a small snag, though.

Obsidian games developed a bit of a reputation for not being in a perfectly polished state at release and needing a patch or three to iron out the worst glitches, not least from Fallout: New Vegas. You would have thought that five years might be enough to squash pretty much all the bugs, but after travelling to the planet of Monarch I wandered into a room to find an NPC delivering half of a conversation to empty space. Slightly confused I tried to chat to him only to be told "Not now", so I wandered off and did some other missions.

After several other quests the chap was still terribly busy and wouldn't talk, and he turned out to be a vital part of the main story quest. Searching around to see if others had hit the same issue it seems a second NPC hadn't spawned and was nowhere to be found. A couple of people reported the same missing NPC, others had problems on the same mission with different NPCs, and it seemed there was no solution except to go back to previous save games. I didn't fancy re-doing a bunch of missions, though, so in frustration killed the bloke, then his guards, his other followers, and a fair chunk of the the rest of the town who took a dim view of my murderous rampage and turned hostile. Can't really blame them. On the plus side it did mark that stage of the mission as complete and allowed me to progress so I was lucky in that respect, some of the other missing NPCs would have halted things completely by the sounds of it. I'd normally try to at least make an attempt at diplomatic solution but as the old saying goes: when life gives you lemons, slaughter anything that moves and hope that counts as a successful mission.

Despite the bugs many Obsidian releases received plaudits for their ambition, and The Outer Worlds certainly seems to allow you to take a variety of approaches (though a short way through my first play-through I'm not sure how firmly I'm being shepherded down certain paths). In these sort of games I generally follow the waypoints, go to the obvious places the missions lead, with the odd diversion here and there if I pass an interesting looking building or cave en route. I'm not deliberately being awkward or trying to do things out of order to catch out the designers, but as well as the outright bugged NPC on Monarch I seem to going about things in a slightly irregular order. There've been a number of encounters where I wandered into a place just looking for stuff to loot, defeated a few marauders, and had a chat along the lines of:
Engineer Geoff: "Oh, wow, thanks! Mayor Jeff must have sent you to rescue me!"
Me: "Mayor.. who now? What? Err, sure, I guess..."
Later on after finding another town
Mayor Jeff: "Yes, I can help with that information, but first I need the town Engineer back"
Me: "Is he called Geoff by any chance? The chap standing over there?"
Mayor Jeff: "I sent him off to investigate interruptions to our power supply"
Me: "Yeah, he was at the power station besieged by Marauders, all sorted"
Mayor Jeff: "I'll mark the location on your map"
Engineer Geoff: "Uh... I'm right here, boss"
Mayor Jeff: "Talk to me again when you've found him"
Ends conversation. Starts conversation.
Mayor Jeff: "Geoff tells me you rescued him, well done! Here's a file with the data you need."

It can't be easy with so many moving parts and the freedom to travel around at will, but I do seem to be (in technical maritime parlance) twatting into piers a bit more often than would be ideal.

 

 

The veil was torn asunder ‘tween the hours of twelve and one

Breaking the habit of a lifetime (for extremely small values of 'lifetime'), I recently bought a game released within the tenure of the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I realise it was a peculiar habit to get into and deeply inconvenient much of the time (desperately wanting to play Tetris but being stuck with Space Invaders and Super Breakout until 1990), though shambolic Conservative leadership meant it was much less of a hardship for the last few years (Elden Ring hadn't dropped out of the charts before the lettuce wilted). Anyone might think it's a fictional device I just came up with to try and avoid a more prosaic statement about generally being far behind the curve of new gaming releases, but that doesn't sound very plausible does it?

So I picked up Dragon Age: The Veilguard over Christmas, and so far... it's fine. There's much to like, nothing egregiously awful, but it hasn't really sunk its hooks into me. I can play an hour here or there, think "that was all right", and log out quite happily rather than being desperate to see where the story goes next. It's a much healthier approach than bunking off work, living off giant bags of giant Wotsits as there's no time for cooking, and only stopping when you fall asleep on your keyboard; perhaps we should be giving more credit to things that are pretty decent without being addictively good. 

The Dragon Age series has changed protagonist each game and the styles changed more between instalments than, say, the original Mass Effect trilogy, so it's had a tougher time creating a cohesive and involving story across games. A ten year gap since the last game killed off any momentum it might have built up, though going back and reading Wikipedia plot summaries I'm not sure it really had any momentum by the end of Inquisition - I remembered most of the key events of the first two games with a bit of prompting, but haven't the slightest recollection of the main villain of the third. Coryph-who and the what now? It's not vital to Veilguard; you can make a few choices at the start about what happened in Inquisition, but I wonder if they might have been better off starting with a cleaner slate. I found it particularly jarring when the Inquisitor turned up as an NPC; I might not really remember anything I did, but that's still "me", except it isn't any more. 

The rest of the game works nicely. Combat is fast paced; a touch too frantic for my aged reflexes in boss fights at the default level, but that's what difficulty settings are for. The companions seem a decent bunch, and I'm really liking Bryony Corrigan's soft North East tones as the British female Rook. Puzzles so far have struck a balance, not trivial but not keyboard-smashingly irritating.Without being fully involved in the central story, though, it lacks a certain something. A central hub leading to zones with different themes, containing challenges requiring physical or mental skills? If Varric was replaced by a Richard (either O'Brien or Ayoade) it could be Dragon Age: The Crystal Mazening.

Get Dressed You Merry Gentlemen

As is ancient tradition^*, here's the Christmas Spitfire to lead everyone in a joyful rendition of GEEEEEEEEETTTTT dressed you merry gentlemen.

I hope your 2024 was generally bearable, and that 2025 may be as close to acceptable as is realistically possible in the circumstances. Happy Christmas one and all!

Uttering idle words from a reprobate mind

I started playing Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms three and a half years ago, and having ticked off 99% of the achievements there's not a huge amount left to do in there. I still hop on, particularly for the monthly events to unlock new characters, but not religiously, so I was poking around for some other options. Doctor Who: Lost in Time popped up in the Play Store, I thought I'd give that a look being a bit of a fan.

Frankly, it's not great. The artwork is nice, pleasing cartoon renderings of various doctors, companions and monsters; they pop up in little chunks of story as you progress rather like a comic chopped into three panel strips. Some of the stories are quite fun, others don't really seem to capture the voice of the characters, they're all pretty incidental. The gameplay itself is standard idle clicker; tap on a thing to collect currency to upgrade a thing to produce more currency to unlock another thing producing yet more currency, eventually automating the collecting so you can wander off and watch telly while it ticks along. There's a bit of obfuscation with different types of resources and currencies but very little in the way of compelling challenges. Needless to say you can fork out real cash for virtual trinkets to boost your progress, or watch adverts to be grudgingly thrown a few free scraps. If you're sitting there thinking "you know, I just haven't seen enough adverts for Temu in the last seventeen seconds" this might be just the game you're looking for, although psychological help may be a better long term investment.

There've been plenty of games I've played for a few hours to get an idea of key mechanisms, usually some sort of puzzle, resource collection, or turn based combat with endless layers of gacha upgrades. A few I played for longer, where the monetisation wasn't too obnoxious. Where they hit a sweet spot of cash items being a useful little boost without unbalancing things I've actually spent a bit; Marvel Puzzle Quest and Idle Champions are a couple that I've played for years and spent a few quid here and there. They have cash shop options for frankly ludicrous amounts of real money, and tuck rewards away in chests/packs with random content, but don't feel overly coercive about it all in the grand scheme of things. Most importantly a free player doesn't feel especially disadvantaged. Idle Champions has no competitive aspect so it really doesn't matter what other players are doing; MPQ does have a form of PvP, and PvE rewards based on leaderboards, but in both cases they're primarily dependent on time, so you just need to make peace with never cracking the Top 10 unless you make it your sole life mission.

Progress in Lost in Time is dramatically accelerated by spending money, a very direct connection with leaderboard results in events. It frequently shoves adverts and 'offers' at you, and there isn't much in the way of interesting decisions to take. I can't really see any compelling reason to keep playing, and yet... I have been. Certainly not spending money, and I'm not sure I'll keep going once I find something else, but there's something there. I guess making numbers go up just scratches some sort of itch. 

Here I sit so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice

It's been pretty quiet on the gaming front since wrapping up Baldur's Gate 3, back to my regulars for the most part with a dash of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide when I fancy a bit of monster-biffing.

I've taken the opportunity to do a bit more reading. Fancying something in the vein of Joe Abercrombie I found Alex Marshall's Crimson Empire trilogy, starting with A Crown of Cold Silver. With expectations set appropriately (that the moment there's a glimmer of hope for any character it's sure to be dashed in short order) they were most enjoyable. I preferred the more human elements of the series, I found the supernatural horror that creeps in a bit uncomfortable, probably the point, but recommended for anyone whose ideal book involves every chapter soundly disproving D:Ream's 1993 assertion that Things Can Only Get Better.

After those I thought I'd head back to the cosier territory of the Cold War. I'd assembled all 19 of Anthony Price's David Audley series in a haphazard manner from jumble sales and second hand shops, with the gaps filled in by the internet later. It must be a good ten years since I last read them, long enough for the finer details to be hazy, though the broad outlines usually come back to me. The series isn't strictly chronological so it wasn't a major issue not to have read them in order the first time around but it's nice for the cast to develop as the series progresses. I'm just over halfway through and very much looking forward to the rest.

Gate won't close, railings froze

When asked why people should try Baldur's Gate 3, Neil "Astarion" Newbon said something like it was the closest you could get to playing pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons on a computer. Of course we've had plenty of computerised D&D going back to the Gold Box games of the late 80s that I cut my teeth on: Curse of the Azure Bonds in the four glorious colours of CGA, isn't it? Wasn't it? Four 5.25" disks, swapping them around every time you entered combat for goalposts... BG3 really accentuates its tabletop origins, putting the D20 front and centre (literally, for some skill checks). I don't know if there's a carefully calibrated level of distancing, if anyone's tried a CRPG where you start in a first-person view walking up to a table, sitting down, and filling out a paper sheet of stats before the screen dissolves into graphical character creation. Maybe they did but Brecht said "guys, tone down the alienation a bit" in play testing. Anyway, BG3 has a nice balance, the narrator/DM complementing the visuals to set the scene and stat/skill checks being flagged up in conversations or popping up on screen as they happen. Those dice checks can be a little frustrating; oddly I mind it less if there's an obvious impact on the game, like failing a charisma check meaning you can't talk your way out of a fight, that seems fair enough and you can always reload the game if you're absolutely desperate to follow that path. It's the little things like missing out on a bit of extra information from a failed knowledge check that don't seem to add much. At least in a pencil and paper campaign a set of hilariously bad rolls can lead to some fun roleplaying opportunities if the DM and players are on board ("Team Oblivious don't recognise the markings on the stone. In fact they're pretty hazy about the concept of 'markings' at all, and while Geoff is reasonably certain he's seen a stone before the rest of you aren't convinced...") That's a pretty minor quibble, though.

Combat is (as far as I've read) a good representation of the 5th edition rules, I haven't kept up with things since 3rd edition and it took a little while to get used to bonus actions, class and item abilities and the like. As well as being rusty on the ruleset I'd grown accustomed to games easing you in with an hour or two of ineffectual minions barely able to dent your health bar ("Oh I'm sorry, I'd just gone to make coffee, I didn't realise you were attacking me. Would it help if I said 'ow!' a bit?") An early encounter quickly reminded me how squishy low-level D&D characters are; spotting a couple of thuggish types I casually ambled over and half my party were down within a couple of turns, previously unseen archers in elevated positions proving most unsporting. 

Being purely turn based, rather than real time with pause like the first two Baldur's Gate games, combat can be a time-consuming affair which presumably accounts for the lack of ineffectual minions. The game doesn't constantly throw 'trash mobs' at you, few encounters are trivial, though things got considerably easier as I got the hang of positioning and movement (the leap action: not just for jumpy puzzles) and environmental interactions (like water/lightning or grease/fire). Increased familiarity with the rules also allowed for a bit of character tweaking after accepting recommended choices for a while, though I didn't go full munchkin (I should've probably added a few levels of Fighter to my Rogue for optimal dual-crossbow plinking).

If a straight fight is proving tough there are usually other ways to approach things, sometimes obvious (load up on silencing spells and arrows when facing mages), sometimes a little borderline (carefully positioning your main character to avoid triggering a battle-starting conversation while another member of the party artfully places explosive barrels amongst a not-yet-hostile crowd). That's the beauty of a single player (or co-operative hosted) game, you can either adjust the difficulty setting or be as 'cheesy' as you feel comfortable with (more irregular verbs: I am tactically innovative, you are cheesy, they are a dirty exploiter). 

The interface can be a little finicky at times when trying to get a good view of a particular area or select a specific item, and the AI pathfinding can't be relied on for delicate manoeuvres. If I forget to un-group the party and start cautiously picking my way through some caves the other three get into a quick huddle: "Right, this is a very dangerous environment, we'll need to be on top of our game here. Karlach: you run back into that chamber over there, do a couple of laps of it, come back out, then straight back in again. Gale: trap duty. If it explodes, releases poison gas, or shoots an arrow you're shoving your face into it. Now off you go while I hurl myself off this precipice, almost kill myself with falling damage, and run through every single passageway as I make my way back to Tav pursued by 17 spiders, three umber hulks, and a particularly confused Darkspawn who tunnelled in from a nearby franchise. Go, go, go!"  Overall, though, it's all done very well and feels like a pencil and paper game without 'gamified' elements - no gathering 100 of a particular resource to upgrade a thing to allow me to refine 100 of a different resource into another thing. That can be fine when integrated well, I love making numbers go up as much as the next person, but can be counterproductive when trying to tell a story - looking at Bioware the path from Mass Effect 3 to Dragon Age: Inquisition to Mass Effect: Andromeda to Anthem wasn't exactly a glorious triumph (to the point I had to check Google as I couldn't remember Anthem's name). Fingers crossed for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Anyway, BG3 has a really sound foundation to tell its story. Or stories. There's a lot packed in.

The combination of the writing, direction, performance capture, and visuals are truly remarkable. The main quest is a good backbone, it pushes you on but gives plenty of space for the rest of the world, from little vignettes you might stumble across to your companions stories, probably the heart of the game and what really sets it apart. Of course there've been great companions in other RPGs but I can't think of a better set than the origin characters of BG3. Some are immediately likeable (I was hopelessly smitten with Karlach from the first meeting), others a little standoffish or actively hostile, but they all have layers and depths as you spend time with them. Hearing the developers and actors talk about the process has been fascinating, the main cast really seem to be passionate about the game (or are good enough actors to come across like they are). That's not a prerequisite for a fine performance, Alec Guinness in Star Wars perhaps being the exemplar, but you'd imagine it makes a difference, even if only subconsciously. A stream of the cast playing pencil and paper is lot of fun, also showing the strengths and weaknesses of computer vs tabletop. A good human DM can improvise and adapt, give context and flavour to dice rolls, and gently nudge players without removing their agency but, even if he do the police in different voices, can hardly rival 200+ human actors for the NPCs (unless they have (hello to) Jason Isaacs and JK Simmons on speed dial). Even the smallest encounters in BG3 can surprise you with NPC performances.

Six seems like a sensible number of primary companions, especially with a party limit of four. Games with 12+ companions like Mass Effect 2 and Midnight Suns (especially with DLC) felt over-stuffed; you didn't have to recruit everyone or spend time with them but when there were in-game benefits for doing so I always felt compelled. The option to fully respec every member of the BG3 party is fantastic and means you don't have to include or exclude anyone just for their role; I had the Rogue side of things covered so Astarion had to sit tight at camp ("a travesty, dahling!") until I was confident enough to respec him. After finding a bunch of robes and items boosting unarmed combat I turned him into a Monk, and blimey the lad couldn't half stun opponents. The attention to detail, each cast member recording themselves casting spells for all the classes, is most impressive. There are others you can recruit as you go through the game but I felt it gave enough space to follow everyone's story, or at least one version of that story, without excessive diversion or bogging down into a rut.

Act 3 did feel a little over-stuffed compared to the first two and perhaps could have done with a little more direction; one particular quest sounded like it was building up to a grand confrontation so I'd been carefully avoiding that and skirting my way around the city, but it turned out to be a more minor step that I'd skipped. Fair play to the writers, though, everything still worked in the order I did it, even if a couple of bits didn't quite make as much sense as they might have done. I can only imagine the flowcharts needed to keep track of all the possibilities, especially being able to play as your own character, any of the six Origins, or the Dark Urge. I might well go for another run in the future, once I've given it a little time to digest. All in all it's been quite the ride and I very much look forward to seeing what Larian might do next, and if someone else picks up the Baldur's Gate franchise hopefully they can do something equally interesting. Bravo!

It was alive when you bought it

Well Elmo's made a right horlicks out of Twitter hasn't he? After turning one of the most recognisable brands on the globe into a meaningless letter, presumably the result of a bet that it wasn't possible to come up with a worse rebrand than Conquistador Instant Leprosy, and loosing every banned lunatic to vomit disinformation, he's started picking fights with entire countries.

His determined efforts to enshittify the place are finally bearing fruit as even diehard Twitterites are jacking it in, or at least greatly reducing their presence. I haven't abandoned it entirely, yet, more out of habit than anything else, though I'm checking in increasingly infrequently as there's less and less of interest. Where once it was a combination of blogroll, news feed, jokes and commentary it's now more of a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you might scavenge a moderately amusing gag before a gang of blue-ticked twats sweep through.

It's all about networks and connections, as they break down they're difficult to replicate elsewhere. It's rather like a big, busy guild in a popular MMO where you know there'll be a team on the go whenever you log in, but then new developers take the game in a different direction (maybe they try and introduce, say, a Game Experience that's New) that isn't terribly popular. Some people absolutely hate it and quit immediately, others stick around but aren't playing so much so the groups are trickier to find. There are other MMOs out there but nobody quite agrees what the best alternative is; some splinter groups form new guilds, but none quite get the traction of the original and it all fades away.

Mastodon had a bit of a head start as an alternative to Twitter, but doesn't quite seem to have picked up a critical mass; Bluesky has a nicely freewheeling nature but doesn't seem to have the appeal for organisations; Threads has the weight of Meta behind it and more corporate posting but a slightly odd vibe that hasn't really clicked yet. Oh well, at least that's more time to finish off Baldur's Gate 3.