Our hearts are little, but our hoard is great

Happy slightly belated New Year, one and all. I hope that 2016 is as splendid and marvellous for you as 2015 only 1/365th longer, unless 2015 was neither splendid nor marvellous in which case I hope that 2016 is both splendid and indeed marvellous, or at least as splendid and marvellous as can realistically be hoped for. In fact even if 2015 was splendid and marvellous I still hope 2016 is more so, if such is even… Mr Dalliard! I appear to have vastly overcomplicated my attempts to wish visitors a Happy New Year and require a metafictional device to escape the opening paragraph!

So! Shoes. Or rather games. Not really much to report, as nothing much fired my enthusiasm over Christmas. I finished Wolfenstein: The New Order, not bad, slightly annoying final boss fight. War Thunder continues to thunder along, in a warlike fashion. The seasonal Steam sale was a rather calm affair, with a bunch of games discounted for the whole sale rather than Daily Instant Flash Look Now Now Now Next Fourteen Seconds Only offers. The trading card gimmick was to browse your “Discovery Queue”, which had the desired effect once as I saw Audiosurf 2 pop up on sale. I enjoy firing up Audiosurf now and again to surf new music acquisitions, so thought I might as well pick up the sequel (review so far: quite like the first one but a bit shinier).

I have just picked up Fallout 4 (review so far: quite like the third one but a bit shinier). My basic game-buying stance tended to be either to pre-order a game if it had a strong pedigree/reviews and offered some sort of shiny trinket as an incentive, or to wait ’til the price dropped to less than a fiver on Steam/GOG/The Humble Store. Fewer and fewer things have met the first criteria, I think the last thing I pre-ordered was Dragon Age: Inquisition, which my aged brain has filed under “recent” but was more than a year ago. On the flip side, games seem to be holding their price a bit better, with sales during the first year or two knocking off 10-40% rather than immediately plummeting to super-bargain levels. As such, with Amazon having the game at a decent-if-not-spectacular price (for a physical copy, £15 less than the Steam code) I figured I might as well tack it onto an order. I can’t remember the last physical game box I bought; probably an Elder Scrolls Online pre-order. Didn’t bother with the DVD, just typed the code into Steam and set the download off.

Fallout 4 might take me a while to complete, as exploring new places, meeting the locals, then offering to help and/or shoot them (depending on how nice they seem) only takes up about a third of my time. Far more important is then stripping the bodies, containers and general surroundings of anything that can be humanly lifted, and conveying it back to my home settlement in a series of shuttle runs. I was something of a packrat in previous Elder Scrolls/Fallout games, and the fact that junk items can be broken down into crafting resources means I can’t possibly leave behind a single coffee cup or clipboard in my wasteland adventures.

Being a bit of a hoarder in real life as well, it did make me think that I should be grateful for e-books, MP3s and Steam. If I had to store physical versions of all my digital books, music and games, we’d need to move to a bigger house…

A Question of History

Do you like surveys? Do you like history? If you answered “yes” to these questions, I have just the link for you! If you answered “no” to either question, I tricked you into doing a two-question survey anyway, so why not answer a few more…

Via Twitter:

Please spare 10 minutes to complete a survey on history in #film, #TV and #videogames for one of my PhD pals: https://t.co/1AJSyqJAXv

— Rebecca (@arbitrarygenius) January 6, 2016

There’s a bit more information in this blog post, all sounds most interesting.

Merry Christmas!

Season’s greetings, one and all, may 2016 bring you joy, wealth and lashings of hats.

War Thunder Update 1.55

Put the kettle on, chaps, time for tea! War Thunder has, thankfully, added British tanks before the French, and a splendid job they’ve made of them. Along with the tanks (being gradually unlocked for testing, unless you buy one of the British premium packs) are new maps for recreating the triumphs (and not-quite-such-triumphs) of the 8th and 1st Army in North Africa, El Alamein and Tunisia, and very nice they look too:

Tank tracks in the sand

Are you my mummy?

There are also a few new aircraft and assorted other tweaks, but the British tanks are the main attraction. Tally ho, death or glory!

Reviewlet: Detectorists

Some readers may remember, from the dim, distant days of 2008, the BBC series Bonekickers, a rather silly bit of Da Vinci Code-esque nonsense, in which a team of archaeologists tackled mysteries of the past with devastating implications in the present, with hilarious consequences (albeit not intentionally hilarious). Luckier readers may have forgotten about it until just now, in which case I’m terribly sorry for bringing it up again; if you missed out then you could hasten to your nearest videographic media vending emporium, who are sure to stock such a popular title, or maybe just check out a recap here.

The reason I dig up the past like some maverick archaeologist is that the BBC 4 series Detectorists is also, in the broadest terms, about looking for old stuff, but in almost every other way is the very opposite of Bonekickers, as if they were series created in mirror dimensions (Bonekickers would definitely be the one with the beard and eye patch). Written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, Detectorists is centred around the members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, in particular Andy (Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones). It’s a beautiful, slow-paced comedy about people, hobbies and relationships, the tone set by Johnny Flynn’s fantastic theme. Though, in the grand scheme of things, not an awful lot happens (I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that at no point do they find an artefact revealing a centuries-old conspiracy concealed by shadowy individuals who secretly run the world), the half-hour episodes just fly by. The second series, just finished, has been an absolute highlight of this year’s television. Five ring pulls out of five (Quatro… or maybe Lilt…)

In Our Time Lord

Talking to Melmoth about the In Our Time podcast, in which Melvyn Bragg hosts three academics to discuss ideas from science, history, philosophy, culture and religion, I mentioned that while Bragg is more than at home discussing arts and literature, in science-heavy episodes like “P vs NP” he takes on something of a “Doctor Who Assistant” role, keeping things grounded for the audience as the academics roam through theoretical fields of incomprehensible dimensions

Melmoth pointed out that, with Jenna Coleman leaving Doctor Who, there could be an *actual* Doctor Who Assistant vacancy coming up, and perhaps Melvyn Bragg could take on the role. I think that would be a stroke of genius, Capaldi & Bragg could roam through space and time, investigating mysteries, defeating invasions, and completely transforming In Our Time…

“So, Professor Harlow, how accurate is Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War?”
“Well, Melvyn, we have some fragmentary corroborative evidence of certain events, but we can’t possibly know if Thucydides actually witnessed…”
“Hang on, I’ll ask him. Back in a jiffy.”

*VWOORP* *VWOORP* *VWOOORP*

“Right, well, it turns out that most of it is artistic license, had a fascinating chat with Nicias, lovely chap, look, I got a selfie with him. Oh, and the beings the Greeks worshipped as gods were actually Thorgruns from Planet Frinksnarf who manipulated the Spartans into invading Attica, but the Doctor and I sorted them out. Incidentally, if anyone’s doing any archaeological work around Sicily, could you keep an eye out for my car keys? I think I dropped them in the siege of Syracuse…”

Everything Old is New Again

Time flies by, and not just when you’re the driver of a train (whether or not speeding out of Trumpton with a cargo of illicit narcotics). War Thunder celebrated its third anniversary over the weekend with a mini-bonanza of sales and small-scale challenges every three hours (win two matches, destroy five tanks etc), which worked rather well for dipping in and out of, rather than settling down to one big task and burning out. I’m still dropping in to War Thunder for a match or two most days, having been in since more or less the start, pretty good longevity really. I’ve also been playing a lot of World of Warships, but getting to tiers V, VI and VII the grind is really beginning to kick in, it’s feeling a lot like World of Tanks back in the day. Course War Thunder gets terribly grindy as well in the high tiers, I’m chipping away slowly at unlocking new jets, but I just enjoy the air battles there. WoWS is rather more variable, for every decent fight I seem to end up in a one-sided loss where most other ships are two tiers higher, or our team manage to lose about five ships before inflicting any sort of damage, or we win handsomely but I get taken out by a fluke magazine explosion in the first salvo. I’ll probably scale things back a bit there, and wait for the Royal Navy to turn up.

Going right back to the early days of PC gaming with Wolfenstein, I also just picked up the reboot, The New Order, in a Humble sale. It’s pretty interesting so far, strong atmosphere and plays well, even if the central character hasn’t developed much of a personality past the blocky portrait from the original. I’d been toying with picking up Fallout 4 on release, but with plenty else to play I might give it a little while for the bugs to be worked out and/or DLC to arrive then jump in later, seemed to be the best idea for New Vegas.

Perhaps most interesting is a new expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It seems like a lifetime ago that I originally hit the level cap in SWTOR and even did a spot of introductory raiding; not a human lifetime, obviously, something a tad smaller, maybe a rabbit, or a long-lived hamster. It got a second lease of life with the inevitable free to play conversion a couple of years back, a few more fun jaunts with the FRR posse, but I’d more or less forgotten about it since then, the Galactic Starfighter space fighting never grabbed me at all. Rather than being pensioned off, though, it seems SWTOR is getting a bit of an overhaul, by all accounts making it a more of a single player experience, more of a “proper” KotOR sequel. It’s a brave move, changing the focus of a Star Wars MMO, but then SWTOR didn’t really offer an experience like pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies so I can’t imagine there’ll be such a backlash (though I’m equally sure there’ll be some sort of backlash, because The Internet). I have quite a soft spot for it, I’m rather tempted to wander back and give it another go, just to see what new hats there might be if nothing else…