Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page

I've got a fairly stable collection of regular games. Not quite so stable that they haven't changed since I was last posting to Blogger in 2008 - that would be a bit much. Mind you, Hellgate: London was one of the last things I posted about before moving over to KiaSA, and I just saw news that its creator has announced a new Hellgate title is in the works. It seems the original has been tweaked and re-released a few times, I was almost tempted to grab the current version from Steam, but a tenner seems a little steep for what would likely be a brief nostalgia hit rather than a serious diversion.

War Thunder is a bit more recent and has received considerably more updates, thundering along in a warlike fashion into its eleventh year. This year's April not-exactly-Fool's event was an apocalyptic resource gathering and crafting affair, Mad Thunder, bringing elements of Crossout into the game. Lightly armoured vehicles with automatic weapons made life nasty, brutish, and short so the mode was fun and frustrating in fairly equal measure - one round with a couple of good kills and a large haul of crafting materials was almost inevitably followed by another of immediate death to unseen opponents with nothing to show for  it. I crafted a couple of new vehicles and might have dabbled further, but as it was only around for a month it didn't seem worth devoting too much time to. Otherwise I try and get a few battles in each week flitting between modes and nations - British ships, Swedish tanks, French aircraft.

Speaking of fun and frustrating, Marvel Snap also fits that bill. I tend to find a deck I like and stick with it - between the randomness of the hand you draw, your opponent's deck, and the locations that appear there's plenty of variety. It's not ideal to get too set in your ways, though, and the game seems to have an uncanny ability to send me on a terrible losing streak, either with a shift in the meta or just a run of bad luck, to the point that I'm on the verge of quitting. I'll grudgingly sort out something new (usually dusting off a previous deck and slotting in a couple of the hot new card gets them competitive again), and frequently get on a hot streak and shoot up the ranks. There's probably some psychological element, like the other queue always moving faster, but it's kept me playing. The small decks and quick matches are a real plus point; it's entirely supplanted KARDS for my card gaming as I found the meta there shifting towards lengthy matches of attrition, with decks of 40 cards from a choice of around 800 needing rather more effort to build and test. 

Around other games I still tend to have Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms idling along in the background. I wasn't sure about its longevity, but three years on it turns out that Making Numbers Go Up still works for me. There are (very) long term goals of hitting some Really Big Numbers (Complete 200 variants! Collect 1000 feats! Acquire 1.00e14 influence!), with regular releases of new characters providing more immediate content while working towards them. Also regularly releasing new characters is Marvel Puzzle Quest - you might've thought they'd be running out with 300+ already in the game, but between some pretty deep cuts ("Hit-Monkey possesses the normal attributes of an Earth Japanese macaque, which includes superhuman agility and reflexes") and multiple versions of better known characters (good old multiverse!) the well runs deep. It's still my mobile game of choice, alongside 2048 Ultimate as a sort of fidget-swiper par excellence during calls and similar (up to 8,388,608 in one square so far!)

Destiny 2 had been a regular for a good while but fell out of rotation a few years back; it recently got an update, Into The Light, with a new Onslaught activity pitting players against waves of mobs. It generated some positive buzz so I got it patched up to have a nose around, and enjoyed a bit of blasting. I'm not sure I'm motivated enough to start on the heavy admin - working out a build, finding weapons with particular perks, touring the Tower for bounties and the rest, but it scratched an itch and might be something I head back to.

Aside from the regulars a light dabble in Fortnite didn't last too long - Festival Mode didn't grab me like Guitar Hero 3 had back in 2008. Saints Row 4 was more diverting, but got a little same-y after a while, so when a decent bundle of Mechwarrior 5 and its DLC turned up in a sale I picked that up to clamber back into a 'Mech cockpit for the first time since Mechwarrior Online back in 2013; I'd loved the rest of the Mechwarrior series but could never get into MWO. For some reason I hadn't got around to MW5 before, but that allowed for plenty of improvements and additional content. It was most enjoyable to work through the main campaign, building up a collection of increasingly heavy 'mechs. I carried on for a while after completing the story, but with a couple of reliable lances of assault 'mechs things got a little humdrum, so I had a look around for something else. Midnight Suns was another game I'd had my eye on for a while that popped up on sale with its DLC, so I grabbed that and it's proving... interesting. More on that next time when I'll hopefully have finished it.

Bringing It All Back Home

As my posting has dwindled over the years it seems a little excessive maintaining an entire hosted site for irregular burbling. I've gone back to where it all started and dusted off this here Blogger blog formerly known as MMO Musing, renamed it to Killed in a Smiling Accident, and (more or less) migrated the content from there to here.

I'll probably shutter things over there, maybe re-point the domain if I can be bothered or leave a placeholder of some sort. Monthly-ish posts should continue if you have a burning desire to re-point feeds, bookmarks or what-not.

Welcome (back) to where time stands still!

Forever lasted a fortnight

I know you all come here for the latest up-to-the-minute buzz from the gaming world, so, hey – have you heard about this little indie called Fortnite? I reckon it might get pretty popular, you know…

My consumption of gaming news might generously be called haphazard these days, generally comprising A Random Subset Of Things Posted To The Site-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter (a rebrand that must be a source of constant joy to whoever came up with Consignia, safe in the knowledge that it’s no longer the worst rebrand in history) . In the year since The Event things have definitely fragmented; some folk headed off to Mastodon, an old chum sent over a Bluesky invite before it flung open its doors and it’s got a good community going, but Twitter continues to limp along so I still check back in, albeit not so religiously.

My Twitter feed is more of a historical curiosity than a carefully curated ongoing concern, much like the blog roll here (with apologies to the last few diehards still blogging away). It’s been pretty stable for the last ten years or so with an occasional addition and even more occasional removal (in most cases from seeing some crypto-bollocks pop up, kicking off a game of ‘which dormant account got hijacked by scammers this time?’) A few gaming sites like Massively OP and PC Gamer are in there, and the latter posted about Harmonix ceasing Rock Band DLC. Having been quite the plastic guitar aficionado back in the day that was a shame, but my instrument peripherals went to the Great Charity Shop In The Sky (or down the local high street, at least) a few years back so there wasn’t a direct impact. Reading on, the article said Harmonix were focusing on their work in Fortnite for Epic Games – my random news consumption had entirely missed Epic buying Harmonix in 2021 and the resulting release of Fortnite Festival at the end of last year. That prompted me, for the first time, to go and download the Battle Royale juggernaut to see what’s what.

I started out with the Festival mode, and it’s… fine. There’s a limited number of free songs available with some rotation – a few from the dim mists of history (i.e. I’d heard of them), a few newfangled popular rhythmic artistes (that I usually hadn’t heard of, but generally proved quite catchy) and a few Epic Games offerings (pretty forgettable). There’s a peculiar Jam Stage that lets you play snippets of different tracks with others to create… weird noise? There are achievements for spending 5, 10, 15 minutes in there, I couldn’t see much point in it past that, maybe I’m missing the appeal. The Main Stage is, oddly enough, the main draw – essentially Rock Band on a keyboard (QWERTY, not musical) or controller, though I’m not sure how well it translates to the latter. You can pick lead, bass, drums or vocals, all of which use four lanes of notes (five in expert mode) to tap along to – no mic for vocals, no ‘strum’ in the guitar modes, just hitting buttons. For a couple of songs I tried the old technique from PC guitar-alikes back in the day, holding a keyboard upside down with F1-F5 as ‘frets’ on the left hand but without needing the space bar for strumming it didn’t really work. Instrument support is on the way, though apparently first-party peripherals aren’t on the cards.

It was diverting enough, Harmonix obviously have the background for a solid rhythm game, but without an instrument controller it’s not really the same; it’s a curious thing, how essentially the same action of pushing a button can feel so different on a silly plastic guitar rather than a keyboard. Once it gets support the current music library wouldn’t really compel me to go hunting for a USB guitar either, my nostalgia isn’t that strong. Still, it was enough to make me download Fortnite, so I figured I might as well have a look around the rest of it.

Atop a vast array of user created modes are the core options – the original Battle Royale and more recently added Festival, Rocket Racing, and LEGO. I hopped in for a round of Battle Royale, parachuted down, ran around a bit, shot a few folk, got shot. I can see why it’s popular, but not really my thing – I never really got into Apex Legends either for all its qualities. The construction element didn’t seem terribly useful in my initial mash-buttons-no-idea-what-this-does run; presumably it plays more of a part when you have a vague idea what you’re doing and can set up a strong position, a couple of the folks I bumped into started building a wall but I countered with an incredibly advanced tactic I developed I like to call “Running Around The Other Side Of It And Shooting Them Anyway”.

Rocket Racing, developed by the Rocket League folk, is a well executed racing game, but again not really my thing. LEGO Fortnite turned out to be my favourite of the modes, a survival game that doesn’t deviate terribly far from the Minecraft blueprint – gather stuff, build stuff, gather more stuff – in a LEGO brick format. The building aspect works very well, with plans that allow you to create a series of components that assemble into a specific larger structure, or can be used in a more freestyle way. Combat with bricky skeletons and spiders yields further crafting components allowing for expeditions into caves for more advanced materials. I didn’t bump into anything wildly innovative, but it was very well done, I stuck around for a while until the craft-and-upgrade-and-craft cycle got a little stale.

The addition of Festival, Rocket Racing and LEGO around the same time is interesting in developing an interlinked ‘metaverse’, with a degree of commonality across the modes. One scenario touted by the NFT crowd, between inexplicably attaching value to horrifically ugly JPEGs, was being able to own virtual items and transfer them from game to game; the Fortnite cash shop (Eminem and The Weeknd to the fore when I had a look – perhaps the latter could buy his missing ‘e’ for 200 fortbucks) has a dash of that, letting you be Slim Shady in both a Battle Royale and a rhythm game, but even within its own ecosystem things are hardly universal (there doesn’t appear to be a LEGO version of the skin, presumably as the rights and brand representation get a bit tricky).

Overall it’s not really my bag, baby; there’s a distinct lack of walking sticks and Werther’s Originals in the shop, though at least I have a bit more of an idea of what’s going on with this Fortnite malarkey now. If they keep developing Festival mode and I happen to find a reasonable guitar peripheral I might even pop back for another bash.

All the sinners are Saints Row

Hunkering down over Christmas to avoid spreading COVID did give me a chance to wrap up Cyberpunk: 2077. The game received another reasonably chunky update in December, adding a working metro system amongst other elements. I might have been mildly miffed if there was anything in there that would have made a significant different to my second playthrough, but after taking the train once and admiring the effort put into the system I never used public transport again, fast transport was just so much more convenient; maybe there’s some deep message there about public infrastructure (or rather more prosaically, maybe teleportation is better than buses). My first time around, I had sided with Arasaka at the end of the game (not entirely deliberately, I’d hoped to spring some sort of inside-job double-cross but was never presented with the option to do so). This time I called in favours from the Aldecados, and went in guns blazing. I much preferred it as a conclusion, going out with a bang rather than a whimper, a fitting end to 100+ hours back in Night City.

Casting around for something else to play I noticed that Vampire Survivors had also received a few updates since the last time I played it, so I fired that back up. I particularly enjoyed its Adventures – small sets of missions that take you back to basics, only a single character to start with and a more limited set to unlock. That kept me going until the Epic store gave away the Saints Row reboot for the new year.

It’s a bit of an odd duck, the new Saints Row. I remember enjoying Saints Row 3, and Saints Row 4 before it got a bit silly (having superpowers was fun, but made foolish human contraptions like “cars” and “guns” obsolete rendering chunks of the game a bit pointless); I didn’t think they were that long ago, but Google says 2013. The new game seemed comfortingly familiar right off the bat, popping up a map full of icons to visit for a variety of activities, some from previous games and some new; you get little bonuses for things like driving on the wrong side of the road (something that comes very naturally to a British player) and narrowly missing or indeed slamming into other cars (something that comes very naturally to an incredibly careless driver) (and in the game, ahhhh). Last year I contemplated the changes in games from 1993 to 2003, and the rather more leisurely progress from 2013 to 2023; I’m not sure the new Saints Row brings a whole bunch more to the table compared to its predecessors. It’s a perfectly good game, I’m enjoying running around doing slightly goofy missions (including LARPing and hijacking fast-food toys, so far). Compared to something striving for more realism I appreciate the more laissez-faire approach to law enforcement and physics (without going full bananas), but it feels a little incidental; I’m not sure much of it will stick with me after I head off to something else. £50-ish at launch would have been a bit steep, as a giveaway it was very generous; worth a look, certainly, but not a must-play.

Happy Holidays!

Now I have a Spitfire, ho ho ho!

GEEEEEEEEETTTTT dressed you merry gentlemen let nothing you dismay
For it is Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas day!

Christmas 2023 hasn’t worked out quite as planned thanks to a couple of bouts of COVID; not serious, thankfully, but it put the kibosh on travelling to family. Oh well, nothing for it but hunkering down with Lyra the dog and perhaps the odd game or two. Could be worse!

Hope everyone out there is enjoying the holidays and has a great 2024!

Treachery and treason, there's always an excuse for it

Phantom Liberty, the new expansion for Cyberpunk: 2077, seemed simple enough to begin with, our little band of misfit underdogs against the nasty warlord-type running Dogtown. Sneaking around, infiltrating swanky parties, swapping faces with amoral hackers, all very Mission Impossible. Towards the end things fell apart; betrayal, lies, treason, death… and that was just the teachers, ah!!1! And then I got off the bus!

Having reached an unsatisfactory conclusion the first time I played through the base game I tried to do a little reading around the possible endings of the expansion without completely spoiling them. Melmoth helpfully provided some spoiler-free nudges so I had a bit of an idea of some of the choices I’d have to made, though that didn’t make it any easier to decide who to side with. Everyone had their reasons for behaving as they did and there was no compromise to keep everyone happy. Or indeed alive.

The result was a bittersweet finish, heavy on the bitter with a faint dash of sweet. I wasn’t expecting everyone to tap-dance off into the sunset singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” while fountains of rainbows sprayed hither and yon, but even by Cyberpunk standards it was a bleak, bleak time of my life. Afterwards I did some more detailed reading and it looks like I got the worst ending – except for all the others. A couple of paths even lead to a completely different finish to the main game, an interesting take on things, but not really what I envisage for my V.

I was feeling a little melancholy as the credits rolled, but the game serves up a treat at that point – the titular theme tune, performed by Dawid Podsiadło. It’s an absolute banger, as I believe the kids say, that would fit a Bond film extremely well. I think it might be the first end credit song I’ve sat and listened through since Still Alive and I’ve added it to a couple of playlists since. It was a nice way to carry me back to the main game with a renewed purpose, to wrap things up for V more suitably than my first time around.

Cyberpunky Reggae Party

After the somewhat disappointing conclusion to my first run at Cyberpunk 2077 I never did go back to an earlier save to try something different. With the announcement of Phantom Liberty I decided to start up a fresh game earlier this year and had made a bit of a dent in Act 1 before finding more details about the expansion, including a major overhaul of key systems in the whole game. As a result I parked up that second play-through until the full release, and by the time that came around a few weeks back I’d got so rusty I decided to start from scratch, again.

It probably wasn’t the best decision in hindsight; though things have been tweaked and combat feels better this time around the first part of the game plays out in much the same way, and it was a bit of a drag running through that first heist again. After that you have a few different leads to follow so I switched things around by tackling them in a different order, and that refreshed my interest nicely enough to propel me to the point that the expansion started.

It has a neat introduction, a little on-rails but nothing too egregious as you crawl, jump and fight through ruined buildings to reach Dogtown, the new zone. It felt like a fair challenge, particularly a boss that was the toughest battle of the game so far, emphasising the isolated status of the new area. Things then opened up again, with side missions and more freedom, though I hadn’t realised quite how much freedom until I hopped into a car marked by an icon on the map (Have Icon, Will Interact). Phantom Liberty adds the old GTA staple of nicking particular cars and driving them across the map to a random garage, so I merrily followed the indicated route and found myself leaving the heavily fortified gates of Dogtown with naught but a loading screen cunningly tucked behind a security scan. I can’t quite remember the timeline, if a local Fixer had been in touch before or after that to say he’d fixed things so I could travel in and out without issue, but it was a little anticlimactic – you couldn’t have done that a couple of hours ago when I was scrapping with a giant robot?

It’s a well-worn issue in open world RPGs, the tension between having a central, driving plot with sufficiently high stakes and urgency while also offering a variety of side-missions or other activities that tend to be rather less important in the grand scheme of things. I’m sure I’ve written about it before, quite probably more than once, but can’t think of a precise enough keyword to find specific previous posts so bear with me if I repeat myself. CP2077 gives you a problem you definitely need to solve, but without such immediacy that any diversion would be unwarranted. It also builds in natural pauses, as many games do; “I need some time to set up the next part of the mission, wait for my call”, giving additional licence to chase after errant taxis, biff opposing pugilists for cash, or stumble across reported crimes with perpetrators conveniently unwilling or unable to leave the scene regardless of when you turn up. Phantom Liberty makes the juggling act that bit tougher by slotting into the middle of the game, allowing you to tackle its missions in parallel with the original story, and at the risk of damning with faint praise it’s sufficiently interesting to work. I’m intrigued by the machinations of moles and sleeper agents and Idris Elba, but not so hooked to be frantically following that thread to its conclusion. I’m happily drifting around from icon to icon doing whatever gigs and side activities pop up, and when that gets a little dull then I’ll push on with the main story (of either the original game or the expansion).

It makes for a somewhat fragmented narrative, but it works in a single player game. I could never really get into the story of Guild Wars 2 or Destiny 2 being spread all over cutscenes, dungeons, open world activities and the like, often out of sequence, some bits never directly experienced and others repeated nightly (with a weekend matinee). CP2077 only moves on when you move it on, and I can more than forgive any minor dissonance from a character getting on the phone saying they have an urgent job, but not seeming too put out when I turn up an indeterminate amount of time later having taken a tour of all the clothes shops in the city looking for a pair of shoes to really set off the snazzy new coat I found in a random suitcase under a bridge when I should really have been street racing but couldn’t help breaking off to investigate the possibility of purple loot. I’m looking forward to finishing off Phantom Liberty then seeking a more satisfactory conclusion to the main plot, but just as importantly seeing what sort of random grenade-nosed faulty-groin-implanted oddballs I bump into along the way.