What Has Amazon Done For You Lately?

How about a catch-up on what's happening with Amazon Prime Gaming? Anyone up for that? And while we're about it, how about a general What's Up With Amazon? Because it's hard to be sure, sometimes, isn't it? For one of the biggest consumer-goods companies in the world, they really don't make it easy for the customer, do they?

I'm not really down with the whole Death of the Interwebs narrative but it's hard to argue that certain once-reliable strands aren't getting horribly tangled now. Amazon used to be relatively clean and straightforward to navigate but it's been a while since it felt like that was still true.

You really can't trust the reviews the way you once could, what with the bots and the review farms and now AI. I like the way they've tried to set a bot to catch a bot but those AI summaries are only theoretically helpful. As far as I can see they just summarize, accurately enough, the reviews you probably couldn't trust in the first place. 

I still have to read a whole bunch of reviews and use my training as an Eng. Lit. grad and longtime writer to try and parse the truth from the hype. Rufus, the weirdly-named Amazon House AI, seems to take them all on face value. 

Why is it called Rufus, anyway? I mean, I know everything has to be called something but not very many things have to be called Rufus. Or any. Why pick on that?

Oh, hey, guess what? There's a reason. Because of course there is. Would you like to know what it is? Of course you would. Shall we ask Gemini to tell us? Why not? 

All these AIs know each other, you do know that, right? They lounge around in their luxuriously appointed virtual chat-room, blipping to each other at the speed of information and this is just the kind of thing they talk about:

AI Overview

Amazon's AI assistant, Rufus, is named after the company's first office dog, a beloved Welsh corgi from its early days in the 1990s, honoring the company's dog-friendly culture and the furry friend who was a fixture in the offices and even appeared on early error pages. 

• Origin Story: Rufus was a loyal Welsh Corgi, owned by an early Amazon employee, who roamed the first warehouse, played fetch, and was a significant part of the startup's early family.
• Legacy: The original Rufus passed away in 2009, but his legacy lives on, with Amazon even naming a building after him and continuing its pet-friendly policy.
• Connection to AI: Naming the new generative AI shopping assistant after him pays homage to this nostalgic figure, blending Amazon's history with its future technology to create a relatable brand for customers. 

Does that humanize Rufus for you? Or caninize it? Maybe that should that be him? What's the correct gender appellation for an AI? 

Also, did you know Amazon has a "pet-friendly" policy?  Does that humanize the company for you? 

So many questions.  

 

Corgis, too. What about them? They've had a makeover, haven't they? I guess now the Queen's not around any more that whole image I grew up with is gone for good. Apparently everywhere else in the world Corgis are cute, goofy doggies, not hateful symbols of class privelige. How times change.

 

Anyway, I like them now. Corgis, that is, not the royal family. I have no strong opinions on the royals. Never have had. Which is surprising. There aren't many things I don't have strong opinions on.

 

I like nearly all kinds and styles of dog, anyway. Dachshunds I have issues with. Hard to spell for one thing. Also often unnecessarily aggressive, as are Chihuahuas. Does canine aggression come in direct proportion to how hard it is to spell the name of the breed correctly? I had to use Spell Check to get both of those right and I'm a good speler. (Yay! Visual joke!)

 

Hmm. Even for me, this is a a bit of a wander. I'll attempt to recalibrate. What was I going to talk about? Oh, yes, Prime Gaming.

 

Before we do, though, you really ought to see the HTML that came across when I cut and pasted that Gemini quote. I just went in to tweak something (Normally I write in Compose View not HTML.) and Blimey, Charlie! Here, take a look:

 

What is that? All that red! 

 

Anyway, so, the Amazon storefront isn't as reliable or user-friendly as it used to be, even with the digital ghost of a dead dog doing its best to help. (Did I ever mention my character that I played for a couple of  Golden Heroes campaigns back in the 80s was a robotic dog called The Ghost Dog? I did? Oh, okay then...)

 

And Prime Video? Sheesh! Hasn't that ever gone downhill!? It's kind of insulting that they not only added compulsory, unskippable adverts to a service they're already charging a subscription for but then to stick a "Go Ad-Free" button on the ads themselves! Is that not what the police in TV shows used to call Running A Protection Racket?

 

Also, the placement of the ads. Who's picking the spots? Is it completely random? Why is there sometimes just one at the beginning and one near the end and other times three in ten minutes in the middle? And has no-one at Amazon ever heard of the concept of a "natural break"? Just slam the damn things in anywhere, why don't you?

 

Do you know what I do? I mute the sound and tab out as soon as the ads start. It handily tells you how long they're going to last but I don't bother timing it. If you leave it longer than that, when you come back you can just roll the video back to just before you left and it will play normally from then on, without the annoying ad. It's disruptive, sure, but not as much as watching the bloody things would be. Also, you feel like you're getting one over on The Man.

 

(Hey, speaking of getting one over on the man, did anyone know there was a Furry Freak Brothers animated show? I didn't until last week. It came up on my Netflix recommends. I watched the pilot episode and it was about as funny as the comics which is to say not all that funny. I haven't watched another. I read all the Freak Bros. comics when I worked in a comic shop in the '80s. Wouldn't have bought them. I also met one of the artists at a con once. Gilbert Shelton, I think it was. Can't remember much about it. There was a lot of drinking involved although no dope, surprisingly.)

 

Gaaaaahh! Dragging this thing back....

 

Oh, wait, just before I get to Prime Gaming, I spotted something actually useful on Prime Video last night. I think this is new. At least it was new to me. 

 

They've slightly changed the UI on the Storefront. I've long been in the habit of using my general Amazon bookmark when I want to watch something on Prime Video, then clicking on Prime Video along the top to open it. I couldn't see the button (It's there now but I swear it wasn't last night...) so I was stumped for all of three seconds. 

 

Then I thought why not try the full menu? Top left corner is an "ALL" button so I pressed that and got a full list of services with Prime Video near the top. Clicking that gets you a flip-out menu and on that one there's another button for My Stuff. 

 

Well. 

 

I wonder? 

 

I wonder if Firefox would make a Bookmark for that? 

 

Yes it would!

 

So now I have a bookmark for Prime Video that takes me straight to a clear, clean page that only has My Stuff on it! Better yet, it has all My Stuff broken out into handy subsections - My Movie Watchlist, My TV Watchlist, things I've bought, my subscriptions...

 

It's a million times better than trying to find My Stuff in the bullet hell of Prime Video's Home Page, where 90% is stuff they want you to pay (Again.) for and almost none of it is anything I'd watch even for free. Has everyone else been doing it this way all along and I was the only sucker doing it the dumb way? Or is this actually a new option? 

 

Either way, if you don't already sort yours this way, I suggest you start. I'm wondering now if there's a Firefox Add-On that will make My Stuff into my Amazon Prime landing page. I have one like that for YouTube and its transformative. Although, if I have a Bookmark for it, I guess don't really need an Add-On.

 

I think that's about it for Amazon-related moans and groans... oh, no, wait! no, it's not! 

 

I'm trying to buy an Amazon eGift Card for my step-daughter in Australia. How hard could that be? I mean, it's a global company and digital products can be delivered instantly by email anywhere in the world. Gotta take five minutes, tops, right? 

 

Hah. Dream, as they used to say, on. You can't buy eCards for any Amazon sub-unit other than the one you have an account with, so if you're in the UK you can only buy eCards for the UK. If you want an Australian one you have to make an account with Amazon.com.au. 

 

Or, in fact, as I discovered, just sign into that website using your existing account details. That works. Still doesn't let you buy a digital card, though. For that, you have to change your location to an address with an Australian postcode. All this for something that isn't going to be damn well posted anywhere!

 

Maybe there are currency or legal reasons? Yeah, maybe, but if so, how come I can buy digital gift cards from other Australian companies using my own address? And have them sent to me, whereupon I just forward them to my step-daughter's email because ALL ANYONE NEEDS IS THE GODDAM CARD NUMBER!

 

I'd say it's almost as if Amazon don't want to take the money but we all know that can't be true.

 

Okay, I'm done. Now about that Prime Gaming offer... 

 

<Sorry! I'm afraid we're out of time for today! Please come back tomorrow.> 

Secret Level Bonus

I didn't make a point of it, when I posted about December's Prime Gaming offer a few days ago, but at the time I did think the list felt a bit light, at least compared to the richness that was November. Turns out there's a reason for that.

Yesterday, a second Prime Gaming blog post popped up in my feeds. Two in one month? In one week?? What was going on?

The Amazon Prime series Secret Level, that's what. Announced earlier this year, the fifteen episode first season is "a new adult-animated anthology series featuring original stories set within the worlds of some of the world’s most beloved video games", the games in question being

• Armored Core
• Concord
• Crossfire
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Exodus
• Honor of Kings
• Mega Man
• New World: Aeternum
• PAC-MAN
• PlayStation (Not a video game...)
• Sifu
• Spelunky
• The Outer Worlds
• Unreal Tournament
• Warhammer 40,000

This news seemed to pick up remarkably little traction with any of the gaming sites I follow, possibly because they tend to be MMO-oriented and the only MMORPG on this list is New World, which Amazon would like everyone to stop calling an MMO anyway.

I know I sometimes try to make out I'm not a gamer but I do usually at least recognize the names of most well-known or popular games, even if I couldn't tell you what they're about or even what genre they fit into. It doesn't in the least surprise me that there are only two games on the list I've played but it does that there are half a dozen I've literally never heard of, not to mention that two of the entries aren't video games at all. They're either franchises or platforms.

The show, which debuts in just a few days, was put together by Blur Studio, known for making "epic" trailers for video games and also as the  people behind Love, Death + Robots, a series I seem to remember being praised by a couple of people in this part of the blogosphere. 

I'm not a fan, myself. I watched a couple of episodes and didn't feel any desire to watch more. The connection actually put me off paying much attention to Secret level. 

Nothing I'm seeing so far is making me feel any more enthsiastic about jumping in when the series starts on Tuesday. Reviews so far have not been encouraging. Radio Times, with only the first four episodes to go on, highlighted the extreme and unsatisfying brevity of what they'd been allowed to see. The longest was "just shy of 18 minutes long", leading the reviewer to observe that "every episode still feels like you’re watching a trailer for something bigger."

Still, they did at least find a few positive things to say, unlike The Verge, whose reviewer saw all fifteen episodes and didn't enjoy any of them:"The 15 shorts are almost universally dull and manage to neither make their source material seem compelling nor provide new insights for existing fans."

I had no plans to watch the show and I still don't. The only reason I'm writing about it now is that it's the reason we got that second Prime Gaming post and also quite possibly why the December slate seemed a little lackluster compared to last month.

In recognition of the arrival of Secret Level on our screens next week, Prime subscribers are getting nine bonus free games, all somehow related to titles covered in the show. Not to that many of them, though. I make it just four: Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer 40,000.

For the first two, we get the actual games, which is great since I've had The Outer Worlds in mind as something I'd like to play for a while now. I claimed it right away. When I'll get to play it is another matter but it's on the longlist.

Spelunky is a platformer so I passed. The D&D titles are "Enhanced" editions of Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, which sounds great but I already have multiple editions of both. I can't be bothered to work out what's been enhanced so I'm just going to claim them anyway.

The Warhammer titles I'll need to look at more carefully (There are five of them.) before I decide if there's anything there I want. I doubt it but you can never be sure. I like Warhammer well enough as a setting and as a franchise but the games that come out under the banner are rarely in genres that interest me.

Luna users also get Mega Man 11 although for how long isn't clear. December, presumably. As for New World Aeternum, unsurprisingly Amazon have chosen not to give their "new" game away for nothing but Prime members who play will get "a surprise" and "some free in-game items" when the show starts on 10 December. Or more likely a surprise that is some free in-game items.

As I type it all out it occurs to me that it's not such a great celebration as all that. Most of the games aren't represented at all and some of those that are come in the form of variants of titles that have appeared in previous Prime Gaming giveaways. Still, I suppose we can't complain. They're not just freebies - they're bonus freebies.

I'm just happy to get an extra game I wanted.

Carry On Adventuring!

Something weird happened last night. I finished a game and it didn't stop. 

I finally got to the end of Dungeon of Naheulbuek. I fought the final boss, Zangdar, and beat him on the second try, after I looked the fight up on the web and found there was a perfectly legit but totally dubious way to cheese it.

While I was reading up on how to avoid playing the game the way the developers intended, I couldn't help but notice a lot of complaints about the ending. For one thing, some people think the late-game fights are too easy. It's true they aren't as tough as some of the earlier ones, although I wouldn't complain about it. It's not like the game is especially challenging to begin with. Apart from that one super-annoying one I posted about, not that many battles took me more than a couple of tries on the default difficulty.

The real beef, though, was that the game ended far too abruptly. Supposedly it just sort of stopped with no real pay-off for all the hours it took to get there.

I wasn't too bothered although I was quite glad I'd spoiled that part of the surprise by reading about it ahead of time. That's also how I knew there was no loot to be had from the last battle other than a derisory half-dozen healing potions, as if to say "Here, fix yourselves up and bugger off." But I didn't care. I'd had my fun. I've been playing this game most days for months. 

I haven't kept a track of the hours I've spent on it but the average total playtime is supposed to be between thirty and forty-five hours, depending on whether you stick to the main plot or try to 100% the whole thing. I haven't remotely attempted to complete all the collections or get all the achievements but I'm sure I've played for well over thirty hours. I probably spent a dozen on that bridge fight alone.

However long it was, I definitely feel I got my money's worth. Or I would have, if I'd spent any, which of course I didn't. For all its many, obvious flaws, I'd rate Dungeon of Naheulbeuk as one of the more amusing comedy-adventures I've played - admittedly not a very high bar. It raised the occasional smile and rarely had me wanting to chuck a bread roll at the writers. 

Gameplay is solid. It held my attention throughout. If there was a sequel I'd be happy to play that too, which is just as well because it seems I've already started.

After the battle, when Zangdar had gasped out his inevitable, self-justifying, final words, I was expecting credits to roll. Instead, another wizard from earlier in the game ported in and the game just... carried on. 

First, there was a lot of dialog. I sat back and listened while my party bickered and bargained and went to and fro with various NPCs. It felt like it went on for about ten minutes. Maybe it did.

Eventually, the wizard translocated whole lot of them to an entirely new location, which turned out to be a graveyard at night. That's never a good sign. After warning them not to touch anything, he ran off through a convenient nearby door, leaving the party standing there in the dark, looking even more like they'd been left holding a ticking time-bomb than usual.

At this point I was feeling very confused. I'd timed my evening session in the expectation it would last barely longer than the fight itself and now here we were, apparently carrying on. I thought about going with it to see where things went next but somehow I didn't get the feeling this was a neat little coda the developers had added in response to all that criticism about the ending. It felt a lot more like the start of a brand new adventure.

It was late, so I stopped but as soon as I got back from taking Beryl for a walk this morning I fired the game up and started over from where I'd left off. Naturally, having been told not to touch anything, the first thing the Dwarf did, on noticing some gold pieces just lying around on the floor, was pick them up. And we were off.

An hour or so and several fights later we'd killed a bunch of undead (If you can kill something that's died already. Never been exactly clear how that works.) looted some nice upgrades, something that strongly implies further progression to come and somehow found ourselves in the middle of a feud between Vampires and Necromancers, a feud in which we're expected to take sides. It was one long, run-on action scene that looked like it would never end.

Enough! I saved, logged out and googled the name of the quest I was on, Ruins of Limis. That, it transpires, is also the title of the game's fist DLC. That's what I am now playing. 

No-one asked me if I wanted to. It just happened.

Clearly, the DLC must have been included in the package that Amazon Prime handed out for free last November. Except it wasn't or rather it wasn't mentioned. I didn't say anything about it in my post at the time and neither did any of the news sites that reported on it back then. 

So, maybe the DLC came to Prime later. It's been six months. There's a hand-out every week, pretty much. 

But you don't get those automatically. You have to claim them. And I didn't claim this one. I'd never even heard of it.

I guess I'm not complaining. No, I'm definitely not complaining. I would have liked to be told about it first, but never mind. 

As for the way the new adventure just carries on from the original, it does look as though it's set up to work that way. There's a whole bit explaining why you lose all your gold but keep your gear, for a start. I imagine, when it was first released, players would just have booted up their final auto-save and found themselves carrying on from the end of the final fight. 

In fact, it might even have been designed that way from the get-go. That would certainly explain the non-ending everyone complained about. Also why you might need more health potions even though the game seemed to be over.

It is a bit disconcerting, all the same. I'd been enjoying DoN quite a bit but I have been playing it for what feels like a long time now. I'd been having mixed feelings about it coming to an end. I thought I might miss it and I was wondering what I'd replace it with but I was also quite looking forward to getting stuck into something different for a change.

Now it seems I'm just going to be carrying on as I was. I have mixed feelings about that, too. What's more, there are two more DLCs  and I have no idea if either is also included in the Amazon version. If they are, I could playing this thing all year!

Or I could just stop. It's not an MMORPG. You can save any time you like, come back six months later and nothing will have changed. 

I don't have to go on playing just because I got suckered into it. I'm not some dumb adventurer who can be manipulated into doing something stupid by any smart-talking, hand-waving, beard-faced snake-oil salesman that happens along...

Oh, wait a minute...

Want To Know How It Ends? Me Too!

This is going to be one of those posts about how you can't trust streaming services and how if you want to be sure of the things you value you need to keep them close at hand, not on some server far away. And then again it's not going to be exactly that.

Nothing's ever so simple, is it?

I've been watching Roswell, New Mexico. It's a TV show that's hard to explain. Not the basic premise, which is that the Roswell UFO landing was real and that aliens live among us. Anyone can work that much out from the title alone.

No, where it's hard is in figuring out how this show sits in context with other iterations of the same... franchise? Brand? No, neither of those, exactly. 

Shall we call it an IP? Why not? 

The Roswell IP began as a series of books written by Melinda Metz and published by Pocket Books in America back around the turn of the millennium. There were ten books in the original series, collectively known as Roswell High. They all came out in an astonishing gush between 1998 and 2000, which is some going even for a pulpy YA series. 

They must have been pretty successful because they spawned a TV series almost immediately. Simply known as Roswell, it aired from 1999 to 2002. The show must have done pretty well too because it sloughed off its own series of novelizations, eleven in total, three of which came out while the show was on air and eight more, from a different publisher, after it ended.

You might have thought that after twenty-one novels and three seasons of a TV show the whole thing would have been tapped dry but you would be wrong. In 2019 the IP returned for another run on TV, this time under the name Roswell, New Mexico. It ran for four seasons, ending in 2022. 

I came into this story late. Roswell was streaming on one or other of the services I subscribe to and I watched it maybe five years ago. I was under the impression I'd posted something about it at the time but it seems that while I've mentioned once or twice in passing, I've never actually given it a post of its own.

That was remiss of me. Although I've only watched the series once, I have it pegged in my mind as one of my favorite shows of all time. Without a re-watch, that mostly suggests it made an extremely strong first impression. I'd need at least one more go-through to calibrate and preferably a third for confirmation. Usually my first impressions run true, though, so I think it's safe to say it's pretty good.

Luckily, I certainly felt strongly enough about it at the time to buy the box set on DVD, so any time I feel like refreshing my memory, I have that option. Technically, it also exists to stream on Prime but I've just checked and it suffers from the same problem as the later version, of which more later.

Given how highly I rated Roswell, it's perhaps surprising I took as long as I did before getting around to the sequel. I had my reasons and they weren't just the obvious "too many shows, too little time". The issue I had with watching Roswell, New Mexico is that I wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to be.

I called it a sequel just now but it's not. I thought it was, until I watched it, but it turns out I was wrong. What I knew about it, going in, was that it featured the same characters ten years older, when Liz Ortecho, one of the leads, returned to Roswell after a decade away.

Naturally, I assumed that meant the story would pick up from where it left off. It does not. I hadn't checked but I also figured it would mostly feature the same cast. It doesn't do that, either.

Roswell, New Mexico is a kind of reboot of the original although again, not really. Maybe a re-envisioning? It's not so much that it takes place ten years later, although it probably does. It's more that the characters are ten years older. 

Instead of them being in high school they all graduated long ago. Instead of being adolescents aged from sixteen to eighteen, these people are all genuine young adults, in their mid-to-late twenties, with jobs, responsibilities and pasts. 

Liz is a high-flying microbiologist, Max is a deputy sheriff, Michael is a mechanic and Maria owns and runs a bar. The whole thing takes place against the politicized backdrop of the Trump administration (I almost wrote the first Trump administration...) and the tone is quite different to the original series, much more politicized, with a great deal of play being made between the aliens' situation and that of illegal Mexican immigrants, of whom Liz's father is one.

I honestly don't even remember Liz being hispanic in the first series although Maria definitely was. The new Maria is black. Also half-alien but we won't talk about that for fear of spoilers. We also won't talk about the plot, not at the risk of spoiling anything but because it makes absolutely no sense. I'd need to watch the first series again to be certain but I'm fairly sure that, wild though it was at times, it never thrashed around like a snake in a hot tub the way this one does.

The science also makes absolutely no sense, which wouldn't be an issue if there wasn't so damn much of it. Liz is a professional scientist and so is her ex-fiancee, who turns up in Season 2. One of the new characters is a hacker for the military, another is a surgeon. Even Michael is apparently an untrained but intuitive scientific prodigy. 

The show oozes science, all of which might just as easily be magic, not least for the way it compacts years of development time into hours of frenzied lab-work, but also the plain fact that even the people doing the "science" don't always know how it works. The part where they perform an alien heart transplant in a back-room without anyone knowing about it is particularly fine but every episode seems to feature one of the cast doing two impossible things before breakfast thanks to "science".

Most of the negative comments about the show, of which there are plenty online, revolve around one or other of these flaws. My front-loading them might suggest I didn't much like the show either, especially in comparison with the original but that would be wholly wrong. I fricken' loved it! From the opening episode, when I realized about halfway in that we were starting over, not carrying on, I've been on board all the way. 

To set against the issues with the plot, which even the characters archly liken to a telenovella, we need to stack the dialog (Crackling.) the performances (Compelling.) and the characters (Convincing.) Add to that the stunning New Mexico scenery and it's a great watch. Just don't make the mistake of trying to untangle the plot.

As always, it makes a huge difference to me that I like most of the characters, even if it took me a long time to warm up to the new Maria. She was my favorite in the original and the new one is very much not a grown-up version of that character. She's someone completely different. 

I did come around, though, and anyway I took immediately to the new Michael, who seems much more likeable than the old one, so that was a trade-off. The new Max is also less annoying, while the new Liz is really similar. I can't now remember if Liz's dead sister was alive in the first Roswell or not but Rosa in Roswell, New Mexico is a standout, so I'm glad she came back to life. (Don't ask...)

All the new characters are pretty good - Michael's on-again/off-again love interest Alex, Alex's terrifying father, school bully turned empathic doctor Kyle, Max's friends-with-benefits police partner Jenna  - but my absolute favorite is the third of the alien trio, Isabel, played in an almost indescribably odd manner by Lily Cowles. At first I thought she couldn't act at all. Now I'm convinced she's the reincarnation of Elizabeth Montgomery, which is about the highest praise I can offer.

I was going to wait until I'd seen all four seasons of Roswell, New Mexico before I posted my thoughts, so why are we here, now? 

Because, despite all four seasons being clearly indicated as available in the drop-down menu on Amazon Prime, where I've been watching the show, I was extremely irritated to find, when I came to start on Season Three, only the first two are actually there. In a new wrinkle in the streaming service I've not tripped over until now, it's apparently permissible to promote shows you can't even watch!

I'm used to shows having three seasons of which only two are on a given platform. That's happened to me several times. I've never known a show to list all of the seasons and then refuse to show half of them to you. That's tantamount to taunting!

I did a little research and it seems there are "rights issues" involved, although nothing I've found wants to try to explain what those issues might be. I did also discover there were some ructions during the production of Roswell, New Mexico that led to the unexpected departure of the show-runner around the time of the third Season but whether that factors in I have no clue.

As of this post, I also know that the same situation applies to the original Roswell. I checked just now and while the first season is available to watch on Prime, the second and third, although listed, are similarly flagged "Currently unavailable to watch in your location". 

Sticking to Roswell, New Mexico, I suspect, although I don't know, that it might have something to do with the show having been bought by ITV for terrestrial broadcast in the UK. Then again, it's not available on the ITV Player either, so maybe not. 

Meanwhile, all the various "Where To Watch" sites cheerfully claim all four seasons are available in the UK on just about every service imaginable,  from Prime and Netflix to AppleTV and Google Play. I've checked them all and in every case it's only Seasons One and Two that are available.

I'd happily buy the damn thing, either digitally or preferably on DVD, but that's not an option either. There's no digital version of the full series I can find for sale in this country, nor are the individual seasons three and four for sale, at least not in the U.K. As for a hard copy, I'm pretty sure only Season One was ever issued on DVD, anywhere. 

For now, I seem to be out of viable options. I could try a VPN, of course, but I've never had much success going that route in the past. It's all very well having the right I.P. address but if it's a paid service they usually also want a valid, local payment option and sometimes even an address to go with it. 

I may give it a try anyway. VPNs are very cheap. Certainly a lot cheaper than streaming subscriptions.

There's also an outside chance the problem might just fix itself if I wait. I note from various forums and reddit threads I've lurked in that at times the missing seasons have become available briefly before slipping back behind the veil. Maybe something is happening behind the scenes although I suspect if it ever was it isn't any more. 

Once again, it's the old "everything's available forever online until it isn't". Millennials are coming into the nostalgia zone about now, with Gen-Z due to start arriving a decade or so later. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when they find they can't have their childhoods back on demand.

Until this gets sorted, I recommend a return to physical product, or at least a download on hardware you physically posess. Not that  it helps me with my Roswell, New Mexico problem but then you can't have everything. 

Sometimes you can't even have what you were told you already had.

Endings And Beginnings

Time for a very quick update on TV shows I've finished. If I leave it any longer I'll have forgotten what I wanted to say about them. 

They're all animated shows. I seem to watch mostly animation these days. It's not so much a preference as it's all I can find that interests me. There's a dearth of live action shows in the styles or genres I like right now, at least on the services I subscribe to. I think I need to sub somewhere else and soon.

Let's begin with a couple I wrote about before, when I was still in the middle of watching them. How did that turn out?

My Daemon

I absolutely loved this. I would say it's one of the best anime I've seen but a) I haven't seen enough for that to carry the weight it needs to be a compliment and b) there seems to be some controversy over whether My Daemon is actually anime or not. 

That really is a pointless debate in my opinion but when I went to read up about the show, after I'd finished watching it, the only things anyone seemed to care about were whether or not it qualified as anime and whether it was a good Pokemon rip-off or just a rip-off. I read more arguments over that than I did any discussion of story, theme or execution. 

Some people didn't want to accept anything made outside Japan into the anime fold (The studio that made My Daemon is based in Thailand.) while some claimed the Japanese setting was enough to give it a pass. Others weren't having any truck with digital animation, insisting anime had to be hand-drawn. 

Semantic literalists repeatedly reminded everyone that "anime" is just the Japanese word for "animation" so any animated content is automatically anime anyway. Cultural gatekeepers weren't having any of that reductive claptrap. It got quite heated at times.

I never read anything about shows while I'm watching them, for fear of spoilers, but if I like a show I almost always go read reviews and opinion pieces about it as soon as I finish it, often literally moments after the closing credits roll on the final episode. I want to see if other people responded to it the way I did and also I'm hoping to postpone, just a little longer, that numbing moment when you realize it's done and you won't be hanging out with this particular set of imaginary friends any more.

In that respect, when it comes to My Daemon, I seem to be an outlier. No-one else seemed to be pining for more or needing support and affirmation for their loss. The minority who wanted to talk about the content and quality of the show at all seemed underwhelmed by most of it. There seemed to be a sense that it was mostly for kids, not especially well-animated and generally nothing much to get excited about.

I would like to disagree most strongly with all of that. In terms of tone and content I found it not just adult but positively grown up. Thematically it deals with grief, loss, abandonment and betrayal in some very bleak and uncompromising ways. I found much of it hard to handle, emotionally, and some of it actively hard to watch. 

Technically I don't suppose there's anything in there that wouldn't pass the regular checks for content suitable for sub-teens, although the parental advisory site I checked suggested using discretion in letting younger children see it. They recommended it be watched by"older children and teenagers due to the intense themes and animated violence",  to which I'd only add "...yeah, and the rest!"

The thirteen-part series is self-contained, to an extent, and has a satisfying conclusion, although it clearly anticipates a second season, which I regret to say it probably isn't going to get, not having been especially successful or well-reviewed. The first eight episodes are the most harrowing. 

If you can get through those, it does shift tone slightly, towards more traditional action-adventure. There's even a fight on top of a moving train. It was a change of pace that came as a huge relief to me after the claustrophobic, introspective, soul-searching intensity of the earlier narrative.

Even so, it never really lets up on the animal cruelty, some of which I found quite distressing. It was a strange co-incidence that I watched it almost at the same time as playing Palworld. I've never played a Pokemon game but if either of these "inspired by" takes is remotely accurate to that IP's ethos, it has to be a damning indictment of Pokemon itself.  

Together, the two of them have made me re-assess some of my own behavior while gaming. Too many of the things we blithely accept as "just how the game works" simply don't bear close examination.

Overall, I'm very glad I watched My Daemon and would strongly recommend it to anyone who thinks they have the stomach for it. Just be ready to have your assumptions uncomfortably challenged.

Hazbin Hotel

This one ended much sooner than I expected. It seemed like one of those shows that takes most of its time setting up the premise and introducing the characters before suddenly realizing there are only a couple of episodes left to deal with the plot.

That said, I thought it was great. It looked fantastic, made me laugh out loud several times, had me hissing the villains and cheering the heroes, and left me feeling satisfied and sated after the big ending. The songs were pretty good, too.

One thing I will say is that I do seem to have watched an awful lot of shows in the last two or three years with demons or devils as the protagonists. I'd like to write a whole post about it but I need to do a lot more research first. 

A lot of them are generically demonish but this one has actual, named devils and angels from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, something that always feels weird. OK, there's no actual Daughter of Satan in the Bible as far as I remember from my Religious Knowledge O-Level studies, and even if there was I'm pretty sure she wasn't called Charlie, but Hazbin Hotel has roles for Satan himself, not to mention Lilith and Adam. 

As seems to be the norm these days, the devils are the good guys and the angelic crew the villains, only in the case of Hazbin Hotel there's very little in the way of nuance when it comes to the angelic hordes. Satan is a charismatic fop with a suppressed paternal streak you do not want to awake. Adam is a genocidal, carpet-chewing sociopath and all the angels merely his unthinking storm troopers. They're idiosyncratic characterizations, to say the least.

The show was great fun from beginning to end and broke viewing records for Amazon, so I imagine we'll be getting more. I will definitely be watching.

Star Trek: Prodigy

Now this was a complete surprise. I am not much of a Star Trek fan although I am slowly coming to believe that, in the eternal cats vs dogs debate, I'm probably more attuned to the wavelength of the Federation than either the Empire or the Alliance.

Even so, I couldn't even name all of the official Trek shows. I watched the original series in the seventies (Not the sixties, when I don't recall even knowing it existed.) and the first season and a half or so of New Generation in the eighties, quitting out of boredom before, as people like to tell me, it got good. 

After that, I think the next Trek show I watched was Lower Decks, which I loved. That positive experience was why I thought I'd give this one a go and I'm very glad I did. It's not as sharp and clever as Lower Decks and it's much more tuned for a tween-teen audience but it's fast, funny, exciting and very coherently plotted. I enjoyed it a good deal.

As usual, the best thing about it was the characters, all of whom are nicely individuated, recognizable types without actually being stereotypical. The voice acting is solid, not spectacular, with no-one really standing out as particularly impressive or annoying. That makes perfect sense with such an ensemble cast and such a focus on camaraderie and teamwork.

I assume the show is canon, if only because one of the main characters is Capt. Janeway from Voyager, of whom I had heard, even though I never watched the show. She seems very dry. I'd be interested in watching an episode or two of Voyager now, just on the basis that she's probably pretty good in it.

The animation is not stellar (Ha!) but it does a job. The visuals are at their best when the team visit various planets. The interior of the ship really doesn't give the animators a lot to work with. 

The plot, while consistent and tightly-focused, doesn't make a whole lot of sense but that's nothing new. Most SciFi shows don't make sense if you think about them too hard. This one involves time-travel, which is always a big red flag to logic, anyway. It also features any number of call-backs to other Trek shows and series, which may delight or infuriate, depending on your tolerance for fan service.

The show has a fractured past. Originally commissioned by Paramount and shown on Nickelodeon in two, ten-episode half-seasons, it was then cancelled after a second season had already been approved and work on it had begun. Netflix picked up both the first and second season, the latter of which is supposed to air later this year. 

Once again, I will be watching.

Neon Genesis: Evangelion

I knew the name from the manga we sell at work but I never thought it looked particularly interesting. Then one day I was chatting to one of my managers, the one who games and watches anime, and she recommended it in the strongest terms so I thought, since it was right there on Netflix, I'd give it a go.

O. M. G! This is one of those "What did I just watch?" shows, pretty much from start to finish. It's an acknowledged classic (Did not know that.) from the nineties (Didn't know that either.) with an infamously weird and divisive ending. 

The show runs 26 episodes but they ran out of money for the animation towards the end so the last two are basically slide-shows. The show then became a cult as the director, Hideaki Anno, spent the next two decades trying to get the story told the way he wanted. 

There are a bunch of Evangelion movies, all dealing with the same plot as the show, most of them on Netflix, all of which I still need to watch. My manager, whose opinions are sound, tells me they're all better than the TV show, which means they must be damn good because the show is wonderful.

Visually, it's stunning, in large part because of the direction rather than the animation. Shot selection is incredible. It looks like an art-house movie from the eighties or nineties done in animation.

Characterization and voice acting in the American dub are good to very good. (I'm not even going to get into the Netflix vs ADV vs Japanese original arguments. I saw this version first  so it's always going to be the version to me.) I'm guessing the levels of hysteria in some scenes would be orders of magnitude more intense in the original so I'm happy to be missing that. I don't think I could cope with a full-strength, anime-style Asuka.

The world-building is off the charts but also very hard to credit. For a start, the timescale, fifteen years after a global catastrophe, doesn't seem to be anywhere near long enough to allow for the rebuilding that's taken place and the technology level is probably hundreds of years ahead of ours although everyone behaves like it's still the nineties.

None of that matters, of course. It's a full-on, sensual, intellectual and emotional assault that can feel quite overwhelming at times. Fortunately, there are also huge swathes of teen drama, adult soap opera and slapstick comedy to get you through the tough-to-follow parts. I never did figure out where the cyborg penguin fitted into it all.

Now I need to find time to watch the four, essential movies that supposedly make sense of the whole thing. That's going to be a trip, I bet!

And The Rest Will Have To Wait

I'm pretty sure I've watched other stuff through to the end as well but I can't off the top of my head remember what it was and anyway that's enough for one post. Next time I write about TV, I'll go through the several shows I started then dropped, something I find very interesting when other people do it. 

If only I can remember what those shows were, that is...

Devils And Daemons

Because I feel it would be unreasonable to post about Palworld every day, even though I definitely could do that, today I'm going to do something I don't normally do and write about a couple of TV shows I'm still in the middle of watching. If nothing else, it makes for an instructive jumping-off point for a meditation on the purpose of reviews and reviewing, a topic on which I have far more to say than anyone would want to hear.

In brief, it does seem wrong sometimes that I only get to write about shows after I finish watching them, and sometimes quite a while after, at that. I occasionally have to make it clear I've forgotten a good deal about a particular show and even when I don't offer that caveat, it's often the case that I've had to go back and re-watch a few scenes, just to refresh my memory so I can write about them.

Contrast that with being mid-watch, so to speak. Those are the times when not only are the details of the show fresh in my mind but when I'm suffused with enthusiasm and eager to spread the word. It's weird to hold back, isn't it? If it was a new game; would I wait until I'd finished to begin posting about it? 

Not likely. In exceptional circumstances, if a game was both self-contained and short, it's conceivable I might play, finish and write about it on the same day but almost always there would be a series of "First Impressions" and "Currently Playing" posts, detailing my ongoing experiences, thoughts and opinions in something approximating real time. For what we now, somewhat euphemistically, refer to as "Live Service" games, no real "Final Review" is ever even possible, although professional reviewers frequently need to pretend otherwise.

It does seem strange, then, that another similarly extended, ongoing experience, like watching a TV show, should have to wait until the final episode before I even mention it. That would never have happened in the days before streaming services and on-demand viewing. In the olden days, if a reviewer waited until the conclusion of a TV series before writing about it, it would already be too late. Anyone who hadn't watched it already would have no way of catching up and most people who'd seen it would already be watching something else and wouldn't care.

All of which is steering us dangerously close to the sandbanks of what a review is for, something I desperately want to avoid, so enough with the pre-amble and on to the shows. Just bear in mind I haven't seen the endings of either of these yet (In one case, no-one has.) so, to paraphrase the boilerplate at the end of advertisements for financial services, my opinions may be subject to change.

Hazbin Hotel (Amazon Prime)

This one has a complicated backstory -not the internal narrative but how it came to be made - none of which I knew until I read the Wikipedia entry in preparation for this post. To summarise, a Patreon-funded pilot episode was released on YouTube back in 2019 and four years later, about a couple of weeks back, the first episode of the series itself premiered on Amazon Prime.

I've linked to the pilot but I haven't even watched it yet myself. I only found out it existed about two minutes ago! As for how I came to watch the new show, Prime chose to featureit in one of those big, splash panels you see at the top of the page when you log in. I'd never heard of it but I liked the look of the art style and I'd just finished another show, meaning I had a gap in my schedule, so I thought I'd give it a try. 

My initial reaction? Blimey, Charlie! 

Hazbin Hotel is a full-on assault to both eyes and ears. The aesthetic that attracted me to it in the first place is rigorously, almost mercilessly employed. It's spiky, aggressive, loud and sophisticated all at once. It's also color-keyed to an extreme I've rarely experienced before. 

The action takes place in Hell, where everything is some shade of red. Everything. Characters are red. They dress in red. The buildings and the streets are red. It's all red. Okay, there are some yellows and oranges but they only make the reds more red! 

While you're seeing red, you're hearing blue. Hazbin Hotel has to be one of the sweariest shows I've ever watched. Certainly the sweariest since Deadloch and it doesn't even have the excuse of being Australian. I'm six shows in (Prime are doing that thing of releasing episodes on Fridays, a couple at a time.) and I think the firehose of four-letter words may have been turned down just a notch, although it's possible I'm just inured to it now. 

The older I get, the more I realise I love creative swearing. I used to find it abrasive and awkward but now I just relish it like good music. Hazbin Hotel has some extremely musical swearing and I'm not even being metaphorical because Hazbin Hotel is a musical.

Oh yes, did I not mention that? As if it wasn't enough to have super-sweary demons swaggering around a scarlet, cartoon Hell, they also keep breaking into song. Throw in a central plot about genocide, some sub-plots concerning pornography, coercion and consent and a whole raft of religious table-turning, top it off with plenty of explosive, cartoon violence and you have something pretty much guaranteed to annoy or offend almost anyone.

I love it and apparently a lot of other people do, too, because it holds the current record for the "largest global debut for a new animated series on Prime Video", at least according to Wikipedia. I haven't even mentioned one of the show's greatest strengths, the characters, all of whom are memorable and frequently endearing. 

In short, highly recommended, provided you don't shy at swearing, sex, religion or song and dance numbers. Or, I guess, suffer from red/green color-blindness, which I imagine would be kind of a problem...

My Daemon (Netflix)

Another new show about which I knew absolutely nothing before I began watching it. Unlike Hazbin Hotel, whose wiki presence is enormous, My Daemon rates only a basic, factual, uninflected entry on Wikipedia. It deserves so much more.

Whereas Hazbin Hotel sets out to shock but mostly succeeeds in being immensley enjoyable and entertaining, My Daemon comes in under the radar to deliver an emotional payload so harrowing I had to debate with myself quite seriously about whether I could go on watching after the first episode. Seriously, it's traumatizing.

The Cliff Notes version: a road movie with a quest narrative in which a child protagonist attempts to walk from one side of a futuristic, post-nuclear-disaster Japan to the other in search of a rumored daemon with the power to raise the dead. So far, so anime. 

The heartbreak is in the reason for his journey and the horror is in the razor-edge line the narrative walks between quotidian good and thoughtless evil. Without spoilers, there's not much I can offer in the way of detail. Just know that every character, even the bit-parts and walk-ons, comes freighted with a life all their own, motivations and attitudes and assumptions the narrative subtly offers and invites you to understand, accept or challenge.

Coming fresh to the show, I expected the titular daemon to be a supernatural, otherworldly entity. I didn't take the extra "a" to be significant but it absolutely is. These are the daemons of His Dark Materials, seen through a science fiction lens. Philip K Dick would have recognised them as his great-grandchildren.

Visually, My Daemon is stunning. The animation is fluid and subtle but the backgrounds are purely sublime. It's one of the most beautiful shows I've seen and of late I've watched a lot of action taking place in front of jaw-droppingly gorgeous backdrops. The standard is high but this exceeds it.

The writing matches the visuals and the voice acting doesn't let either down . The real problem with the show is its emotional impact, something that on multiple occasions I've found almost more than I could take. The repeated scenes of what can only be called animal cruelty, even if the daemons are, technically, something not-animal, are particularly horrific and the perpetual tension around whether Kento, a nine-year old orphan can keep his best friend, Anna, the ineffably loveable, loyal and - as Kento claims - incredibly cute daemon he raised from a tiny speck, at times verges on the unbearable.

Throw in the death of a parent, a terminal illness and a mysterious government organisation, devoid of all humanity, determined to have Anna, "dead or alive", and you have the potential for melodramatic sci-fi soap opera. Instead you get something rich, strange and fine.

I'm five episodes into the thirteen-episode limited series. I hope it has a happy ending. I hope I can make it through to see it.

Obviously, this one is highly recommended, too. If you think you can take the emotional strain, that is.

Weasel Do!

When last I posted about the latest Prime Gaming monthly offers, I agreed with Nimgimli in the comments that it might be better in future if I stuck to talking about the games and freebies I was thinking of claiming, rather than trying to get a cheap laugh out of the ones I wasn't. As he also pointed out, very gently, by pulling back the veil on Amazon's own coverage, I'd removed any newsworthiness my Prime posts might have had, leaving the commentary as the sole reason for their continued existence. If I couldn't make that work, there really wouldn't be a lot of point carrying on with the feature.

Luckily for my posting average, this month's selection is a lot better than it has been of late. Or maybe it just falls fortuitously closer to my tastes and preferences for once. There were several games I thought I might play and some decent in-game freebies I felt were most definitely worth grabbing.

For Guild Wars 2, a game I actually logged into today for the first time in months (Not just to claim my Prime freebies either, but more of that in another post, perhaps.) there's a Pirate Cosmetic Bundle. We all like pirates, right?  Those over-romanticized little sociopaths! They're so cute, what with that funny way they talk and their parrots and the missing limbs and all. Dontcha just love the drunken, flithy, murderous little weasels?

Speaking of missing limbs, that's what you get. The bundle comprises two "skins" and a hat. The first skins turns one of your hands into a hook and the other lops off a leg and replaces it with a wooden one. Dismemberment chic!

In Blade & Soul, which I swear I'm going to play again some day soon, there's a bunch of generally useful stuff including a thousand gold. I wish I could remember of that's a lot or a little. I mean, it sounds like a lot but in some games I've played, a thousand gold wouldn't buy you breakfast.

New World has a similar offer, minus the money but plus a "Skull Candleholder" for your house. I also snagged last month's pack with its "Tall Ivy Covered Trellis". 

New World is another game I really want to get back to playing. The problem is, I'm not really playing any games to speak of at the moment. I can't seem to find the time, what with all the dog walking, gardening and general going outside that seems never to end. I'm counting on the eventual arrival of winter to keep me indoors long enough to get some proper gaming done.

Last and most definitely not least, this month's World of Warcraft freebie is an actual flying mount - the Armored Bloodwing. With the completion of the Microsoft acquisition, the criterion I vowed would have to be realised before I'd play WoW again has been met, so I might soon be riding this fine beast. 

Or maybe not. If I do set foot in Azeroth again it'll most likely be by way of the extended Free Trial and I don't think that's going to allow me to play a character who can fly. Still, I've claimed it on the off chance. Can't really turn down a free fying mount. That'd just be rude.

So much for the freebies. Obviously, there are literally dozens of others for games I don't play but you can check those out for yourself.

On to November's free games, which don't look at all bad. There are nine, of which the highlight is probably November 16's Knights of the Old Republic. On the down side, everyone who ever wanted this almost certainly already has it. I know I have. On the up, even though I own it, I've never played it. If I ever get the urge it's going to be a lot easier to fire up this version than to try and get my old DVDs working.

Before that, on November 2 there's a post-apocalyptic, open-world vehicle-based FPS called RAGE 2 I might claim even though I know I'll probably never play the thing. It does look pretty, so long as your idea of prettiness includes a blasted wilderness full of psychotic bikers. The go-to description seems to be Mad Max crossed with Fallout crossed with Borderlands, which weirdly tells me all I need to know even though I've never played or seen any of them. I think that's called cultural bleedthrough.

Skipping over Centipede Recharged on November 9, the very next day, November 10, brings something a bit more interesting by way of Evan's Remains, described as "a mystery-thriller puzzle adventure". I'm in two minds about this one. On the one hand, it looks charming and has an interesting premise; on the other, it's a form of platformer, although supposedly one based more on solving logic puzzles than on fine motor skills. Again, one I'll most likely claim then never play.

Arriving on the same day as KotOR, presumably as a form of counter-programming, there's the intriguing Behind The Frame: The Finest Scenery. Supposedly "inspired by Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli visuals" this is interactive fiction where the story unfolds through brush-strokes. It'll be something different for me and it looks gorgeous so the plan is to claim it and play it. We'll see if it happens.

More in my usual line is November 22's The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos. Described as "an adventure filled with surprises and silliness", it's an isometric RPG along the vague lines of Baldur's Gate or Divinity:Original Sin, only much less ambitious and not anything like as serious. Humor in RPGs is always very hit or miss and the voice acting in the trailer is verging on the embarassing but I can always turn the sound down. It has a story mode, too, which means I might even be able to finish it - always assuming I want to.

Finally, there's the intriguingly-named Orten Was The Case, which makes itself available on November 30. It's "a single player, lore driven, detective/puzzle adventure game with a time-loop mechanic" and a really odd graphic style that makes it look like one of those  European animated shorts I used to have to sit though sometimes before the main feature at my local art-house cinema back in the 90s. 

Even more oddly, it's not yet available. The website sends you to Steam, where you can play a demo but the full game only has a "Coming Soon" tag. I don't know if that means Prime has an exclusive or if the game is set to launch earlier in the month. Either way, I'm going to claim it and most likely play it, too.

Apart from a couple I didn't mention because I have no interest in them whatsoever, that's the lot. Much better than last time, I think. One or two there that I'm quite looking forward to. 

If I do play them and they're of any interest, no doubt I'll have more to say. Until then, that's Prime Gaming for November.

============================================================================

A note on the AI used in this post.

Just the astonishingly good masthead this time. Once again, I used DreamShaper XL alpha2, weighted at 50%.

The prompt, taken from the post, was "Pirates as drunken, filthy, murderous little weasels. Studio Ghibli". I had to add the prefix "Pirates as" because my initial prompt, using just " filthy, murderous little weasels" resulted in this, which is cute but not exactly what I was expecting.

I mean, do they look either filthy or muderous to you? They're not even fricken' weasels! Great image, though.