Text And Subtext - An Adventure With Morrissey And The Smiths

Yesterday, I was somewhat surprised to find I didn't have enough new music bookmarked to fill a post. It's certainly not that I haven't been listening to plenty. It just looks as though I haven't been keeping a note of what it was.

When that happens it's usually either because I've been listening to familiar artists doing what they do, something I enjoy but don't necessarily find worth sharing, or because the new stuff I've discovered sounded good to hear once but not so good I wanted to call attention to it. That happens a lot.

Still, I wanted to do something musical on a Saturday. It always seems like the day for it. Luckily for me, late last night something really quite peculiar popped up in my feeds. 

To save everyone the trouble of following the link, it goes to a piece at NME entitled

"‘The Smiths Are Dead’ is a new Commodore 64 game about Morrissey". 

What the hell?! So much to unpack there.

Firstly, it's a text adventure. Apparently people still write those. I guess if you're going to revisit the 'eighties it's on point. Do people still play them, though? I mean, I loved a good tesxt adventure back in the day but I can't make myself enjoy them now.

Secondly, it's for the Commodore 64. That's still around? Well, yes, apparently. When I started reading the article I assumed it would be some kind of emulator project. Then I got to the part that said "While it is currently out of stock on the Amiga Store, fans should sign up for email notifications for when it is available again."

Unless you're Square Enix, you can't run out of stock of a digital product. And the Amiga Store (It exists.) hasn't. They've run out of cartridges. The Smiths Are Dead is (Or I guess I should say was and probably will be again, some day.) available in physical format. Specifically, cartridge. Go figure.

I do not intend to turn this into an investigation of why anyone would a) want to develop software for the Commodore 64 in 2023 or b) issue said software in a physical format that - to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge - the original C64 discontinued in favor of tape and disk the first chance it got. 

At this juncture I ought to say I never liked the Commodore 64 and never owned one. I preferred first the ZX Spectrum and later the Amiga 500. I actually still have an Amiga. It's fully functioning as far as I know, or at least it was the last time I used it, which would have been some time in the early 'nineties. Very, very occasionaly I toy with the idea of getting it out and looking at it but somehow I find the urge very easy to resist. As for using it... let's get real.

Never underestimate the draw of the nostalgia market, though. And I guess if you're going to tap that, it makes sense to double down. A Venn Diagram of the Smiths, home computing, the 1980s and adolescent angst would look like one big, filled-in circle, after all.

Anyway, like it or not, "The Smiths Are Dead" text adventure for the Commodore 64 is a thing that exists. It's set right at the point when the band has just split up (Hence the title, which also plays on the Smiths' album "The Queen Is Dead", as absolutely no-one reading this needed to be told, I'm sure.) and the game takes Morrissey's perspective as he prepares to record his first solo album. The cast features a list of characters well-known to anyone familiar with the British music scene of the time:

• Steven Patrick Morrissey 'Moz' is the ex-singer of The Smiths and the character we will take during the adventure.
• Gail Colson is my manager and the person who should help us redirect our career after the breakup of the group.
• Geoff Travis is the owner of the Rough Trade record label, which published the music of The Smiths.
• Stephen Street is a producer and a very prolific and valued musician in the English indie scene.
• Vinny Reilly is the ideologue of Durutti Column and a genius with the guitar.
• Andrew Paressi is a multi-functional artist who accompanied Morrissey at the start of Morrissey's solo career.

If you want to know more, I guess you'll just have to play the game. Always assuming you have a Commodore 64. With a cartridge port. And that the game ever comes back into stock. (Oh, alright. It is available as a digital download from itch.io as well. You can play it using an emulator. I might even do just that, one day.)

In the meantime, why not let's have some Smiths numbers? Everyone loves the Smiths, right? Just like everyone hates Morrissey, now. 

Only, we've all heard the songs so many times. Do we really need to hear them again? So let's have some covers of Smiths' songs! And heaven knows there are plenty to choose from. There can scarcely be any eighties' songwriters more covered than Morrissy and Marr.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of the covers sound an awful lot like the originals, something I've never really seen the point in. Covers ought to sound as unlike the originals as it's possible to get without not sounding like them at all. 

Also, just because there are so many and because I've decided to do this on the spur of the moment rather than work up to it over a number of weeks, I just don't have the time to sift through the thousands of faithful, respectful versions of This Charming Man and How Soon Is Now? on YouTube in search of something interesting, irreverent or original.

Luckily for me, plenty of people have done that already, so all I needed to do was leech off their hard work. At least, that gave me somewhere to start. From there, I relied on YouTube's recommend algorithm to throw up a few more that hadn't been included in every Best Smiths Covers list ever.

I've favored covers that have videos, but some of the best ones don't have any moving pictures, unfortunately, so I've had to accept a few static images as well. Also, since the game starts when the Smiths stop, I'm throwing in a few Morrissey solo numbers, god forgive me.

Enough preamble. Let's jangle!

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side - Holden

OMG! This is gorgeous! And double points for naming the band after a Salinger character then covering a Smiths' song. Talk about teenage alienation!  

Holden are a French duo. I'd never heard of them. It scares me how many great bands I've never heard of. It scares me even more how many I'll never hear at all.

How Soon Is Now? t.A.T.u

The oft-maligned, frequently misunderstood, always inspirational t.A.T.u, who I've loved ever since a blowhard I couldn't stand stormed out of a Yahoo Group I was in just because someone (Not me, sadly.) had the temerity to say they liked All The Things She Said when it first came out. Until then I didn't have any strong feelings one way or the other but I figured if he thought they were some kind of threat to the natural order, they had to be a force for good.

I really love the way Julia breaks the lines in strange places, like between "the" and "heir". It's typical of the idiosyncratic way the two of them phrase. They may not be the strongest singers but they're wonderful with a lyric. True storytellers, both of them.

This Charming Man - Stars

Here in a forceful, if louche, live rendition, opening with a heartfelt plea by frontman Torquil Campbell in which he exhorts everyone to go out and start a band withtheir friends so they'll never lose touch with each other.

I did that. Didn't work. Haven't seen any of them for decades. Just sayin', Torquil.

Girlfriend In A Coma - Mojo Nixon

I could have sworn I'd featured this one before but search says not. I seem to remember a conversation with Wilhelm about Mojo Nixon in the comments. Maybe it was at TAGN. 

I recommend watching this all the way through. The second half is the best part.

Ask - The Roberts Family

See? Not everyone's a cynic! Recorded during lockdown, apparently, although it looks like they're outside a beach hut. I hope you like the song because we're getting it again in a minute.

Let Me Kiss You - Nancy Sinatra feat. Morrissey

It's not like I was going to let this pass once I knew it existed. Nancy sounds sublime as always and the arrangement is gloriously crazy. Morrissey looks exceptionally sinister in that picture, though, doesn't he? Even by his terrifying standards, which is saying something.

Cada Dia Es Domingo (Everyday Is Like Sunday) - Mexrrissey

Again, I was almost certain I'd used this before but no. It's not even in my archive. I must just have watched it and moved on. Morrissey, of course, is famously Big In Mexico. So is Lana del Rey so I guess it balances out.

You're The One For Me, Fatty - planetbumi

I'm not sure how big Morrissey is in Indonesia these days but there's one hell of an indie scene in Jakarta that seems open to anything remotely redolent of the 'eighties and 'nineties so I guess he's doing okay. I always thought this was one of Moz's more overtly comic numbers, although it needs constantly to be stressed that almost all Morrissey lyrics are inherently amusing, usually intentionally so. 

It also can't be repeated often enough that the Smiths are actually a mosher's delight. All that angsty bedroom misery goes straight out the window once you hear these tunes played in a club. I never saw the Smiths but I did see Smiths tribute band These Charming Men once and believe me, it was exhausting! Pretty much like what you see above, really.

Just a couple more and then we'll wrap it up, I think. The longer I go on doing this, the more curious and exotic covers I'm finding. We could be here all day if I don't exert some self-discipline; something no-one ever accused Morrissey of doing.

Ask - Nina Shallman

I promised another version of Ask and here it is. Shimmering, I think, is the word. The dynamics on this are superb but where does that xylophone-style keyboard motif come from? It's not in the original, unless it's meant to be the guitar part. Sounds more like Peter Sarstedt's Frozen Orange Juice to me. 

Don't you just love the way she smiles so happily all the way through "It's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together"? And yes, there are seven bombs. I counted.

The Light 3000 - Schneider TM

There Is A light That Never Goes Out is probably a lot of people's favorite Smiths song. It's hard to replicate the initial impact of the first hearing, when it kind of rips your soul out. Even harder in a cover, which is why this glitched, bleached-out rewrite works so well. Go elsewhere, get to the same place.

This Night Has Opened My Eyes - WDRL

I was checking to see if Juice WRLD had ever covered a Smiths song, because it seemed like something he might have done (He hasn't. Didn't. Sad.) when I found this instead. Actually, that's not quite how it happened but I wish it was.

While I'm wishing, I wish I'd been the one to leave the comment on YouTube that says "This song makes me feel like I’m driving home late at night after dumping a body in a lake." Not that I've ever done anything like that...

C'mon! Now you're wondering, right?

Okay, I know I said two more but let's make it the round dozen. I mean, Morrissey would want imperial measures, I'm sure.

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others - Lilly Hates Roses

They're Polish. According to the text as translated by Google "Lilly Hates Roses, taking on the work of the British, pass well-known songs through the filter of their own sensitivity and already developed style. The result is unique arrangements in which The Smiths' music takes on an even deeper expression."

I don't know about all that but I like it.

And finally. We really couldn't do all of this without Rick Astley and Blossoms, could we? Their joyful reappropriation of the Smiths back catalog in recent times has gone a long way towards making it feel comfortable to listen to some of these songs again. I'm sure all Smiths' fans who've been having issues with Morrissey never shutting the fuck up would like to thank them.

Which song to choose, though? Oh, alright...

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now - Rick Astley and Blossoms

It always was a bit of a plodder if we're honest but it's still a crowd-pleaser anyway. Not the finest sound quality but feel that crowd reaction.

And with that we're done. Until next time.

Meet The Krewe

Last week I bought four new games so it was a racing certainty I'd end up downloading something else for free and playing that instead. This is why I so rarely pay money for anything - games, music, books, movies, tv shows - the very act of handing over the cash seems to guarantee the universe will feel duty-bound to let me know I could have had something just as good - or even better - for nothing.

In this case, the something in question turned out to be so peculiarly unlikely, I don't think there's any way I could have anticipated it. I was checking Feedly, as I do many times a day, being as addicted, in my fashion, to certain, relatively obscure forms of social media as any GenZer to their TikTok feed, when this popped up.

Artifact Krewe, available on itch.io for the extremely appealing price of no money at all, is "a Guild Wars 2 fangame, not associated with it". Wrap your head around that, if you can. It's also "a treasure hunt game taking place in a colorful world". Now you know that, you know pretty much everything the game's storefront has to tell you, other than the developer's name - Skrool.  

Skrool seems to have made just this one game. The only link on the "About" page goes to a Twitter account going by the name of "Not Really Skrool" that's been "temporarily restricted... because there has been some unusual activity from this account.

It seems that being restricted by Twitter doesn't actually stop people seeing what you've got to say; it just means anyone who wants to find out what that is has to click the equivalent of a "proceed at your own risk" warning. I clicked, so now I can tell you that Skrool "exists". And that's about all I got from Skrool's profile.

A scan of the recent timeline reveals that Skrool has been working on the game "these last years" and... er... that's about it. Diligent research on my part (I clicked on the link to Skrool's Tumblr, perhaps significantly named It's Really Skrool, although perhaps not, since there's another Tumblr just called Skrool) reveals that the game has actually taken two years to complete. 

Having had work in the Peacemaker Calendar of 1335AE, Skrool would appear to be very active in the creative side of GW2 fandom, an aspect of the game I've been aware of for a long time but rarely felt the need to pay much attention uintil now. On the evidence presented, Asurans and their culture would seem to be Skrool's main focus.

That's something I'm sure everyone reading this who's ever played GW2 must have worked out for themselves already, just from the name of the game. According to the GW2 wiki, "krewe", with that idiosyncratic spelling, refers to Asuran "work gangs or limited single task corporate entities" although the word itself has clearly been borrowed from the carnival traditions of Louisiana and nearby regions, where it refers to "a social organization that stages parades and/or balls for the Carnival season".

Whatever its provenance, Artifact Krewe is a fine divertissement. After reading about it on MassivelyOP, I immediately downloaded the game, which arrives in a neat zip file that unpacks to take up just over a gigabyte of hard drive space. For that, you get a lush, vibrant, colorful world in which to enjoy some very gentle, relaxing and curiously satisfying gameplay.

There's no character creation beyond giving your Asura a name. Pick something you don't mind seeing repeatedly because every NPC will use it as extensively while talking to you, as if they'd just come back from a weekend's residential marketing course. 

If the game has a weak point - and it's hardly even that - it would be the dialog, which often reads as though it's been written by someone for whom English is not a first language. Coming of the back of Noah's Heart, however, that feels like a churlish observation to make. Both the meaning and tone are always eminently clear, which puts the text well above many other supposedly professional games I've played lately.

Other than that, I really can't fault it. As well as looking gorgeous Artifact Krewe sounds charming and plays smoothly. I found the controls intuitive and comfortable. It was easy to work out what to do and how to do it. Movement feels fluid and expressive, although the woozy sweep of the camera could induce motion sickness in the sensitive.

The mechanics of locating and unearthing artefacts, using a device whos acronym escapes me for the moment, are simple and straightforward. Rather than cluttering up your inventory, each artifact found adds itself to a list as you look for clues to lead you to the lost laboratory of the celebrated but mysterious Vixx.

In the fairly short time I had to play I found half a dozen items, some buried in the ground, others on crops of rock only accessible by way of some light, GW2 vista style platforming. There was one that turned out to be concealed behind a locked door, openable only by rolling a large rock onto a pressure plate. The puzzles felt like fun. Nothing was difficult or annoying. 

"Fun" pretty much sums up what I've seen of the game so far. The whole experience is sun-drenched, celebratory and bright. It may be that the tasks and challenges get harder, later but somehow I doubt it. There's no combat in the game and it feels very much modeled on those whimsical, joyous, almost childlike events GW2 was known for in its earliest days. 

For someone who remembers the game as it was back then, it doesn't feel so much like a tribute as a reminder of what could have been. Right now, I'd rather play Artifact Krewe than log in to the game that inspired it.

Robots, Voodoo And The Afterlife

By the time I finish writing and editing this post, the latest Steam Next Fest will have ended. I'm beginning to wonder, as Krikket does, if it wouldn't be better just to have a "Demo" category on Steam, one that didn't come with a self-destruct button. Except... wait.. there already is one. It just never occurred to me to look!

The obvious advantage of these periodic, time-limited events over the always-on demos on the game pages is clearly the attention they draw. In this small corner of the blogosphere alone I count at least four bloggers who've posted at least one Next Fest report this time around and I can think of two or three more who've covered it in previous events. By contrast, almost nobody posts about random demos they might have tried in the fallow months between festivals.

I hereby pledge to make more of an effort to play and review demos of interesting games as and when I find them, not just when Valve fires the starting gun. It shouldn't be hard. I really enjoy demos. They're kind of like singles as compared to albums: much shorter but much punchier, the good ones, anyway. Like singles they're also a lot easier to sum up in a couple of pithy paragraphs, plus you can bundle a bunch together and make up a full post with a lot less effort than reviewing a whole damn game.

Going into this most recent Next Fest, I was somewhat unimpressed with what was on offer but either I picked exceptionally well or I was mistaken. I've now completed another three demos, leaving just one to go, and once again they're all winners.

For a while, I wasn't expecting to be anything like that positive about the first of today's batch, Life of Delta, and I still have some serious issues with the demo itself, even now I'm feeling a lot warmer towards the full game. If I was tasked with coming up with a demo that would entice people into wishlisting an adventure game, I'm not sure I'd begin by locking the player in a single room with no dialog and almost no interactions and then ask them to solve a particularly long, awkward puzzle before they could even get out of the door.

Not to overstate the difficulty but even after I became sufficiently irritated with my lack of progress to go watch a YouTube walkthrough, I still couldn't do it. In the end I gave up and went to bed and that was almost as much of the demo as I saw. Luckily, after a night's sleep I decided to give it one more try. Suddenly it was easy.

Why? Did I have a dream revelation of some kind? No. I already knew exactly what to do the night before. I'd watched someone do it on YouTube ffs. The reason I hadn't been able to solve the puzzle, which involves watching multiple icons to see which ones light up to match a pattern, when you click on a button, is that the visual difference between the lit and unlit icons was all but indistinguishable in artificial light. It was only in the morning, with sunlight streaming through the window, that I could tell which ones were "On" and which were "Off".

The reason I persevered is that Life of Delta opens with a gorgeous cut scene, good enough to make me wish it was the start of a whole movie. The in-game graphics are also excellent. The trailer shows a little of both.

Once I'd finally freed myself from the first room, everything else went about as smoothly as any other point and click adventure game. The controls are intuitive and the rest of the demo has interesting conversations, manageable puzzles and plenty to see. 

The music and background sounds are fine, too, but for once I won't be praising the voice acting; not because it's bad or because there is none but because all the robots speak in a kind of Charlie Brown-adult mumble. It's a common but very risky choice. Sometimes, as in the SteamWorld games, it's so incredibly distracting I have to mute it but here it works pretty well. I imagine it must save a bomb on paying professional voice actors, something that's only going to get more controversial in years to come - not that AIs are the only threat to employment for the game voiceover specialist...

The Life of Delta demo took just 48 minutes, well over half of which was spent in that first room. Even so, I saw more than enough to mark it "Recommended". I'm going to save myself the trouble of trying to find an unobtrusive way to say the same about the other two. I'll just get it out of the way now: they're all three "Recommended".

Second in this batch comes the game I mentioned at the end of my last post, Pitstop in Purgatory. I was slightly wary of this one, not being crazy fond of afterlife fantasies, but it very quickly won me over with a combination of characterful images, clever writing and solid voice acting.

Before I go any further there's something I ought to mention. To myself. I literally just found this out right now, when I searched for the trailer on YouTube for the post. Actually, there are several "somethings" that need to be addressed:

• 
  Pitstop in Purgatory launches on Steam in just three days.
• The full game is already available on Itch.io.
• I already own the blasted thing!

I had no idea. It's one of the myriad games (Okay, 1,182.) in this summer's Indie Bundle for Abortion Funds, which I bought back in July. Naturally, I haven't played any of them. I think I managed to scroll through about half of them before I gave up. Sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing.

If Pitstop in Purgatory is in any way representative of the quality of the games in that collection, I really need to go back and take another look. The demo is both engaging and entertaining, the afterlife theme adopting an original and surprisingly undisturbing tone despite the heavy trigger warnings (Death, illness, torture...)

The graphics, which didn't immediately appeal, quickly grew on me. They look like either pastels or chalks. The settings are as constrained as you might expect from a purgatorial scenario but the richness of the illustration offsets any serious claustrophobia. 

Mechanically, Pitstop in Purgatory plays comfortably with no noticeable glitches or hiccups, a sign of a game that's already been released. The character you play, Astrid Braid, used to be an actor but her recurring role in the drama of life has just come to an end. As she struggles to come to terms with the fact of her own demise, Astrid meets a cast of self-centered shadows, all of whom have a lot to say, none of which is of very much help.

Troubled by visitations in her sleep (Yes, there is sleep in purgatory. In your own bed, no less. Also, there's drink. Sounding quite cosy now, isn't it?) it seems Astrid may be destined for something better than everlasting limbo. Or is it something worse?

It took me 38 minutes to take Astrid as far as she could go, namely the bar and her bedroom. Whether the entire game takes place in those two locations, which would at least be thematically appropriate, or whether the nether stretches further is something I guess I can discover at my leisure, now I know I own the game. Not much point wishlisting it on Steam, either, although had I not just made my great discovery I certainly would have.

Thirdly and lastly comes Foolish Mortals. This one also has a supernatural setting and a historical one as well, although I can honestly say I didn't notice until half-way through. The action takes place in Lousiana in the 1930s but I'm so used to seeing the New Orleans cliches in TV shows and movies I took the clapboard houses and paddle-steamers to be nothing more than contemporary set-dressing. It was only when the Maitre D' at the Captain's Club started going on about Prohibition that I realised we'd stepped back in time by almost a century.

Since we're in the Louisiana swamplands, the plot necessarily revolves around voodoo. How could it not? The demo opens in something of a flurry, mid-quest with, three out of five ingredients for a voodoo summoning already in your bag, along with an empty soda bottle and one or two other things. It's taking in media res to extremes. For a moment I thought I must have missed a step but no, that's where the demo begins, although maybe not the game.

The full game is set to feature "more than 30 fully voiced characters...over 70 gorgeous hand-drawn locations..." and offer "a full-length experience, with a gameplay time equal to Monkey Island and Broken Sword." I still haven't played Monkey Island but the Broken Sword titles were an immediate point of reference for me here.

It's a long demo for a long game. It took me almost an hour and a quarter to gather the remaining ingredients and complete the spell, at which point... ah, no, I'd better keep that part to myself. The puzzles weren't over-complicated or illogical although they were adventure-game unlikely. It's very much a positive point in the game's favor that I completed most of them without referring to the extensive and elegant in-game hints, a feature I only discovered close to the end.

The voicework I would describe as solid rather than exceptional. It does have very much the light tone of the Broken Sword games, albeit without that series' signature banter between two leads. Maybe that's coming later. As for the visuals, I think "gorgeous" is more than fair for the paintings, documents and other full-screen illustrations. The locations themselves are neat and attractive but perhaps leaning more towards the functional than the decorative.

As for the plot, always a key feature in games of this nature, the demo sets things up nicely. Once again, I don't want to give too much away, but there's a development at the very end that suggests a significant change of direction from what I'd been expecting until then. I'm certainly curious to find out what happens next.

Foolish Mortals is scheduled for next year. There's a Kickstarter running. It's only just started but with 24 days still to go it's already well past the modest £12,000 target, the pot standing at £20,575 as I write. 

I won't be backing it. They definitely don't need my money to get the job done. I will be wishlisting the game on Steam, though. It's exactly the kind of thing for a long, winter's evening.

That just leaves one demo left from the seven I chose five days ago. It's called Unusual Findings and I'm pleased to say the demo's still available even though Next Fest has ended. I'll try and fit in a review somewhere. Who knows? maybe it'll be good enough to merit a whole post of its own.

Finding Our Way Home

Since I added NME.com to my feeds a few months ago it has somewhat unexpectedly become my primary source of gaming news. Back when I used to buy it at the newsagents in the early 1970s, the New Musical Express was precisely that - a print publication filled with news about music and pretty much nothing else.

By the late seventies there was a lot of politics in the mix and by the time I stopped buying it in the mid-eighties there was coverage of movies and other arts, too. One thing that definitely never got a mention was video gaming.

Now, billing itself as "The world’s defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking what’s new and what’s next since 1952", I would estimate well over fifty per cent of everything that comes down the Feedly pipe from NME Towers relates to either K-Pop or Gaming. 

Indeed, NME covers K-Pop to such an extraordinary extent that I was astonished to read this morning that Nayeon "has become the first-ever K-pop soloist to enter the Top 10 of the Billboard 200." I was under the impression all these singers and bands I'd been reading about must be global superstars. Otherwise why would I need to know?

One of my backlisted projects for the blog is to take some time to listen to a selection of the seemingly endless series of Idols NME keeps bringing to my attention so I can put together some kind of post about whatever it is they're trying to tell me or sell me. I feel it's something I ought to know more about even if I'm not sure why.

That's an adventure for another day although I don't see why we shouldn't take a moment to enjoy POP, the ineffably-titled lead single from Naeyon's groundbreaking mini-album, IM Naeyon. It's very good, although it does sound like it could have been made at just about any time in the last fifty years.

And that's all the non-inflammatory content for today. From here on in it's all trigger warnings and swearing. No judgment if you want to dip out now.

What I came here to talk about this afternoon is a little more serious. I've been wondering for the last week or so whether to post about the infamous Supreme Court revoking of Roe vs Wade. It seemed such an important event on so many levels that to ignore it seemed weird and yet an English male weighing in on such a topic, paritcularly on what is ostensibly a gaming blog, felt uncomfortable, bordering on innapropriate.

Mrs Bhagpuss and I were talking about it as we walked Beryl last night and I told her that, after a good deal of consideration, I'd decided not to post anything after all. If anyone else in this part of the blogosphere had done more than mention the situation in passing I must have missed it and, while the effects of the decision are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, the immediate cultural moment seemed like it might have passed.

And then I saw this in my NME feed. Why I should have heard about it first from this particualar source is a question worth asking but that's where I got the news and I was glad to get it from somewhere. 

This makes the third itch.io charity protest bundle I've picked up in the last couple of years. They're fantastic bargains on paper - this one claims to be worth £2500 - but in practice it's a donation pure and simple. I've only played a handful of the thousands of games and it's extremely unlikely I'll even look at the descriptions of most of them. A lot of them are PDFs for tabletop games and many duplicate or even triplicate between the bundles. I'm definitely not buying these to play them. If I do, that's a bonus.

The fundraiser is for "the National Network for Abortion Fund's Collective Power Fund, which moves money directly to abortion funds across 20+ U.S. states, with a particular focus on the South and Midwest." The target is a modest $50k.  

When I bought my bundle a few hours ago the total so far already stood at $48k and as I write it's close to $60k. There are still nearly ten days to go. I'll be interested to see what the grand total comes to.

I don't have a lot more to say about it. I still think it would be crass of me to start analysing or interpreting the circumstances and implications of the politics from three thousand miles away. I'll leave that sort of thing to those who feel comfortable doing so.

What I am happy to do is relay the words and voices of a few of those people who have felt the need to express their opposition publicly. Last weekend, when all of this kicked off, I was watching the BBC's live feed from Glastonbury, where all manner of artists, from superstars like Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamarr to indie acts like Idles and Phoebe Bridgers made a point of using their plaform to express outrage, anger, disappointment and fear.

For a few days I was pondering the idea of a post featuring clips of all of the above and more but now I'm going to settle for my two favorites, both of which not only drive the point home with effortless authority and absolute clarity but also make for fantastic listening and viewing. Also they're both sweary as all get-out, which ties right into that other post I keep threatening but never come through with. 

One, sadly, isn't on YouTube but you can watch it on iPlayer as long as the BBC keep it up, always assuming you can access it from where you live. It's Jarvis Cocker and his post-Pulp outfit, Jarv Is, with a version of their extremely NSFW number, the real name of which even I balk at typing, here rendered slightly more acceptable for mainstream broadcasting as Pricks Are Still Ruling The World.

The other is this superb performance from the wonderful Olivia Rodrigo. Her entire set was a master class in how to charm and delight a huge festival crowd, many of whom hadn't come to see you and probably weren't expecting all that much. I watched the whole thing live and loved every second of it. 

Fuck You (feat. Lily Allen) - Olivia Rodrigo

Take this as a teaser. I'll do the whole damned thing one day! And don't foget the Itch.io fundraiser is open until July 14.

Climb Higher

 

I spent an hour this afternoon playing two free games I found on Steam. I say "playing". I might be stretching a point.

The first was Cloud Climber. It's from Two Star Games and it only appeared on Steam a couple of weeks ago. Someone must have been waiting for it. It already has a "Very Positive" rating from nearly fourteen hundred reviews.

That could be because the developer's previous game, My Friend Is A Raven, has been available on Itch.io for a while, long enough to pick up some (Over-enthusiastic) reviews and a whole bunch of video walkthroughs on YouTube. 

 

I played MFIAR (as no-one is calling it) after I finished Cloud Climber. It's one of those multiple-ending games that seem to have become something of a talking point around here of late. 

It could almost be an exemplar of the genre. Its endings are so central to the design they aren't only named, they're numbered. My first playthrough took me less than ten minutes and I got the bad ending. I know it was the bad ending because... well, see for yourself.

 

It seemed quite plain to me that the idea here must be to see all the endings. When it's made as clear as that my issues with the general concept don't seem entirely relevant. Also, it was pretty obvious how to get to see the rest.

Well, two of them. I skipped through the same steps with slight variations a couple more times for those. It only took two or three minutes each time. It would have been rude not to.

I couldn't figure out the one ending I was missing, though. I thought I'd rung all the changes. There are only a very few ways to twist a tale with so few moving parts. In the end it turned out I needed to do less, not more. That fixed it. But I had to watch YouTube. I didn't figure it out on my own.

 

So that's My Friend Is A Raven. I realize I haven't actually described it in any way but why bother? It's free and it takes ten minutes to play. If you're interested, go try it. It's no life-changing experience but it's worth ten minutes of anyone's time.

More unusual and possibly more intriguing is the game that led me there, Cloud Climber. This one really does push the boundaries of what could reasonably be called a game. The description on Steam calls it "a short narrative adventure game". Well, it is short. I won't argue with that.

 

Gameplay consists of climbing ladders and opening doors. A couple of times there are keys to pick up because a couple of doors are locked, even though there seems no reason they should be. There's one interaction with a fixed object and twice you need to collect some planks and repair something but again doing so doesn't seem to serve any function whatever except to justify calling it a game.

As for narrative, there are diary pages lying around and the protagonist soliloquizes now and again in voiceover. The sum total of the storyline could be jotted down in a paragraph. A short paragraph.

 

The minimalistic approach is highly effective. It doesn't really need anything more. The whole thing isn't so much a game as a mood piece, a tone poem even. 

It takes place atop a series of wooden towers high enough to reach the clouds, which is precisely what they were built to do. Visually, it's breathtaking. Literally, I imagine, if you have any kind of a fear of heights.

I'm not sure whether it's possible to fall off the stairs or platforms. One of the diary pages does allude to the possibilty. I was very careful not to find out. It certainly feels like it could happen at any moment, though.

 

The soundscape is understated and evocative. There's a disorienting sense of isolation and loneliness. The ending (there's only the one this time... I think) comes laced with bittersweet confusion. The developer (it's just one person, Gavin Eisenbeisz) calls Cloud Climber "a really relaxing experience" and I guess it is, at that. Provided you don't think about it too hard. Or have acrophobia. Or abandonment issues.

Once again I won't go on at length. Cloud Climber took me about fifteen minutes and the screenshots pretty much tell the story. It's free, go play it.

There's a third project in the works from the same studio, something that does indeed look much more like a game. It's called My Beautiful Paper Smile and it's already available in Early Access. It's a cheery little fable about "a world where children are raised in large facilities, and taught to smile at all times. If the kids show any emotion other than happiness they are deemed imperfect, and are heavily punished". Just the kind of thing we all need right now, I'm sure you'll agree.

Might give that one a miss, at least for the time being. Not sure I'm really quite in the mood.

Getting The Itch

I really had no plans to buy the Itch.io games bundle. I'd never heard of Itch.io and I don't play indie games so why would I?

People kept writing about it, though. I clicked through a link and read about the charity it was there to support and that seemed like a good thing. I read a bunch of posts where people talked about the games they'd picked out to play and some of them sounded interesting. There were even a few I'd heard of.

Still, I wasn't intending to do anything about it. There are a lot of good causes. If I want to give five or ten dollars to support one I don't really need to fill my hard drive up with seventeen hundred video games I'll never play to do it, do I?

And then Syp posted this, in which he included the key phrase "...if you’re reading this on Monday, you still have time to take advantage of it."

Well, I was reading it on Monday, wasn't I? That felt weird. It was like he was speaking to me personally.

Of course it was Monday when he posted it, too. Syp just meant the offer was going to end that day. But I didn't think that, not at first. I thought "It's a sign!".

Okay, I didn't actually think "It's a sign!". Not in so many words. It wasn't as though I was having some kind of metaphysical, revelatory experience. It was more like when you remember a bill's due and you just have until the end of the day to do something about it before it becomes a problem.

Syp also very helpfully included a link to the offer. So I clicked on it.

Do you know how easy it is to buy things on the internet? I mean, I did. But really? Did I?

Also, buying things on the internet isn't like actually buying things, is it? It's more like clicking a button. Okay, not so much like clicking a button as... well, it's clicking a button. Which feels really different to paying for things with money. Cash money, that is.

Not that anyone pays for things with cash any more. You literally can't. I've done very little shopping these last few weeks but the few stores I've been in don't take cash at all now. If I was back at work I wouldn't be taking cash over the counter either. Cash apparently is dirty, although since all our notes are plastic now, I don't see why we can't just sanitize them before handing them over...

Anyway...

Itch.io had everything set up so all you had to do was choose how to give them money. I chose PayPal, which is somehow even less like spending money than using a credit card. They'd filled in the amount and everything. $10.00. Which is so cool. I mean, you could pay $5.00, that's the minimum, but who's going to open the  drop-down menu, de-select "10" and change it to "5"? No-one, right?

Certainly not me. So I paid my ten dollars, which of course felt absolutely nothing at all like spending money, atlhough, oddly, it did feel very much like Doing A Good Thing. All the good feels for none of the bad ones. Neat!

And that got me one thousand seven hundred and four games.  Well, mostly games. Also some utilities and other stuff. It's nearly two thousand items. There are fifty-seven pages of them on the website. I've gotten as far as page seven, although let's be honest, even then all I've really done is read the titles. Some of which are really amusing.

I've done a little more than just that. I've downloaded maybe half a dozen. And I've played one. All the way through.

I didn't mean to. I was just doing a little checking to see what the standard was like.

The game I played is called Milkmaid of the Milky Way. It was on Syp's list. It's "Award-winning", apparently. And it rhymes.

I liked it. The rhyming is... not terrible. After a while I didn't really notice it. The graphics are very effective and sometimes quite lovely. The puzzles are mostly logical, until the final showdown, when the solution is so insane I can't imagine that anyone ever figured it out.

I used a walkthrough whenever I got stuck and the whole thing took me a couple of hours. Maybe three. I wasn't counting. I got kind of wrapped up in the story, which was, frankly, nuts.

Then this afternoon, after lunch, I started browsing through the list some more and came across "Damn the Man, Save the Music!" which is "... a role-playing game for 3-4 punks...inspired by movies like Empire Records, Dazed and Confused, and a love for the ’90s.".

A table-top RPG, that is, not a video game. You get the rulebook, character sheets and a bunch of ancillary resources. I'll never play it but I've already spent the best part of an hour reading the rules. I do like a good rulebook.

So, ten dollars well spent. If anyone has any recommendations, do feel free to drop them in the comments. Seventeen hundred is a lot of games to choose from and a disturbing number of them have really interesting titles...