Rag-Tag Grab-Bag. Sold As Seen. No Refunds

For once, I have several meaty posts I want to write but I can't seem to find the time to write any of them. Certainly not today. Tomorrow I don't have much planned, though, and it's forecast to rain heavily all day so maybe then...

For now, though, I think this is going to have to be a bit of an ad hoc rummage down the back of the bookmarks. Again. 

Let's start with a PSA.

Are You Experienced?

EverQuest II is.  275% experienced. From yesterday until 10.00AM PST on 19 November, all Live servers plus Varsoon and Zarrakon are getting a 275% server bonus to adventure and tradeskill xp. Anashti Sul, the Origins server, where players are supposed to enjoy the journey or something, I guess, are getting just 14%. 

This is in celebration of Darkpaw breaking $100k in donations to Extra Life this year. There's also a 45% increase in the chance of rare drops, double currency rewards and double loot drops in "current expansions". 

This is great news if you want to fill your bags with crap level a character up to 125. Before level l00, a 275% bonus on xp from mob kills and quests is huuuuuge. From 100 to 125 the xp from kills will be meaningless but as I understand it the bonus will still apply to quest xp, which is already huuuuuuge in some of the relevant expansions so presumably it will now be huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge! 

I haven't tested it personally, so don't take my word for it. Go try it for yourself. I also haven't confirmed what I've heard about the final five levels to the 130 cap, which is that in the expansions aimed at those levels, bonus xp does not apply to quests at all. That's by design, not because they've been specifically excluded.  

I have tested it on a Level 125 character in the expansion before the cap went to 130, though, and it seemed to work there. I was getting almost 10% of the level for a basic kill quest hand-in, which seemed like a lot. 

If I can find a gap in my schedule, I'll put in some time and see how far I can get a couple of characters who are sitting at 125. It would be nice to have them at 130 for the new expansion.And I might get one of my lower-levels out and blitz some dungeons just for fun. When it comes to xp, I like big buffs. I cannot lie.

The Whole of the Luna

As I suspected, Amazon's recent withdrawal from the games market has indeed put paid to Prime Gaming. I got one, presumably final, email from the Prime Gaming blog that handed everything off to the Luna website and since then... nothing. I guess it's up to Prime Members to remember to go check to see if anything new is available from now on.

If so, here's where to look. I'm not going to go through the slate for November one by one but just for completeness' sake, here are the games, the dates they become available and where you can claim them from:

Already available: 

New Tales from the Borderlands [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series [GOG Code]
Gas Station Simulator [Epic Games Store] 
Lovecraft's Untold Stories [Epic Games Store] 

From November 13: 

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition [GOG Code] 
Fallout 76 [PC via Microsoft Games Store] 
Fort Solis [GOG Code] 
Dark City: Kyiv Collector's Edition [Amazon Games App]

From November 20:

PlateUp! [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series [GOG Code]
Dream Tactics [GOG Code]

From November 26:

Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 6 Collector's Edition [Legacy Games Code]
Gunslugs [GOG Code]

I don't remember seeing the Microsoft Store come up before as a place to claim Prime giveaways. Not sure I like that development much. Also, I notice there's only one game you can play through the Amazon Games app itself. I imagine that's on the way out, too. It'll all be freebies from third-party platforms by 2026 or that's my bet.

Stranger Than Strange

There's a new trailer out for the final season of Stranger Things. It's the first five minutes of the first episode, which seems to be a thing now. Netflix did the same for Wednesday back in the summer.

I haven't watched it and I'm not sharing it. I watched the Wedneday one and posted it here, because it was really good. But I regretted it later. Watching it, mostly, although if I regretted watching it then logically I should also regret sharing it, unless I was trying to give people a degraded experience when they came to the show itself. (I wasn't, by the way...)

The problem with the Wednesday First Five Minutes Trailer (And this is a spoiler of a kind, if you haven't watched the show yet, although if you haven't gotten around to it by now I'm guessing you 're not really going to care...) is that it raises completely inappropriate expectations for the rest of the season. It makes it look as though in Season 2, Wednesday is going to be working as a kind of bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals. 

That is very much not what the rest of the season is about . The trailer is basically Wednesday's "What I Did On My Holidays" report. When I came to watch  the full first episode I was a little irritated by what felt like a bit of a bait&switch by the marketing department. It definitely fed into my mild disappointment with the first half of the season.

I have no idea if the Stranger Things trailer plays any similar tricks but I don't intend to risk it. I'm really looking forward to the show and I'm more than happy to wait until it arrives before I see any of it.

I will happily share this with everyone, though:

That's a trailer for the upcoming Stranger Things animated spin-off series, Tales From '85. The Duffer brothers said a while back that they planned on doing more with the Stranger Things IP and this is one of those things. 

It's a cartoon that's supposed to remind everyone of the kind we all watched in the '80s, which makes sense. When Stranger Things first appeared, all the publicity about it went on and on about how it was either an homage to or a recreation of the 1980s. It was one of the things that put me off watching the show until much later.

In the latter seasons that whole eighties vibe seems largely to have vanished. The action may take place in the same decade but all the focus is either on the weirdness or the military, neither of which seems particularly grounded in any time period, not on the everday small-town lives of a bunch of young kids in the decade of Madonna and MTV. Plus the kids aren't so young any more, either.

The cartoon show, which has a completely different cast of voice actors, has the opportunity to reconnect with that original, nostalgic concept. Whether it will, or whether we'll want it to, is another question. We won't have too long to wait to find out. It's coming in 2026, although exactly when it will run is still a mystery.

And Finally

Anyone remember a song called iPod Touch that I included in a music post a while back? I thought it was great. I still think it's great. It's by Ninajirachi and it's from her album I Love My Computer, which is also great. 

At the time I thought she was some obscure hyperpopper I'd been lucky to discover. If I thougt about it at all, I'd have guessed hardly anyone was listening to her. Although actually I didn't think about it at all. 

Turns out she's a much bigger deal than I knew. She just won Australian Album of the Year at the TripleJ awards. She also won Australian Music Video of the Year for Fuck My Computer, which you can find in that post I just linked so I won't link it again here. She won Australian awards as a teen, too. She's a big deal in Oz, apparently.

This will explain.

I didn't even know she was Australian. 

Tomorrow, a proper post. Maybe. Let's hope so. 

First Impressions Box Set

I've had several days to get used to my new laptop and I'm pleased to say I'm extremely happy with it. It does everything I wanted and more than I expected. I'm still in the process of setting things up exactly as I like them but all the basics are in place and I've had the chance to test how a few things work so I thought I'd do a kind of batch First Impressions post to cover what I've seen and done so far.

If you're not really interested in hearing me go on yet again about how easily impressed I am by a four-year old piece of tech that wasn't very exciting when it was new, then I recommend skipping the first few sections of the post so you can read my first impressions on a couple of games that came out several years ago and that everyone's already played. I'm nothing if not up with the times!

The Laptop Itself

The reconditioned Lenovo T480 looks brand new and functions perfectly. (Crosses fingers and touches wood. Not that I'm superstitious, which is what all superstitious people say after doing something extremely superstitious.) 

The vaunted keyboard is very responsive; firm keys and a good, solid feel. The dedicated function keys threw me for a while but that was a quick and easy fix. 

I've written a couple of blog posts on the laptop and now I'm writing this one. The only issue so far is that it takes me a little longer. If I type at my usual speed, I keep missing the smaller space bar so I have to take it a bit more slowly. It takes even longer if I have to keep going back to fill in all the missing spaces.

I can't say I'm delighted with the placement of the touchpad and the pseudo-mouse buttons. The pad is too big so I keep resting the heel of my hand on it by accident, which causes some odd results and the buttons are too close to the space bar, which ditto. As for the red button between the G and H keys that acts as a mouse if you press it, that's a gimmick I'll never use. I have an actual mouse plugged into the usb port.

Performance is excellent, as is the screen. Obviously there's no problem with all the usual stuff - web-browsing and  watching video and so on - but the T480 also works very well as a gaming machine, thanks to streaming technology. All things considered, I'm extremely pleased with it.

Windows 11

I was curious to see how Win11 differed from Win10. I'm going to have to decide whether to make the effort to upgrade later this year, when Microsoft stops support, so it's very useful to get a hands-on with the replacement well before that happens.

So far I can't see much difference. There's absolutely no learning curve to absorb as there was between, say, Windows 7 and 8. It looks the same and most of the functions are pretty similar, as far as I can see. 

The only negative I've encountered is that you have to set default apps for every single file type individually now, instead of ticking one box for all formats. That's annoying but no big deal.

The only positive that stands out is the screenshot option, which I discovered last night by accident. For all I know, this was in Windows 10 too but if so I never noticed it. Now, pressing Prt Scr brings up a tiny toolbar that lets you take screenshots and video but also allows you to select areas of the screen to save, including freeform shapes. I foresee making considerable use of that feature in future.

Other than that, nothing really feels any different. A few things seem to have been simplified or tidied up is about all. At the moment I think I prefer it and I liked Win10 so I'm happy.

Remote Gaming

Splashtop streaming from my desktop works flawlessly, apart from the spinning PoV in Wuthering Waves I mentioned last time, a problem for which I have yet to find a solution. I played a couple more sessions of Cloudpunk that way and it felt smooth as silk, even though it was being streamed and the laptop is using WiFi. If there's any additional latency as a result it's not apparent to me.

I also tried Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service last night and that was a complete success. I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly. I envisage making more use of cloud computing now I have the laptop than I found the need for previously. I'm not saying it's the future but it's darn handy.

Native Gaming

I wasn't really planning on doing a lot of gaming directly on the laptop but I figured I'd give it a try just to see how it went. I installed one of the games I bought in the Steam Winter Sale - Divinity: Original Sin - on the new 1TB drive I got to go in the enclosure I already had. I'm going to try and keep the laptop's internal drive as tidy as possible although it's probably a lost cause.

The game played perfectly. The laptop's integrated graphics can handle it easily at high resolution but so they should - the game came out a decade ago. Still, if the machine can comfortably run ten year-old games I'm well set; there must be thousands of games, new to me, that I'd enjoy from that era or earlier.

It did get noticeably hotter running that game locally, so I'd probably prefer to play games remotely whenever possible anyway. The most worrying thing is that I can now play video games in bed. I'm not sure I want to be able to do that. It's one more temptation to resist.

Amazon Luna

This was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one. I knew Prime members in participating regions, including the UK, got to play several games on Luna for free, with the selection changing every month. I had not realized until I logged in that you can also link your Luna account with your Good Old Games account to get access to a selection of GOG games, which you can then play via Luna as well. 

Those don't rotate every month and you can add plenty more from the GOG store. It's a decent selection - 279 titles, although that's misleading since many are DLC for a much smaller number of core games. Looking through the list, I think it might be all the games Prime has given away through GOG over the past couple of years.

I chose The Outer Worlds, which I got free with Amazon Prime a few months back. It played flawlessly with everything on what looked like the highest settings, which is how Luna defaults. I didn't change anything. I saw no lag whatsoever and the laptop remained cool and quiet throughout. I don't think the fan came on at all.

The addition of games claimed on Prime but registered on my GOG account is something of a game-changer (Golf clap...) for Luna. I was never going to subscribe to the service and the monthly choice bundled there directly with Prime hasn't held much  interest me so far but every month I claim two or three titles through GOG and this makes it considerably more likely I'll actually play some of them.

The Outer Worlds

So much for first impressions of the technology. How about the games? 

I played Outer Worlds for long enough to get to the first settlement. Maybe an hour. It's slick and amusing, which I was expecting and ludicrously violent, which I definitely was not. Enemies literally explode when you kill them, even when you're using a sword. I tried to pick up an item in the ground after I killed a Marauder and it turned out to be the poor guy's foot.

The game opens with a good cinematic before dumping you into character creation. I found it fairly easy to get an appearance I was happy with. There are enough options but not too many.

Once into the game itself, I was a little surprised to find there's no third-person option. Looking this up online, it seems the developer literally ran out of money before one could be added. Whether or not that's true, they haven't added one since so first-person it is. I can deal with that although it's never my preference.

I chose the default difficulty and at the tutorial level combat is easy enough. I went all-in on melee so my tactics consist of sneaking as close as possible then rushing in and swinging wildly. So far it's working but I don't imagine that will last.

There seem to be a lot of fiddly skill upgrades and there doesn't appear to be a way to respec so I imagine I'll gimp my build sooner rather than later but for now I'm just dumping points into melee and charm. I'll lie my way out of anything I can and when that doesn't work I'll cut their heads off.

I like the aesthetic, the dialog is mildly entertaining and slicing people into chunks is a bit of a novelty for me so I'll probably give it a few more sessions. Not sure I'll carry on with it for long though.

Divinity: Original Sin

I like this better than the sequel so far. It was very quick to get into. I picked the first two characters I was offered, tweaked them a little and just got on with it and things seemed to go fine. 

Graphically it looks a little less detailed than I remember D:OS2 but not that much. The dialog seems considerably less... Larien... than usual, which is an improvement. I am not a big fan of the studio's house style. 

I noticed quite a few of the reviews on Steam criticize it for being too light-hearted - "more Terry Pratchet than Terry Goodkind" one of them said. While I agree that Pratchett wannabes can be embarrassing to read, I never remotely rated Goodkind as a prose stylist so if I had to choose... And anyway, this is crisper than that comparison suggests.

The fights, as always, are fun. I did find it funny that in both this game and The Outer Worlds, even in the tutorials I was killing enemies by shooting barrels full of explosives they just happened to be standing next to, but that never gets old, does it? I look forward to throwing oil in all directions and setting it liberally on fire in pretty much every fight, which was my go-to tactic for most of the ninety hours I spent with D:OS2.

I expect to play this one quite a lot until I get really fed up with the repetition but maybe Larien will surprise me and come up with a plot I actually care about this time. We'll see.

Cloudpunk

Not going to say much more about this one other than I love it. It's really excellent. Subtle, intriguing, endearing, satisfying... all the good things you want from a game that's aiming to tell a story worth hearing.

The gameplay consists entirely of fetch quests. I mean that's literally all it is. You get given a location to collect a parcel, you fly your HOVA there, park as near as you can, walk to the location, pick up the package, walk back to your vehicle, get in, fly to the delivery point, get out, hand it over, go back to your car. Then you get in and do it again. And again. And again.

And it's fun. Every time. Each location, each pick-up, each delivery tells a story and they're fascinating stories. And while you're driving you get to talk with Control, who's having problems of his own and with Camus, your AI dog. Camus is going to get a post of his own here one day, I'm telling you now.

Add to that the atmospheric world-building by way of commercials and broadcasts and warnings and the whole city of Nivalis comes alive. I got to the part where you work out how to use the radio last night so I'm hoping for some music as I navigate between the skyscrapers and try to avoid smashing into flying trucks.

I think that's about it for now. Did I play anything else? 

Oh yes, I did a whole chapter of The Black Shores in Wuthering Waves yesterday and it was very good. I still have two more chapters to go before I can start on the latest update. Well, I could start on it right away - it's not locked - but there's a warning that it won't be as good if you haven't done all the parts that come before, so better not.

If only I could figure out how to stop the camera spinning, I'd go do another chapter now. Otherwise, I'm going to have to wait for the weather to get warmer.

Luna Landing

I had a post nearly ready to write but then I read this news item at NME and ended up wasting an hour or so fritzing around, trying to get to a place where I could post about that instead. That didn't really pay off but by then I didn't feel like I had enough time left to do the things I'd meant to do for the other post, so I was kinda stymied.

Never mind. Make the best of it, eh?

So, here's what I know. It isn't much.

Amazon has a cloud gaming service called Luna because of course it does. I mean, Amazon is probably the biggest supplier of cloud-based computing services in the world by now. Why wouldn't it have its own slice of that pie?

Not that it's been an especialy tasty pie so far. By now, I must have read more doomy reports about how cloud gaming isn't paying off the way the industry thought it would than I ever read hype pieces about how it just had to be the future of gaming to begin with. 

I'm guessing it'll end up being neither. There will be cloud gaming services and home clients and they'll all rub along just fine together but that doesn't make for much of a story. 

Personally, I find cloud services like GeForce Now useful for playing games like New World that my increasingly elderly PC balks at but only because I can do it for free. The day may come when I see subscribing to a cloud service as more financially prudent than replacing hardware but that day still looks a good way off to me.

For that reason alone, I wouldn't have considered paying for access to Amazon's Luna service but even if I'd wanted to I couldn't have - until now. It wasn't available outside the U.S. As of today, it is.

As the NME piece explains, "Luna was initially announced in 2020 but launched for US subscribers in 2021". Now, it's also available in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. 

I still wouldn't pay for it but luckily for me I don't have to: "a rotating selection of games that changes each month" is on offer to Amazon Prime customers as part of the subscription they already pay.

Not that you'd know it from the Prime website. At the moment it doesn't appear anywhere at all on my Amazon Prime home page. The only way I was able to find it was by googling "Amazon Prime Luna" and following the link from Amazon.com in the U.S., telling me the sevice isn't available in my territory but helpfully providing a working link to the correct U.K. address, which for reference is this one. 

Why they keep adding these things, incrementally, as separate sub-services beats me. Wouldn't it make more sense just to list the free Luna titles under Prime Gaming? Well, it would to me and maybe that's where it'll end up, eventually.  I'd say it was an odd decision but I'm disturbingly used to these things by now. Amazon Prime never makes anything easy. Well, except getting your stuff delivered for free. That works fine.

Once I'd found the right portal, things still didn't go smoothly. I took a quick glance at the titles in this first month's free offer, picked one and clicked on "Prime Members Play Now", only to be told my browser, Firefox, wasn't supported. 

Digging into it a little, it looks as if the only supported browsers for Windows are Microsoft Edge and Chrome. I could have used either but instead I chose to click on the Download button just to see what it would do. 

It downloaded a standalone Luna app. Figures.

That installed itself briskly and worked just fine. I picked a game - Trails From Zero - and logged in. There was a warning that Luna was "Currently experiencing high demand" but I was #2 in line and the wait time was estimated at two minutes, making me wonder what the hell low demand would look like.

Two minutes turned out to be pretty much dead on target. The game launched, I checked the controls, watched the opening cinematic and settled back to play. Then, of course, I had to try taking a screenshot.

You can't. Or I couldn't, anyway. There was no listed screenshot function in game, neither FRAPS nor Print Screen worked and a google search for "How to take screenshots in Amazon Luna" only returned replies relating to Fire tablets. 

I am pathologically incapable of playing any game where I know I can't take a screenshot. It becomes the only thing I can think about. So I stopped. Until I figure out a way to do it, I won't be using Luna.

Unless, of course, they happen to include a game I really want to play, one of these months. Then I will. If necessary I can screenshot the damn thing with my phone! Don't think I won't do it!

For now, that's about all I have to say on the matter. Consider this a PSA for any UK-based Amazon Prime customers who happen to be reading. Or German or Canadian residents, I guess. 

All of which makes me wonder if Luna has been offering monthly free titles to Prime customers in the States all along. Anyone been using it there?

As for the post I was planning for today, I guess it'll have to wait 'til tomorrow. Unless something more important turns up before then...