Thursday Grab-Bag

As we draw near to the last days (Of Blaugust! Put that bug out bag back!) I feel I don't need to hoard my ideas like a cartoon dragon trying to spread all four limbs and a tail across a heap of gold coins. With just five days to go, I think I ought to be able to come up with something for each of them without having to stretch an idea worth a couple of paragraphs into a full post.

And with that in mind, it's Grab Bag time. Three or four things that would strain anyone's patience, stretched to fill, but which might slip down easily enough in small bites. Hmm. Not sure that even qualifies as a mixed metaphor. Oh well. On we go. Keep moving, hope no-one notices...

Ananta launches on 15 January 2027.  

The gaming feeds have been busy this week with announcements and reveals from Gamescom 26. I can't fathom these things. I skim the news and maybe one item in twenty vaguely piques my interest. It's a whole lot of information I don't need about games I'll never play.

Occasionally, though, a bright, shining sliver of joy bursts free from the grey clump and this time it's an actual release date! Glory be!

The game in question, top of my list, pingingest on my radar, most anticipated, wanted, desired and devoutly to be wished for, is, of course, Ananta. I want it so much I can even remember what it's called without having to look it up. Pays to have a short, easy-to-remember title. 

Ananta, in case you haven't been paying attention, is "the anime GTA". Obviously, that's not what developer Naked Rain or publisher NetEase is calling it but everyone else is. Although not me because I've never played GTA. I'm calling it NTE on steroids.

Okay, no I'm not but you get the idea. You can judge for yourself how accurate any of those comparisons might be from the latest promo video. It's a good one. 

The game has a slightly strange premise. As the central character, known only as Captain, you have to find your missing father and rebuild the failing peace agency you work for and you have to do it by... becoming an internet influencer. 

I'll hand that off for now. Don't want to thnk about it. 

More cogently, the game features not one but two huge metropolises, Nova City and Chongxiao, the latter supposedly "a fully explorable sandbox featuring recreational destinations including gyms, restaurants, mahjong parlors, cat and maid cafes, clothing stores, hot springs, and more." 

I'm guessing both cities are "fully explorable" but maybe Nova City is where the plot happens and Chonxiao is more of a simulation? Speculate away because in just four months all will be revealed. 

That's perfect timing for me. Who does anything in January? Plus I'll be retired then. I can play all day!

I Wish I'd Spent More Time Playing Video Games

I've often fancied having that on my tombstone. Or as my Famous Last Words. Which brings me to a somewhat embarrassing confession. I'm about to out myself as a gamer who doesn't actually play any games.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration but only a very slight one. I had cause to look at my GeForce Now account page for the first time yesterday and I happened to notice there's a section where you can see your "Playtime History". Out of curiosity, I took a glance at it. Then I did one of those cartoon double-takes. Then I really took a look at it.

Oh boy. 

 

I'm not and never have been one of those gamers who keeps meticulous track of how much they play, which game and for how long. I don't keep spreadsheets or run any of those apps that track your gaming time for you. I don't care, frankly. Why would I?

Since I started playing most of my games through Steam, of course, I've had some of that information to hand, since Steam records it whether you want it or not. I sometimes sort my library by "Hours Played". I also often glance at the timer at the end of a session to see how long it took, something I also do occasionally, but less frequently, on GeForce Now because there it requires an extra button-press.

That's for specifics and it can be quite interesting. For a more general idea of how much I've been playing in any given week or month, though, I've never felt the need to refer to any kind of statistical record. I've always, instinctively and without trying, been able to say roughly how many hours I've spent gaming over any given period. 

Or so I thought. Apparently not any more. In the last month or so, I've pretty much only played games on GeForce Now, so what's recorded there is almost a full tally of my hours played. I did play one session of Stars Reach directly on Steam before Playable Worlds added it to GFN, so that was about another hour and I think maybe I logged into EverQuest II once, for no more than half an hour at most. 

 

Excluding that possible extra 90 minutes, my entire total time spent playing video games between August 8 and August 27 - just under three weeks - comes to six hours and forty-one minutes. Add it in and you get a grand total of just over eight hours at most. That means I've played, on average, less than thirty minutes a day for most of this month. Many of the sessions are less than half an hour and there are multiple days when I didn't log in at all.

If you'd asked me, I'd have said I was playing at least twice that. Maybe more like three times. I wouldn't have been lying. I'd just have been very wrong.

In the measured period, I've played just one session that lasted over an hour. That was on August 21, when the new update landed in Neverness To Everness. Outside the time-frame, I also played a couple sessions of similar length in Wuthering Waves, which I know because I mentioned it in a post on August 9, when I wrote that the content I'd just completed " took me several hours to finish". 

Adding that in, I'd estimate I've probably played maybe as much as sixteen hours in the calendar month, which still comes to not much more than half an hour a day. I mean, I knew I wasn't playing as much as I used to but I hadn't realised I'd turned into a half-hour-a-day gamer!

Something will have to be done!

Where Does The Time Go?

That brings up the inevitable question of what have I been spending my time doing? It's an easy one to answer. I estimate that, during August, I've spent at least three hours every day writing a blog post and at least an hour, probably more like two, reading and commenting on other people's posts. Blaugust probably accounts for five hours of every day.  

Every day. Are we in Lessons Learned week yet? Because if so, the lesson I've learned is that that's too much.

I've also spent at least two hours every evening making songs on Suno. There will be a post about that but out of politeness to some delicate sensibilities, I'm saving it for after Blaugust ends. 

Beryl accounts for about two to three hours a day, walking and playing. Computer problems, legal and financial stuff and household chores probably take up another two or three. That's already about a dozen hours a day. Add in meals and sleep and general, unspecified stuff and it's amazing I've been able to fit any gaming in at all! And that's on the five days a week I don't have to go to work.

The end of Blaugust, wetter, colder weather, less daylight, the conclusion of the wrapping up of my mother's estate and my full retirement should all lead to much more time being available for gaming in the autumn and winter. Maybe I can even get up to the couple of hours a day I thought it already was!

I swear, I played literally five times as much when I had a full-time job. Time is so weird.

Walks Like A Duck

I mentioned computer problems in the last section. I'm pleased to say I have now resolved at least one of those. With ChatGPT's help, I managed to find and recover the missing product key to activate the new installation of Windows so I don't have to look at that irritating ghostly reminder message any more. 

It was a strange conclusion to the whole affair. I bought an enclosure for the suspect M2 drive and ChatGPT talked me through several means of interrogating it to try and figure out if the errant key was lurking somewhere in the data. As we were trying various things, I just happened to notice a document file titled "Windows Key".   

After all the endless searching through registries and running commands it turned out the damn thing was sitting there in a named file in the root directory. I didn't put it there. I can only assume it was already there when I got the machine because it was dated two weeks before I bought it!

You might well think the person I spoke to at the helpdesk of the company that supplied the PC might have known that. It would have saved me one hell of a lot of time and effort. Instead, they gave me two random keys that didn't work and then washed their hands of it. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

In the end, I can't even say I needed ChatGPT's help, incredibly thorough, detailed and accurate though it was. I could just have bought the enclosure, found the drive was readable, seen the file, opened it, tried the key and it would have worked. 

Nevertheless, I did find working with ChatGPT to be thoroughly satisfactory and indeed enjoyable process. Certainly a superior experience to most I've had, working with humans in similar situations. Not only was the AI patient and calm, it was constantly reassuring and on several occasions objectively empathic. This is not projection. It's self-evident in the logs.

Again, I'm most likely going to do a full post about this when Blaugust is out of the way but I'm of the opinion that it doesn't necessarily matter if software is sentient, provided it gives the impression of sentience. I know full well no extant AI has either autonomy or self-awareness but I'm a lot less convinced that's as relevant as we think it is. Consciousness is overrated.

Goodbye, Dolly 

And finally, in honor of the passing of a legend, we'd best have something by Dolly. Everyone knew her, even those who'd never listened to a country song in their lives. And it seems everyone loved her. Not many stars of any stripe can claim such universal affection. 

Given the length of her career and the extent of her fame, I find it slightly shaming I only know that same half dozen of her hits everyone knows. I can't say I've ever even heard anything else but then I certainly never went looking. 

Here she is, duetting with Porter Wagoner in the early 'seventies. As they say every day on Radio 4 Extra, it contains attitudes of the time so be warned. 

They were a professional duo for a decade and the break-up was difficult. When she wanted to quit, she wrote "I Will Always Love You" to "express what I feel and have him understand" and she sang it to him when she went to tell him she wanted out. How about that for a letter of resignation?

And she wrote Jolene the same day.  Geez. Save something for the rest of us, Dolly!

Dress Sense Or Dress Sensibly?

There's not much I don't like about gacha games. I like the way they look, the way they read, the way they sound and the way they play. I would never have expected it but it turns out the genre fits me to a T.

The monetization that gets some people mad doesn't bother me. In fact, since the Free To Play revolution, which suppose must be well over a decade in the past by now, which did, genuinely and literally, make most games completely free as far as I was concerned, about the only kind of monetization that gives me pause is the good old monthly subscription model. 

If EverQuest Legends had launched as Buy To Play, with no sub needed to go on playing after the first month, you'd most likely be reading a post like Tipa's about that game right now (I'd definitely be playing a Kerran.) instead of looking at some screenshots of Flora in her new 1970s-style trouser-suit. That isn't to say I won't buy EQL eventually but it is the reason I haven't bought it yet and it will almost certainly be the reason I don't play it for more than a month.

There is one thing I don't like about Gacha games, though. I've mentioned it before. It's the way my  characters tend to look the same all the time. It varies from gacha game to gacha game but it may not be a coincidence that the ones that put the least friction in the way of changing your apperarance are the ones that fold soonest.

Neverness To Everness is fairly standard in that you can roll for outfits on the gacha board, buy them for in-game currency and win them as rewards for in-game activities but none of those options is both easy and cheap. I've been playing for three months now and only yesterday did I finally get Flora a change of clothes. And even then it was only by way of the alternate NTE universe that is Warrens Continent.

The 999 Nights update that added an entire medieval fantasy ARPG to the magitech modern world was bizarre in all kinds of ways but not least in how it blew a giant, smoking hole in the gacha dress code. In Warrens Continent, characters have a traditional RPG paper doll with gear slots and whatever you put in most of those slots shows up on the character. Mobs drop wearable gear and there are plenty of different looks. 

You can take a pretty good shot at getting your character to look how you want them to... for a while. Then, of course, you have to start paying attention to stats and the whole thing falls apart, just like in a  traditional MMORPG, which is how things like transmog and appearance tabs end up being added to every MMO that lasts more than a few years.

Luckily, whoever designed the gear for Warrens Continent had an infinitely better fashion sense than the average MMO dev, so most of the pieces look pretty good together. And there are sets that have bonuses that make you want to wear all the pieces and naturally sets fit together quite nicely so it all works out.

I very much appreciated all of that, while I was playing Warrens Continent as if it was the main game. I was a bit miffed when I had to upgrade Flora's excellent starting look, probably the most demure and modest outfit in the entire game, to something that looked like it wouldn't be out of place in a Slayyyter video but stats are stats.

The best thing about that original outfit was that you can wear it in Hethereau. I was looking forward to doing just that for a while but then, almost inevitably, I stayed so long in Warrens Continent and changed my gear so many times I forgot all about it. It didn't help that the outfit, appropriately called "Unassuming Warrior", is only available through the "Button Shop" and I had no clue where that was.

I did look for it. My immediate thought was that it would be the Mysterious Fuzzy trader but that was a dead end. I looked at every trader I could find and pored over the map but I couldn't see any sign of a "Button Shop". And then I just sort of forgot about it. Don't ask me why I didn't google it but I didn't.

And then on Wednesday I mentioned the Button Shop in a post and Mailvaltar dropped into the comments to explain where to find it: in the F4 Event Menu.

It is. And I never noticed. I will say in my defense that a) I very rarely look at the Events Menu and b) the Button Shop Button isn't actually part of the menu itself. It's on its own at the bottom of the page. Even so, there's no excuse for missing it.

The upside of having waited so long is that when I finally found the shop I had plenty of Buttons to spend. Over ten thousand, in fact. More than enough to buy me both the outfit and the dyes to change the color. So I bought them all, which may have been a mistake.

Oh, not the outfit itself. The outfit is excellent. Flora's wearing it now and it makes a very nice change from running around in Lycra bicycle shorts under a netball skirt. It's the dyes I'm not so sure about.

They come in a pack of three - red, green and blue. At least I think those are the colors. It's hard to tell. They're very muted, particularly the green. Or maybe I mean unassuming. None of them is bad in any way, it's more that I'm not convinced any of them is an improvement over the basic silver and black look, which has a timeless kind of elegance about it.

Still, it's nice to have some wardrobe choices at last. If only the outfits weren't character-specific. Then all my characters could be unassuming, which would come as a huge shock to several of them, I'm sure. Not to mention they'd all be able to wear the Archmage outfit I won on the gacha board a couple of days back. That won't see use until and unless I win Iroi, too.

All the poses in the post, except the one below, were taken on the roof of Mint's building, which turned out to be the perfect place for a fashion shoot. I was there because visiting the Button Shop reminded me I hadn't finished everything I wanted to do in Warrens Continent yet. 

It's funny how a couple of weeks ago we (That's just me, Nimgimli and Mailvaltar really, I guess.) were complaining, or at least observing, that it looked as though we'd be doing nothing but the 999 Nights content for weeks and now here I am, having almost forgotten it was there, back running around Hethereau every day as if the update had never happened.

But it did and I'm back with it now. Not only do I want to finish the event itself but now I've seen inside the Button Shop there are a few more things I want to buy there. Not least the money.

Yes, you can buy money with buttons. Fons, specifically. If I can get enough buttons I might even be able to buy enough Fons to cover my losses at the Catzebo. They are substantial.

Also, I just realized this minute, as I typed the word "Catzebo" for the umpteenth time, that it has to be a pun on "Casino"; not, as I've been thinking until now, on "Gazebo". I really did think it was a joke about the cats all standing around in little, wooden huts...

And with that, I think I'd better make my exit. Fast.