If You Can't Stand The Heat, Get Into In The Kitchen

At the weekend, the Meteorological Office issued the UK's first ever Red Warning for extreme heat, covering London and much of central England. Today, for the first time since records began, the recorded temperature exceeded forty degrees Celsius, which I'm sure sounds like a balmy spring day to someone reading this but is quite literally unheard of here.

Over in the west of the country, where I live, we're only under an Amber Warning. Yesterday was our really hot day. I measured the temperature in the shade in our back garden at thirty-seven Celsius or 98.6 in the old money. Ironically, today feels hotter, even though it's not. 

When I was growing up I lived with my grandparents and my grandfather was very interested in metereology. He had a barometer and also one of those dual thermometers that not only tells you what the temperature is when you look at it, like all thermometers do, but also records the highest and lowest temperatures it reached when you weren't watching.

I have a very clear memory of that thermometer telling us the temperature had hit one hundred degrees Fahrenheit one summer but of course a) memory is fiction b) who knows if the thermometer was accurate and c) was that temperature shade or sun? 

As far as c) goes, I also have a memory of the same thermometer going to the very top of its scale, which I recall being around 115F, when I put it in direct sunlight on a hot summer's day. That suggests the 100F reading probably wasn't due to being it being baked in the heat of the open sun.   

If it did ever hit 100F, though, that would have been higher than the UK record at the time so I think we can discount my childhood memory, other than to say we did sometimes have hot days in the summer back then. Now it seems we're going to get them all the time. 

But you didn't come here to read about the weather. I imagine you came here to read about mmorpgs. Luckily, the two are connected.

Like almost all British homes, the house in which Mrs Bhagpuss and I live with our dog, Beryl, is not designed for prolonged spells of hot, sunny weather. We don't have air conditioning and although it takes a fair old while for the inside of the house to heat up, once it does, it takes even longer to cool down again. That's why, as I said, it feels hotter today than it did yesterday, even though the mercury has actually fallen.

Beryl, being a wooly kind of dog, does not do well in the heat. She's been flat out in a stupor from just after breakfast until just before dusk. Mrs Bhagpuss bought her a couple of gel-filled cool mats and a dog paddling pool, all of which have been very well-used.

I generally do better in the heat than Beryl, but these last couple of days it's been so hot inside the house, particularly in my upstairs study, which, with it's south-easterly exposure, gets the full glare of the sun for much of the day, that I've had to spend considerable time either in the kitchen, ironically the coolest room in the house, or outside in the back garden, where we have an enormous, shady apple tree.

Beryl also likes, if not needs, to sleep on her cool mat in the corner of the kitchen but she's not happy being downstairs on her own, which is somewhat problematic given our normal pattern of spending almost all our time upstairs, where both computers, my study and Mrs Bhagpuss's craft room are.

That's two reasons for me to spend more time in the kitchen and the back garden than usual and since I am normally attached to my PC by a virtual umbilical cord, I've found myself making full use of my Splashtop account. I've had it for a very long time, over a decade I believe. I downloaded the free trial out of curiosity and was so impressed I paid the one-time license fee as soon as the trial ended, imagining I'd use it all the time but until now I've logged in so infrequently that a couple of years ago I got an email asking if they could delete my account since I clearly had no use for it. Luckily I had the foresight to ask them not to do that and now I'm reaping the rewards.

I have an ancient Dell XPS laptop, probably getting on for fifteen years old, which still works perfectly well, at least after I replaced the HDD, but which isn't capable of running anything much made in the last five to ten years. It is, however, perfectly comfortable running the Splashtop app, which means I can use it just as though I was sitting at my desktop.

Consequently I've been able to sit in the relatively cooler part of the house and play games through Steam, play EverQuest II, play whatever I want. There's no appreciable extra lag or latency and everything looks and plays great. I haven't yet tried playing New World via GeForce Now via Splahstop to see what happens at two degrees of separation but now I've thought of it you can bet I'm going to.

Even so, there's another problem. I may be downstairs in the cool but my desktop, which is doing all the work, is still up there in the hottest room in the house. I'm slightly concerned that I might be downstairs, happily fragging some boss, while upstairs my PC is melting.

If this hot weather's going to last  - and according to predictions it probably is, if not at quite the same intensity - it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a couple of games I could play directly through the laptop itself. Older games would probably work but I'd have to download and install them, something I'm not all that keen to do. The laptop has a single, small HDD that's currently admirably clean due to the re-install and I'd really like to keep it that way.

There's an obvious solution: browser games. If a game plays in a browser it will presumably play on any machine that the browser will support. My laptop has both Firefox and Chrome installed so that's the first hurdle cleared.

Are there any good browser mmorpgs, though? Well, yes, there are. I can immediately think of two that I've played: Villagers and Heroes and AdventureQuest 3D, although both need a client download so maybe they aren't pure browser games after all. Others I've tried in the past include Drakensang, Eldevin and of course Runescape but I don't see myself going back to any of those. 

I certainly never imagined I go back to Flyff, either. Flyff launched all the way back in 2005 and since I seem to remember participating in some kind of open beta or trial it may well have been the first free to play title I ever played. I remember having a tough time with it due to lag but generally quite enjoying it.

I do know I didn't stick around long enough to take advantage of the game's signature feature, flight. Flyff is short for Fly For Fun, it being one of the first mmorpgs to offer players a freeform flight option. I've always wished I'd gotten at least that far. 

As luck would have it, MassivelyOP posted an item this morning, retailing the news that Flyff Universe,"the browser-based relaunch of the 2005 MMORPG that arrived this past June", currently has over 800,000 players worldwide. As of a few hours ago, they can add one more to that total.

It took me a matter of moments to get into the game and start playing. I didn't even need to make an account. You can begin playing as a guest and then either trust to your cache to remind the servers who you are or, if that feels too much like high-wire walking without a net after you've gotten a few levels under your belt, convert your guest account to a registered one so you can sleep easy in your bed at night.

I converted at level three. It only took a matter of seconds. Accessibility is the major selling point for browser mmos so there's no percentage in them making it any harder than it needs to be. 

When I logged out after about an hour I was level four and still in the tutorial, albeit thankfully also out in the open world, which was positively heaving with players. I'd had a good time, albeit mostly for reasons of nostalgia. Flyff World may be a remake but it's unabashedly old school. If you want a reminder of what F2P mmorpgs used to be like fifteen years ago, look no further.

It seems unlikely I'll make much progress beyond a few screenshots and maybe a post or two but it's an option for hot days when I'd rather not run the PC. Also, I'd at least like to be able to say I know what it's like to fly in a game called Fly For Fun...

Step Off The Train: City of Steam

Just a few opening thoughts after some five hours' play:

There could hardly be a lower barrier of entry. You don't even need to register; you can just use your existing Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Windows Live account. In due course you'll be able to use Steam as well, at which point there will be a downloadable client but for now the browser version looks great and runs smoothly in both Firefox and Chrome. The occasionally flaky Unity Player has only crashed on me once so far, which is pretty impressive for the first couple of days of a very busy Open Beta.

When I say City of Steam looks great I should qualify that a little. It looks great once you overcome Mechanist Games' best attempts to make it look terrible. For some insane reason the game defaults to an isometric perspective with a fixed camera. I was about ready to go on the forums and start ranting about this crazy decision when a tool tip appeared pointing out that the little camera icon in the bottom right of the screen restores normal free camera movement. That, in my very strong opinion, should be the default, as it was in every previous stage of development. Had I not already been committed to playing City of Steam from previous experience there's a good chance I would have stopped playing it, probably for good, after about ten minutes. Isometric perspective does this game no favors whatsoever.

Not sure about these pants

Indeed, most of the default settings seem likely to put people off, so I strongly advise anyone trying it out to fiddle with the controls before even starting the tutorial. The first thing I did was put all the graphic settings to maximum, which I would imagine would be trivial for any PC used for gaming. Then I put it in Full Screen which required me to reset the screen resolution. Why can't MMOs automatically set the screen resolution to match the native desktop? They almost never do, which means that your first impression of the graphics is almost always much worse than it needs to be.

A few tweaks to overhead names and the visuals were set. The music, wonderful though it may be, is set far too loud so that got turned down. After the screams of ratlings woke Mrs Bhagpuss this morning and I got the benefit of her live impressions of what she'd heard through the wall, some other sound settings got dialed down as well. The sound effects, particularly in combat, can be rather strident.

The Tutorial, which has changed radically in every incarnation so far, has changed yet

Yes, but does it make my bum look big?

again. It no longer really feels like a tutorial at all, more like an in media res opening that never stops. It took me about two hours to get through it last night and all of that felt like normal gameplay. That works marvelously in every respect other than the basic purpose of a tutorial, namely familiarizing you with the controls. Several hours later and sitting comfortably at level 9 I couldn't say I yet have a firm grasp on more than half of the UI and only the very vaguest understanding of how stats and gear work. I got a pop-up once telling me I'd got an upgrade. Just once. What was so special about that item compared to all the other upgrades I'd already found is anyone's guess. As for systems like Crafting and Transmuting, trial and error appear to be the only tutorials on offer.

In this first phase only Humans are available. I picked the quasi-Soviet Stoigmari. The website has excellent lore on all the races but none of it is available during character creation, which ought to be rectified. Each character comes with family; a long-suffering elder sister and a naive younger brother in this case. Although amusing, clever NPC and background dialog is one of CoS's strengths, the comedy Russian-English accent of my character's brother Aleks makes little sense. Surely two brothers would be talking to each other in their own language and hence wouldn't make ethnically stereotypical grammatical solecisms? Never mind. It made me smile, that's what matters.

Once you reach Refuge, the aptly-named refugee sector of The Nexus, the previous long
section in which you find and clean your house seems to have vanished. The house is still there; you get it as soon as you arrive. You have to clean out both the clellar (which is much larger than the actual house) and the sewer beneath it before you can settle in. The debris on the floor and the empty bookcase and pantry remain but I didn't get the quests to fill them. Neither are the stores in town boarded up and requiring a quest to pull up the shutters. I'm guessing most of these quests may still exist; just further down the timeline.

And stay out!

Instead I found myself on a long main quest sequence to open the Sky Dock. I'm running around saying I'm helping the recovery effort while actually following a secret agenda of my own dictated to me by someone I don't know and can't see, who is talking to me on an ancient artifact I found. It's all very mysterious and quite relentless.

So far I'm enjoying City of Steam as much as I expected, which is a lot. As I also expected, it's a game to be taken in bites, not at a sitting. There's a good deal of freedom of action but only around a linear path and after three hours this morning I feel like I've done a day's hard labor. I do hope it won't be necessary to do the entire main quest line on every character just to unlock access to each area. I imagine it will, though.

Ah well, it's not like I haven't had to do that before.

Dinoville Calling : Dino Storm

Hands up everyone who's heard of Dino Storm. Now put your hand down if the first you heard of it was Beau's review at Massively. Yeah, me too.

Smile when you look at me, punk.

I'm always ready to try a new MMO, particularly if it doesn't need a download and registration doesn't ask for anything more than username, email and password. Dino Storm runs in a browser but there's a standalone client if you prefer. Either way, if you decide to give it a try you'll be riding your Dino and yelling yippee-ki-ay in a matter of minutes.

Doing what? Well, after a very brief and to the point session in Character Creation you'll find yourself dressed as a cowboy or cowgirl loping into the sprawling gold-rush town of Dinoville astride a lean, sharp-faced dinosaur. Doesn't look like the most comfortable of mounts but don't worry, bigger and better Dinos are coming your way. If you don't mind a little honest hard labor, that is.

Almost since I started playing MMOs I've had a habit of winding down the evening either with a potter around the low levels in an old favorite like Everquest or Vanguard or a quick run through something lighthearted or whimsical. The habit started with The Realm over a dozen years ago and since then many games have filled the role: NeoSteam, Rubies of Eventide, Ferentus, Eden Eternal, Dragon Nest, Argo...more than I can remember.

Recently when I'm done with GW2 for the night and my mouse pointer is hovering over the Neverwinter icon I've found it suddenly veering away to click instead on the Sheriff's badge with the reptilian eye set dead center. Neverwinter is fun but Dino Storm is funner.

Planning regulations? What planning regulations?

For a start it looks great. The colors are bright and cheerful without being brash or garish. The environments are simple but feel solid. The animations are smooth and fluid and the UI is intuitive and a pleasure to use.

Dinoville itself is a strange place. The dusty Old West buildings bristle with vidscreens  and where you'd expect to see hitching posts there are computer terminals. The Splitscreen Games website doesn't shed much light. Here's the FAQ entry on Dinoville in its entirety:

Dinoville may look weird but the tasks on offer there are very familiar. Kill those Smilodons, water these plants, deliver these letters. All the old favorites. The quest mechanics are excellent; slick, efficient, organized. On the left of the screen is your Game Guide which gives a very clear idea of what's on offer, who to speak to and where they are. Dailies and quest rewards appear there too. The quest dialog is short and pithy. It would probably seem bland if it wasn't for all the official dinosaur names; somehow being told to go kill ten Entelodons offers an off-kilter frisson you'd never get from plain old boars.

Morals are as lax as you might expect in a Wild West Gold Rush boom town. Okay, maybe not that lax - there's a conspicuous absence of Saloons and Dancing Girls - but in a game that's supposedly aimed at a young audience it's somewhat surprising to be asked to Roll the Bones and play the slots. Gambling's quite the thing in Dinoville. Best part is, it seems you always win.

Combat is very straightforward. Point your Laser Gun and get your Dino biting and down

You should the one that got away

things fall. Leveling is surprisingly slow. I've put in several hours and I'm only level four. Lots of goodies come your way when you level so there's plenty of incentive to crack on, not least the chance to upgrade to a bigger, better dino mount. Further in the distance lie all kinds of shenanigans. If I read the Game Guide correctly there's not only the prospect of controlling buildings and camps that can make you a fortune but there's open PvP over the ownership of said assets. Not to mention you can run for Sheriff. How that works I have not the slightest idea.

Will I ever find out? Will this be one of those MMOs I come back to in short bursts year in, year out or will I have forgotten it in a month or two? What about Splitscreen's other two MMOs, Pirate Galaxy and Steel Legions? Are they worth a look too? And more to the point, how come I never heard of them 'til now?

What else have I missed?

Going Undeground: City of Steam

A week ago, give or take, I stepped off the train into Central, the fading, failing heart of Nexus, City of Steam. I enthused about it. Gushed, even. First impressions count double but do they last?

This time they do, yes. And then some. I've played more City of Steam this week than any other MMO except EQ2 and even while I was in Norrath I had a nagging desire to be in Nexus.

Every day I logged in and played for at least an hour, often longer. What the heck is it about City of Steam? It's not even in alpha, for Pete's sake and yet there already seems more to it than most MMOs I've tried in the past year or two. Let's get some detail in here.

See? Embattled. I said it was!

Central, the aptly named capital city is a safe haven surrounded by danger above, below and on all sides. Merchants trade and the trains still run from Central Station but beneath the chipped cobbled streets lie miles of tunnels, tombs and crypts, a forgotten necropolis where a Skeleton King rules over hordes of undead. Across the bridges gangs own the suburbs while the Central Boiler that should have provided city-wide steam power sinks to rust behind sealed doors, a failed engineering project home to thieves and wild clockworks. The inevitable sewers teem with vermin, the embattled Nexan Archives ringing the Central Square stand closed and guarded. The Mythspikes, those great towers that pierce the Quarters hold onto their mysteries.

It's a  service hub surrounded by instanced dungeons, in other words.

I've spent most of my time so far in Paragon's Gate. At the entrance of each dungeon you get a helpful pop-up detailing its level and how many players would be best advised to tackle it. Paragon's Gate appears to be the entry-level instance, supposedly suited to solo at level four. For a while I thought it went on forever but on my third trip down it tapped out at sublevel seven. It goes deeper but not during this pre-alpha Sneak Peak.

My Goblin Gunner was level five when he went in and boy, did he have a hard time. First run through he died a lot, but then I only had a sketchy idea of his abilities. At least I got to learn how the death mechanic works.

The things I do for art...

If there's a penalty for dying other than some potentially serious inconvenience I didn't notice it. While you're lying on the filthy crypt floor with the clockroach that killed you skittering about on your corpse you get three options: You can revive for free outside the dungeon, you can use a Cardiotonic from your pack, which revives you on the spot or you can open the Store and buy a Cardiotonic for 500EL. That option is currently greyed-out. The cash shop isn't implemented yet.

You start with five Cardiotonics. Vendors sell them for 500 silver, which isn't chump change at low levels but isn't by any means out of reach either. At level seven I have just under 9,000 silver. Of course, if you do use a Cardiotonic you stand up right next to the thing that just killed you. Fine if you just crushed five clockroaches and jump back up to finish the sixth. Not so hot if you only killed two and four of them are still there.

Nevertheless, you don't want to be taking the free option and respawning outside because the instances are non-persistent. If you just spent an hour clearing down to level four that's another hour to get back to where you were, unless you were lucky enough to have reached a Mythdock. Mythdocks are handy teleporters that not only send you back to Central so you can empty all the Oily Cargo Manifests and Powdered Glass out of your pack but also give you a return ticket that lets you port back down the same Mythdock and carry on where you left off.

I'll be back!

Not got a Mythdock ticket on you? Never mind. Look on the bright side. Maybe you'll ding fighting back down and then you might have the edge over the Tombcrawler that killed you last time when you meet him again.

Kidding! You won't ding. Killing stuff gives very little experience. About 2xp per. Quests give 1000xp. From the forums I gather that the devs are set against grinding. The focus is on questing and story. I'd prefer it the other way round but maybe I'll come on board when there are more than a handful of quests.

Those aren't fireflies

If plowing through mobs gives next to no xp and there are no quests to speak of, what was I doing clearing seven levels of tombs over five nights last week? Having fun! Really, it's as simple as that. Paragon's Gate is atmospheric, intricate and has a great sense of place. Everywhere in City of Steam has a great sense of place. Being there is absorbing in a way I haven't experienced for quite a while and the combat itself is slick, simple and satisfying. If you like traditional MMO hotbar combat you'll be right at home like I was.

There's a skill tree that lets you spend points to improve the skills you have or add new ones, just as you'd expect. I found it clear and straightforward, intuitive and easy to understand. Just like everything in the game, come to think of it. It really is well-designed. Nothing's new but it all works and works as it ought to work. Slightly more unusual are the three stances you can toggle between on the fly. They switch you between sword-and-board defense, dual-wield slice and dice dps or two-handed big hitter. You have the weapons for all three options equipped at all times - you can see them on your character's back and at his side - and switching from one to another is instant and without penalty. Supposedly there is, or will be, a deal of tactical gameplay in this, with different mobs requiring different stances even within a single encounter. I didn't pay sufficient attention to notice if this is already in. I was too busy hitting things 'til they fell over.

It better not be Shakin' Stevens

I read a couple of comments that CoS is similar in gameplay to Diablo but I can neither or confirm or deny because I never played any of the Diablo games. I understood Diablo, Torchlight and their ilk were very fast and action-oriented, though. Combat in City of Steam is nothing like that at all. It's steady. I imagine some would call it slow. There are large parts of the dungeons where nothing aggressive lurks. You can see the mobs at a fair distance and you can pull them EQ-style to get something you think you can handle. I felt in control of the pacing throughout, except when I made an error of judgment, like opening a door I shouldn't have.

Being Boiled

Ah, doors. I like doors. Paragon's Gate has plenty. Some are locked, for which you need keys that drop occasionally. Some are hidden, sliding panels or walls that swing open at a touch. Although how you can call something "hidden" if it glows yellow when you run a mouse pointer over it ... . Maybe some kind of "Search" skill is coming. I hope so. Probably just about everything is "coming". It's really hard to remember City of Steam doesn't even claim to be in alpha yet. I swear I've played MMOs that launched with less content. I know  I've played released MMOs with less polish.

This is running on. Again. I still have a lot more to say. There will be a part three. At least.