Games Without A Frontier

Not Sure How This Intro Will Go

I have a set of notes, and a couple of thoughts to propel things along, so we'll see how far down the rabbit-hole we get, hmmmm?

     Firstly, no, this Intro does not concern Peter Gabriel's unlikely hit "Games Without Frontiers".  If you'd told me that an ex-prog rocker from the Seventies was going to have a Top Ten hit in the UK I'd have booked you in for a thorough perusal of your synapses.  Art!

     I don't want the Facebook twod mods on by bottom about this, so that is a still from the television series "Jeux Sans Frontieres", which is the French (or Walloon) for "Games Without Frontiers".  It was an unbelievably daft European event involving teams from the EU countries, competing in various wildly impractical challenges, frequently wearing giant foam-rubber suits.  Art!

The ultimate accolade - a board-game

     Phil, one of the people I occasionally wargame with, put up a post on Facebook about playing the board-game "Tales From The Loop", which I'd never heard of.  This is not surprising as there are many things I've not heard of.  Art!

     This is a role-playing game based on an art book by Simon Stalenhag, depicting an alternative-history Sweden or South Canada, where a party of Kids go exploring their very unusual neighbourhood.  It also spawned a single-season television series called - you may be ahead of me here - "Tales From The Loop", following a premise similar to that of "Eureka" or "Eerie, Indiana".  Potentially set in two entirely separate nations - surely a game without a frontier?

     ANYWAY all this is preamble, because the game I intended to talk about all along is another computer game, following in the dread footsteps of "Concord".  I present to you - "Star Wars Outlaws" published by Ubisoft.  Art!

     Unlike TFTL Your Humble Scribe was vaguely aware that this game existed, having caught adverts for it out of the corner of my eye.  

     It has not been doing well, at all.  Initially sales were projected to be on the order of 8 million units, which was hastily revised downwards when it sold poorly, to 5 million units.  This proved catastrophic for Ubisoft's share price, which has dropped by 7% - keeping down with Trump Management & Technology Group - since it's release.  Art!

     It's no coincidence that the stock started to tank on the game's release date.  This, it seems, is par for the course with Ubisoft, as they have lost 80% of their share value over the past 5 years.  Art!

     That's not very good.  In fact it's abysmal - a loss of €60 per unit down to €12 over 5 years.

     This performance makes you wonder about Ubisoft's products; if they're not good enough to sustain, let alone improve, their share value, then perhaps they're doing something wrong?  Such a debacle seems to have propelled fearful investors to interrupt, with a Slovakian company, A J Investments, proposing that the CEO of Ubisoft be replaced, or even that the company goes private.  To go public about going from public to private is quite extreme, let me add.  Art!

Yes, run!  A moving target is harder to hit!

     Here Conrad has to rely on others opinions, because there's no way I'm paying £70, £105 or £120 for it - you get more bits and slightly earlier access if you pay more - in order to conduct research.  There seems to be the usual disparity between industry critics as opposed to the people who actually go out and pay good book tokens for this dubious product.  One critic awarded it 7/10 despite calling it a 'bucket of bolts'.  Players, meanwhile, have criticised the characters, the game mechanics and poor graphics, none of which word of mouth has stopped STO from becoming STOP.

     Here another metric: it debuted in the 'Playstation Top 40' - yet another thing I never knew existed - at number 25, which is apparently the level you'd expect and independent game to start at.  A week later is dropped to 28th, which is still better than "Concord" at 29th.

     Ooopsie.

     By contrast, a game called "Astro Bot" - yet another thing I never knew existed - debuted at Number 10. So far sales of STO have been less than half of it's predecessor "Star Wars Jedi Survivor".

     Try as I might, Conrad cannot find a dollar or Euro total for how much Ubisoft spent developing this game.  Art!

The cheaper option?

"A Grue Of Ice"

This is one of the benefits of having a mind like a skip full of fermenting flotsam, strange items are always bobbing their way to the surface.

     This is the title of a paperback novel I recall seeing many decades ago.  Art!

     Not the best resolution but I think that's a Chris Foss artwork on the paperback that I recall seeing looooong ago.  It concerns the quest to find Thompson Island, which is somewhere between South Africa and the Antarctic, an island that has been seen only twice ever.  Does it even exist, one wonders?  This novel came out in 1962 and thanks to Google Maps and satellites, you couldn't write it now.

     'Grue', in case you were wondering and even if you weren't, apparently means either thin floating ice, or to shudder, so Mister Jenkins is probably going for the latter one here.

"The War Illustrated Edition 194 November 1944"

I didn't put this item up lastly thanks to having enough about matters internecine already.  Let us now prod Art awake with this handy electrified pitchfork and move on.

     This is one of the classic examples of thinking beyond the borders of the box.  Prefatory to the D-Day invasion, the Teutons were convinced that the Allies would need to capture a port, in order to be able to sustain their enormous motorised and mechanised armies ashore.  The Allies came to this conclusion, too, except rather than capturing a port, they set about making a pre-fabricated one that could be floated across to Normandy and assembled there.

     Above you see a couple of shots of 'Mulberry' harbour components being towed out into the Channel and then emplaced.  These would be towed to position and then sunk to form breakwaters and harbours for the naval side of the operation, as you see in the fully-formed breakwater made up of caissons at bottom.

Our Sojourney With Bernie

If that ever becomes a proper word then I want royalties.  We are on another instalment of Mr. Wrightson's work for FPG trading cards way back in 1993, under the aegis of "Master Of The Macabre", a soubriquet he thoroughly deserved.  Art!

     I think the title ought to be in the plural.  Calling these monsters 'worms' is dodging the issue, they look more like tapeanacondas.  Matey ought to have kept his will up to date.  Conrad, because his mind works that way, wonders what gigantic beast these nauseous parasites escaped from - a dinosaur?

Hmmmm Interesting

As you may be dimly aware, various political bigwigs from Perfidious Albion and South Canada arrived in Ukraine earlier this week, potentially to negotiate how far inside Modern-day Mordor various items of long-range ordnance are permitted to go.

     'Just do it anyway!' has been a siren song from people more interested in a short-term bang than a long-term barrage.  If the Ukes resorted to this the weapons spigot would get turned off instanter.

     ANYWAY here's a photograph of Mister Blinky arriving in Kyiv.  Art!

     Who's that crop-headed bruiser in the background?  Art!

     Zaluzhny, that's who, the Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK.  What's he doing back in his homeland we wonder, wearing a dirty great grin?  If Budanov, head of the Ukranian GRU, also turns up with the world's most imperceptible grin, I think various high-ranking orcs will start to sweat.