Killed in a smiling accident.

The producers of Hat News Now Today would Now like to apologise Today, Now, for the lack, Today, of Hat News, Now, Today. Unfortunately the crack team of hat news hunters have been unable to find any new hats.

Well… that’s not strictly true. There’ve been new hats by the bucketload. Barely a slaughter of 20 EnemyGroup EnemyTypes goes by without a new hat or three to add to the collection, and no two hats are the same, oh no, they vary in level, vary in armour type, and, most of all, vary in prefix. There are Sacrosanct hats that give Unholy damage invulnerability and Merciful and Mocking hats that reduce or increase threat respectively (if you wear both at the same time you get an Ambivalent hat, leaving mobs uncertain of exactly how they feel about you) and Invigorating hats that increase your stamina and Exsanguinating hats that tap enemy health and Interventionist hats that make you more likely to interfere with the peaceful business of NPC society and Euphemistic hats that are a bit rude if you look at them a certain way and Paraphrastic hats that re-word your dialogue options (I may have made one or two of them up. But not many!)

Visually, though… I have a suspicion that some Enchanting Corporation ordered a huge container-ship loaded down with identical mass-produced hats, then stuck ‘em on a conveyor belt going past drunk magician with a thesaurus. “Sacrosanct! Pow! Salubrious! Zap! Turn you into a pig! Newt! Pig! Newt! Pig! Louder pig louder pig louder pig mute pig!” So a level 21 Iron-mail Helm is identical to a level 34 Invigorating Iron-mail Helm which is remarkably similar to a level 37 Mocking Bronze-Studded Helm which is identical to a level 48 Bronze-Studded Helm. Once you’ve seen one heavy armour helmet you have, quite literally, seen them all (apart from a few level 30 Vanir and Nemedian bits covered last time out on Hat News Now).

There is a bit of Hat News Hope, as some higher level players do appear to be sporting slightly more interesting headgear, so maybe somewhere in the distant corners of the world there’s a rogue hat maker creating wild and crazy headgear for those brave enough to seek him out… or there’s a 10% chance of a rare helmet drop from some boss at the end of a hellish instance. Find out soon, in Hat News Sometime In The Future, Maybe.

In the month since my last update, I’ve lost about half a stone, so the Wii Fit regime is definitely working. Though technically, it’s not really the Wii Fit regime; I use the Body Test facility to keep track of weight, and run through its muscle workouts now and again (though I could probably figure out how to do sit ups and press ups without the plastic board, if I tried really hard), but I suspect most of the weight loss has come from dieting (drinking lots of water instead of sugary carbonated beverages, eating more fresh fruit and all that) and putting in more time on the exercise bike (while listening to the radio).

So is Wii Fit a waste of money? Rationally, yes, as per the previous update you could get a similar benefit from a workout DVD, set of scales and a notepad (and maybe some graph paper and coloured pencils), and even then I suspect all that is secondary compared to eating less/more healthily (I wasn’t particularly unfit previously, just carrying a bit of extra weight). But… despite, on several occasions over the past five years, making a bit of an effort to lose weight, it’s only since getting Wii Fit that I’ve managed to stick at it, so I’m not sure it can be entirely discounted from the equation, even if just as a psychological spur to stick at the diet to keep losing weight to prove it wasn’t a waste of money.

Anyway, even if the Wii Fit disc starts to gather dust, the balance board can be used for a bunch of other stuff…

In the four years since City of Heroes launched, nobody’s managed to rival its utterly magnificent character customisation. Just the other day I got a second costume slot for my Arachnos Soldier, popped along to the Facemaker to quickly sort out a new costume, and nine and a half hours later emerged blinking into dawn’s early light having deliberated for quite some time over whether the goatee really worked with the skull mask or not. Most recently Age of Conan has a fairly promising array of sliders and options at character creation which let you do a pretty decent job when zoomed in peering closely at yourself in a skimpy pair of shorts, but make approximately bugger all difference once you’re standing next to twenty other people wearing generic chainmail with a tin bowl on your head.

APB, though. Oh my, APB. I just saw the APB character generator on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If that’s really what we get to play with, frankly I don’t care about the rest of the game. I don’t care if there *is* a rest of the game, the camera could just pan around the newly created character for the rest of time to the sound of Massive Attack and I’d still buy it.

Badadadadada dum dum dum dadada daa daaa dum dum daaaaaaaaa! Welcome back to Hat News Now Today, Today’s source Now of Hat News, Now, Today.

After a slightly disappointing hat collection amassed in Tortage, your Hat News correspondent performed some heroic and world changing act of some kind involving a volcano or something (no particularly exciting hats were involved, so it wasn’t worth recording in detail) and moved on to explore some of the rest of Hyboria.

The bad news is, bowls on the head with nosepieces are still very in. Leather, hide, iron, steel, copper, strontium, they all rather blur into each other after a while, and the photographer dozed off before being able to catch all the nuances of the leather helm with iron banding versus the iron helm with leather bindings.

On the plus side, new sets of enemies bring new opportunities for mass killing sprees in the search of a new hat! If you’re looking for something a bit cold, a bit Viking, something that would let you get a bit part in an advert for Skol lager, then you’ll want to hunt down the Vanir, and maybe steal one of these helmets.

If, on the other hand, you’re after something a bit more classical, something that says “yes, I could take you on in a fight, but afterwards I could also find the length of the longest side of a right angle triangle and write an epic poem about it”, then perhaps one of these, wrenched from a Nemedian, is more your scene.

Or finally, there’s always one group you can rely on to take the approach of “working metal is a bit tricky, I know, lets just grab the nearest animal and stick it on our heads!” Yes, it’s those crazy Picts again.

So there we have it; something of an improvement, but still not exactly a vast and thrilling range of headgear options. Rest assured, though, your Hat News Now Today team will work tirelessly to perform their mission: to explore strange new hats, to seek out new headgear and new headwear, to boldly place bits of animal on their head that no man has placed before (and for very good reason in most cases). B-bye!

Just to prove my own point I fired up Audiosurf for a quick five minutes last night, and wound up playing through most of the Solaris soundtrack, which produced some amazing looping tracks. Oh, and then the Ying Tong Song.

While on a music game kick, there’s been a whole bunch o’ plastic instrument type news in the last few weeks. Still no sign of a UK release date for the Wii version of Rock Band; I’ll keep an eye on reviews when it’s out in the US in a few weeks, see how it measures up to the other consoles, but I suspect I’ll give it a miss thanks to a slew of rivals out there. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is out at the end of June, so I’ve stuck an order in for that to get an immediate fix of plastic guitaring. I don’t know much Aerosmith past their singles, but the song list looks like there’ll be enough to keep me going for a while at least. If nothing else it means I shouldn’t be so tempted to do something rash like get the Nintendo DS release, Guitar Hero: On Tour, though watching the promo video had already altered my interest level from “hmm, possibly intriguing” to “FLEE! FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The biggest news, though, is Guitar Hero IV, or Guitar Hero: Roman Numerals Are So Passée And Colons Are In So It’s Not Guitar Hero IV But “Guitar Hero: World Tour” Just To Sound A Lot Like “Guitar Hero: On Tour” So You Can Get Them Confused A Lot, to give its full title. World Tour, perhaps inevitably, brings drums and vocals to the Guitar Hero series, as well as a few other new features like the ability to create custom songs. With the Wii version of Rock Band being somewhat cut-down compared to the PS3 and 360 versions, notably lacking Downloadable Content, it remains to be seen how many World Tour features will make it to the Nintendo system, but there are encouraging noises about downloadable functionality for the Wii. Scheduled for an October release in the US, with a bit of luck we might see it in the UK before the end of the year if the Guitar Hero III release dates were anything to go by, though if Rock Band is any precedent then the mid-23rd century may be more likely. In the past couple of days, word is also emerging of Guitar Hero: Metallica for early 2009.

Not content with the possibility of a mere two plastic drum kits cluttering up your living room, Konami have announced Rock Revolution, though I haven’t seen much about that apart from the drum set. There are murmurings of Rock Band 2 for this Autumn as well, so October/November may see a Plastic Instrument Battle Royale on a scale not seen since the Bakelite Beatles vs Rolling Polyethylene Terephthalate Stones duels of the 60s.

Based on the current situation, it seems unlikely that many, if any, of the instruments will be compatible between games, which is a shame. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said “to have one plastic guitar cluttering up the living room may be tolerated by an understanding wife, to have three plastic guitars, a bass or two, three drum sets and an assortment of USB mics is probably pushing it a bit”. We’ll have to see how UK pricing and release dates pan out, but it’s looking like interesting times in the world of pushing buttons and pretending to be a rock god.

When not playing Age of Conan, I keep going back to Audiosurf. In a strange coincidence (that isn’t strange, and in no way a coincidence), I’ve also been getting back into music generally. Sometimes I can go through periods where I’ll pick up the iPod, select shuffle, and go through about 50 tracks hitting “next” every couple of seconds before giving up entirely. Other times, like recently, I’ll quite happy listen to just about everything that gets randomly thrown up, so either my iPod has a cunning Evil Shuffle mode, that periodically just picks songs I don’t like, or I just go through phases. The second option seems more likely, as exactly the same songs crop up both times.

Anyway! I’d been mostly sticking to the Mono modes, but they only work really well on some songs. Too slow, and there just aren’t enough coloured bricks to keep life interesting, too fast (especially on Mono Pro/Elite), and the focus is more on dodging grey bricks than hitting colours. One of the tweaks in the recent update was that the Vegas vehicle got an extra ability, generating random power-ups, which seems to make quite a difference, and I can quite happily kill a couple of hours going “oh… just one more song, then”.

I’ve never really seen the fuss about “nerfs”. I’m sure there are some examples of game adjustments that resulted in previously perfectly balanced, non-overpowered characters becoming much less viable, but the vast majority of “nerfs” I’ve seen forums explode over have fallen into one of two categories.

Firstly there are the tweaks made almost constantly in most MMOGs; balancing adjustments, fixing of minor bugs, generally making things work As Intended. Half the time you’d be pushed to notice the difference in play if you hadn’t been told a rounding error in the code had been corrected, resulting in your Pokey Sword Death attack doing 22.40 points of damage instead of 22.50. Not that this stops someone on the forums producing an incredibly detailed spreadsheet conclusively demonstrating that this utterly ruins the viability of the class, will stop them ever being invited to groups, and note Graph C in subsection 4.1.2 with a significant increase on the “Slap In The Face” axis following the change. Even better, if multiple attributes of a power are adjusted (say the Pokey Sword Circle AoE attack is slightly increased in damage, but affects a slightly smaller area), not only will there be spreadsheets proclaiming The End Of The Class As We Know It, but rival spreadsheets will clearly demonstrate this is a ludicrous, unjustified buff that will result in raids consisting of nothing but that class. It’s just a bit extra noise, though, in the eternal chorus of “Class X is broken”, “Class X is overpowered”, “Class X is riddocqueuelessss”.

Then there’s fixing of big mistakes. These are much less common, but tend to result in really major explosions, even by usual MMOG forum labour-pain numbing standards. Maybe a decimal point error resulted in the Armour of Anti-Poking ability of the Barbassassin class granting 95% damage reduction instead of 9.5%. It gets fixed. Some poor Barbassassins who never knew any different are a bit surprised when they keep dying, but adjust after a while, as the rest of the class abilities are still fine. Some players who knew perfectly well it was a ludicrously overpowered ability grumble a bit and get on with it (or reroll to the next flavour of the month, until they get fixed). Some, though, can’t let it go. They refuse to believe that anything less than 95% damage reduction is in any way acceptable. They threaten to quit the game, organise protests and boycotts, retain lawyers to sue the games company, contact the European Court of Human Rights wanting to know what’s going to be done about this heinous infringement of their civil liberty and start constructing small thermonuclear devices in their garages to hold the world to ransom until their demands are met. Eventually the storm blows over, though a few holdouts will lurk for years in forums, like Japanese soldiers stuck on isolated islands not knowing the war is over, occasionally pouncing on a passing developer to bemoan the loss of their beloved Armour of Anti-Poking…

So the sound and fury on forums about nerfs normally signifies nothing, and I tend to discount it all as groundless whinging. Genuine issues get overlooked like the boy who cried “wolf!”; actually, more like a vast horde of boys, some crying “wolf!”, others saying “I think it’s probably a wolf”, and some strident factions utterly adamant it’s a whole pack of wolves, or tigers, or elephants, or possibly giraffes (which might not sound so bad, but they’re giraffes with machine guns). Yesterday, though, in Age of Conan, I suddenly got an insight into their pain. I realised the gross, heinous injustice of unwarranted game changes. My character was ruined. Playing him wasn’t fun any more. The Tony Harrison outrage-o-meter was off the scale, and the forums would hear of it.

No, I don’t play a Demonologist (no idea what impact the patch note “Fixed an exploit with Demonologists (infinite stacking of certain spells)” has, and I’m not touching the Demonologist forums with a ten foot pole strapped to a particularly long barge pole to find out). I went to do /emote hugefish_m last night, and… nothing! Funcom had taken it out! I was just putting the finishing touches on a petition to the government, detailing how such a change was tantamount to a declaration of war by Norway and that firm military action was the only possible response, when I thought I’d double check the emote list, and found they’d simply removed the _m suffix to make the command /emote hugefish. Phew. That was a close one.

Badadadadada dum dum dum dadada daa daaa dum dum daaaaaaaaa!^[1] Welcome to Hat News Now Today, Today’s source of Hat News, Now.

Much has been written of Age of Conan, Funcom’s new MMORPG, but for the avid Hatter, one question remains unanswered: why did Rudolf Hess fly to Scotland in May 1941? Hat News Now Today has no idea. But we have sent our correspondents to Tortage, the starting area of Age of Conan, to see what sort of hats are on offer.

The most prevalent headgear is the sturdy padded leather helm, favoured by melee combatants.

Then there’s the helm that’s leather, and padded. Iron nose pieces are in this year.

For those wanting something lighter, there’s the leather helm with ever so slightly less padding.

Yes, as far as helms go, the key words this season are “leather” and “padded”. The iron nose piece is ubiquitous, the major stylistic war rages over Flappy Bit Hanging Over The Neck: Yes or No? (Your correspondent apologises to eagle-eyed viewers who might’ve noticed all the illustrated hats are actually the same, but he couldn’t be bothered to catalogue the minimal differences. Also Tortage is a bit dark, and flash photography won’t be invented for a few millenia, so the pictures are a bit murky).

Still, all is not lost for the hat aficionado. Hat News Now Today would suggest that those seeking more exciting millinery opt for a more mystical light or cloth armour wearing class, which opens up options such as the hood:

Perfect for reapers (of the grim variety), monks, mysterious strangers, and petty criminals trying to avoiding having their face shown in Closed Circuit Artist’s Etchings.

The really exciting hat developments come from the Picts, though:

Here, Arthur “Two Skulls” Jackson shows that skulls aren’t just for inside the head!

And finally, the perfect headgear for anyone who’s ever wanted to hide behind a wall, then pop up shouting “argh, I’m being eaten by a giant snake!”

So there we have it. Today’s Hat News, Now from Tortage is mostly padded and leather, but don’t forget to head out to White Sands to see what those crazy Picts are up to. Next time out we’ll be off to Stygia, to see if anyone has had the bright idea of making stuff out of metal yet. B-bye!

[1] I would have added a sound file to this post of dramatic current affairs theme music, a la Panorama (or more probably The Day Today), but I’m afraid I couldn’t be bothered so you’ll just have to hum it yourself. Still, it would’ve been a dead giveaway if you were trying to read this at work or somewhere, so probably for the best. Unless you just hummed it, which would also have been a dead giveaway… Quick! Tell your boss you were reading important company announcements, and adding theme music gives them greater impact. You never know, you might start a trend.

There comes a time in every new MMOG when you’ve created your character, deleted them, re-created them again with slightly different facial tattoos, run through the tutorial, gone back and re-rolled a different character class, run through the tutorial again with them, decided you preferred the first character, re-logged back in to them, got out of the initial single player tutorial area, found the /friend command (hint: for Age of Conan, it’s (obviously) /cc addbuddy , or there is an “Add by name” button, but it’s in the Players/Groups window rather than the Friends window), sent a message to your friend, found out where they are, found out where you are, managed to negotiate yourselves to the same location, in the same instance, and then it’s time for the traditional MMOG greeting: trying out every funny-sounding emote in the list (starting with /hi, /hail, /wave etc., and building up to anything vaguely insulting).

Age of Conan is slightly finicky to start with, needing you to type /emote greet rather than just /greet (I think, unless anyone knows of any shortcuts). Usefully, tab completion works with slash commands, so /em (tab) (tab) completes the emote command, then pulls up a full list of available emotes. One curious aspect is some emotes are appended with _m and _f, which seems to indicate they’re only available to male or female characters; if that’s the case, there’s no dancing for hulking (male) barbarians, or flirting, or clapping excitedly, whereas females don’t get to cheer, scratch their arm, or be apprehensive.

Anyway, bumping into Melmoth the other night, after a quick /emote greet, it was on to the fun stuff. /emote vomit naturally provided hours of enterainment, as did /emote bearhug and /emote embrace, particularly trying to get the aim right. The epic jewel slotted in the crown of Conan emotes, though, are the fish series of /emote smallfish, /emote mediumfish_m and /emote hugefish_m. These, as you could possibly deduce, cause your character to hold up their hands indicating the size of a small, medium, or indeed huge fish, the latter being particularly impressive as you fling your arms wide to convey just how huge the fish was. Frankly, there wasn’t any need to proceed further through the list, as there is literally (in the Kermodean sense, which is “not literally, actually the opposite of literally”) no situation for which /emote hugefish_m is not perfect. Greeting the rest of your party? /emote hugefish_m! Celebrating a victory? /emote hugefish_m! Roleplaying entering an inn, being wary of those around yet confident of your own abilities? /emote hugefish_m!

There is, of course, one exception to the rule, left as an exercise for the reader to work out; suffice to say it involves griefers or other malcontents, an estimation of certain lengths and the /emote smallfish command (note to Funcom: tinyfish could be handy if you’re ever adding more…)

The Early Access to Age of Conan has kicked off; a few hours late, which wasn’t really a problem (Doctor Who was on anyway), and with a minor glitch when the patcher failed to update itself properly (Quis patcheriet ipsos patcheres?), but once those were sorted out it’s been pretty smooth. I’ve been running around the rather pretty starter area, administering much pointy-stick based justice; it’s busy, but not to the “please take a numbered ticket, you’ll be called when we have a mob for you to kill” levels of some other games at launch. All in all, on the Tony Harrison scale of outrage, it’s not even at “getting lost on a flying carpet”, let alone “being used as a volleyball”.