Remember when I talked about trips?

 I've not talked about places I've been visiting and I though it might be good to do so (or remove the Trip part of my blog name).

So, this past year I've travelled quite a lot. To summarise, I've been to Granada, Berlin, Andorra, Montreal, Tolouse and Edinburgh. To some of these I went with my partner, and others I went with my son too. So I think I'll talk about these trips just a bit each, since most of them were short trips 2-4 days long, apart from the Canada one. 

First, Granada. It's my second time there, but the first time with my son. We didn't plan it like that but we went during Easter, so we managed to be there during processions. We ended up not seeing any because the risk of rain cancelled all the ones we were close to, but still we could experience the atmosphere a bit.

Granada is very beautiful, not too big but with lots of amazing corners, like the small neighbourhood with views to Alhambra or the old centre, or the Alhambra itself of course. We just walked around but we did visit the Science Museum, and have to say it's a very good museum, really worth going there. The food was amazing although way too much, in plenty of places we just ordered drinks and got enough food with tapas that we were full when the main dish arrived. It was curious to live the party atmosphere related to the processions, even if we didn't see any, and honestly it reminded me so much of Blasphemous and how its iconography is all based on living in Andalucia and made me realise how gore is the Catholic church in general. 

Then, in May, my partner and I went to Berlin. It was our first time there, and it's a place I've been curious about for a long time now. The experience was quite good, we had amazing sunny days for Berlin, and we managed to walk around the city quite a lot. The story around the city was very curious, especially everything related with the wall. I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the USA-centric propaganda with the whole thing. I mean, of course what was done there by communist rulers was horrible, but the texts explaining the history behind the wall talked about all the atrocities the USSR had done around the world and then just mentioned like in passing "oh yeah, and there were some little wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and such with Kissinger behind it, plus USA helped these nice freedom fighters in Afghanistan, nothing important related to any of these to talk about". These omissions, I feel, taint the comments about human rights and such, feels very hypocritical, and puts in doubt any historical accuracy of what is presented(if they are not reporting atrocities made by USA in the same period in other places of the world too, who's to tell they're saying anything truthful in general??)

The city felt very nicely connected, very orientated to walking and moving around, and it was curious that most typical food tended to be kebabs and such. We couldn't leave without trying Mustafa's kebab, and it was really amazing, very tasty. We didn't experience the night-life though, and this is something I'm still curious about, I have to say. 

In June we three did a short trip to Andorra. It was the first time there for my partner and my son didn't remember the last time much, he was very little still by then. Andorra has amazing mountains and hikes, but you need to be in very good shape. We were not in very good shape, but still managed to take a nice route that went around several high mountain lakes, very beautiful, although we ended up very tired. We also tried to look at the stars since there are several places in there with very little artificial light, but since it  was summer it was hard to wait till it was pitch black and didn't caught the full milky way view that is so impressive. We also visited a bit a few towns around, but they're very little and we were more interested in the mountain views anyway.

In August we visited Montreal, my partner's brother lives there with his wife and children. We already had been there in 2022. It was a family visit but we managed to do a bit of tourism too. Montreal feels very european for a Canadian city, there are walk-able neighbourhoods and nice corners that reminded me as well of similar streets we found in Berlin, with cute shops and cafes and such. However there's also suburbs, of course, and even if you can live nicely in there and people have lots of money, I cannot help but feel I wouldn't be able to live there comfortably, where going to buy bread requires a 20-minute car drive there and back. Reminds me that this is the result of asshole car companies pushing for this and it makes me mad. 

Apart from that, nature there is amazing and we managed to do a couple of trips to some close mountain ranges, very beautiful. We also went to Ottawa, the capital, and managed to do a short little visit around this other city, that also felt European because of it's old government buildings and the Canadian parliament, resembling a bit the British parliament. Canada in August feels very green and nice, even if it does rain a lot, and it seems like a very nice place to live (till you remember what's the weather like in December). 

In October my partner and I visited Tolouse. The first time we were in Tolouse was in 2023 and it was accidental, we were stranded on our way back to Barcelona from Paris because of a train track issue. They woke us up in the middle of the night, made us go down, and didn't offer any alternatives, so in the end my parents helped and picked us up. We were tired and sleepy and in a bad mood, and even then it felt like the city was very beautiful. So we went back this October to properly visit it, and we really loved it. 

The small streets with the clay bricks, the channels and rivers, the food (omg the food, the streets had an amazing smell of amazing food), the giant Minotaur, Spider and Naked Scorpion-Woman....ah yes, quite by accident we went at the same time they were doing a street opera with giant mechanical monsters moving around the city. It was accidental and amazing. We actually didn't catch them moving much, because they didn't tell you where they were or at what times they moved, you had to walk around and be lucky, but we managed to catch them a few times, and it was an extra-nice detail, also because they had closed street traffic when doing this, so we could walk more freely around the centre. Really loved this city and we ended up so full of amazing food....

Finally in November we went to Edinburgh with my son. My partner's cousin from Hong Kong was visiting family at the time in there, so we arranged to meet. We took the chance to visit it too, and I re-did some of the tours I did before (it was my second time there), but with me telling my partner and my son a bit about the history of the city. Edinburgh is very very beautiful and medieval, very green and humid too of course, and quite cold, but beautiful. I have to say though that the centre feels too tourist and starts to feel very....artificial, very polished for tourists. 

We did visit the cemeteries, the hills and the castle and old-town, although we didn't enter any museum nor guided tour or anything. We ate too much greasy food though and ended up a bit indigested, but we tried the haggis and liked it.

And this is my 2024 trips. I realize I didn't talk yet about my 2023 trips, which includes Paris, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but hopefully in another post soon I can talk about that^^.

It's not a circle

I have not been writing much this year, to the point that I didn't talk about the second part of Alan Wake, which came out a year ago. 

The first game, I remember it with mixed opinions. The story was spectacular, but the gameplay was not very fun, up until you reached the dark place where strange things started happening and was very interesting. But the previous sections, which comprise most of the game, felt....long. You were traversing woods at night and enemies came at you, the same enemies always, and you had to beat them to get to the next point, another wood section. 

 Also, for some reason, you tended to travel by night, when the enemies were more powerful. I kept wondering why not take a good night's sleep and continue in the morning when it was sunny and safe....in moments when you were stranded it's ok, but every time to go out at night seemed unnecessary...

Nevertheless, the story was very good. It was very smart to connect an evil entity with the power of stories, and to indicate that you could modify the story but had to beat it in a way that made sense, if you gave yourself superpowers in writing the evil entity could do the same with itself, so you had to respect the story. 

Since the first game, these people had made Control though. And I'm a big fan of Control and know these people can make great stories, so I was for sure very interested in this second part, even if I'm more interested in Control 2. So, of course I had to play this. 

And I have to say that Alan Wake 2 is so much better than the first game. Still not as fun as Control, but Control is about action, and Alan Wake 2 is about horror, and it does it quite well. Horror is based on making you fear for your safety, for what will be next after the corner, for thinking you're running out of bullets. And Alan Wake 2 manages this extremely well, much better than the first part.

First, let's talk graphics. This game is gorgeous, detailed and realistic. It's amazing how good it looks, it feels like you're playing a movie. The scenarios are very detailed and unique, and feel asphyxiating somehow, in a good way for a horror game. How light work and influences the environment is also very well done. And it's worth mentioning that they've abandoned the "only going out at night" approach and follow a much nicer and scarier method: Considering that overcast north-pacific weather can make areas quite dark, that's what you get in plenty of areas, just the inside of buildings with no power or cloudy areas or rainy areas. This gives a greyish dark look at the game that matches well with its themes.

The plot is complex: Seems like Alan Wake disappeared years ago, and there's people that also disappeared in the lake that are reappearing and getting murdered by a cult, and you need to investigate this as an FBI agent called Saga. You start playing as Saga, who's a very interesting character that seems to have something more than intuition when resolving crimes, and you start investigating the latest murder. The game includes a special mode where you write down clues and follow up logic threads to figure out what happens, which I found quite cool, especially because later on there's threads that you might not find or complete fully, depending on your findings. 

Soon enough things turn to worse as Alan Wake's pages appear and indicate future attacks by shadow creatures, which keep happening as described. Without spoiling much, eventually you also play as Alan Wake, but it takes a while to get there, and then you can switch between these two characters as you advance their plots in parallel. 

In the middle there's also the FBC involved, and Ahti, the Janitor from Control plus other characters from previous games, connecting everything together.

When you play as Saga you find possessed shadow people that you need to light to burn their protection and then shoot, while if you play as Wake there's plenty of shadows around, some are harmless but some of them attack you and need to flash with light to reveal as monsters to attack back. Each character has slightly different weapons and abilities (instead of investigating cases, Wake can do fixed reality alterations of scenes and places), but the gameplay is basically the same. Saga needs to deal with occasional boss fights while Wake just has lots and lots of enemies depending on the area. 

There's a bit of free-roaming aspect in the game, where you can revisit areas and affect their status (the water level is important in this game, since the dark presence lives in the water), but if you're progressing the plot you don't need to do that, this is just for the bonuses and hidden items and logs (and there's plenty of those). 

The plot is amazing, although I called several of its twists in advance, but that's just a well-made story with foreshadowing, not a fault of the plot. It feels quite epic and deep, with scary, weird and even funny moments all thorough the game. The use of real-video actors mixed with everything else makes it a very cinematic experience, but very artistic. There's even a short movie you can watch completely at a certain point, which is not required at all for the game and you can skip and miss, but it's cool that they recorded everything in case you stay to watch it. The developers are Finnish and this is an aspect heavily referenced and shown in the game, which I think it's a nice touch.

The game is not long, as with most horror games, but still may take 15-20 hours to finish. It's quite unforgiving, to the point that I ended up reducing the difficulty in the last part of the game to avoid repeating the same scene time and time again. 

The only flaw I found in the game is that, after all of it, it feels the progress we've made in Alan Wake's global story is...not much. There's progress yes, but there's a lot of unsolved things left for a third part, or maybe a second part of Control, not sure. But this ties well with the internal world, since in the dark place affected areas you tend to have to go through the same place three times before being able to finish them for real....

Recently there was 2 DLCs added to the game. The first one is a lot of fun, with three independent stories a la "Twilight Zone", with a very light-hearted tone and lots of humour, with the last story being genre-bending about what's a game and what you do in it. The second DLC is more serious, following one of the main characters, a FBC agent before she appeared in the main game. The tone is also quite sarcastic too, poking fun at AI and content-generation farms and declaring them evil, plus introducing really really scary areas and concepts, making it a very scary but nice addition to the game. 

Remedy (the developers) are really doing great games, interconnecting everything and creating a very interesting world, and I'm sure to try and buy whatever they produce next.

When everything is done right

At university, between the geeky atmosphere of D&D comics, computers, videogames and people that loves stories, I was told about Baldur's Gate, and was give Baldur's Gate 2 to try. Later on I also played Baldur's Gate, and a bit of Neverwinter Nights 2.

I didn't finish any of them. While they were indeed very nice games, I found them hard and overwhelming, with too many people coming at you and asking you to do quests. The characters, though seemed quite nice, and the atmosphere and style of play was certainly fun. It seems to me it took too long for me to advance much and found the good/evil alignment present in the game a tad simplistic and somehow didn't quite catch me enough to finish them. It's hard to describe, they were nice games but also not so easy to play them, somehow? 

One factor for sure was the combat, real-time based with the option to pause. Combat tended to get very chaotic very fast, having to just pause constantly or just letting chaos ensure. There were also a lot of options and it wasn't very clear what builds were good or not, in my opinion. Anyway, the point is that I played them a bit, thought they were cool but not good enough to finish, somehow. 

So, years and years later, the announcement of Baldur's Gate 3 didn't impress me at first. However, after the first 2 Baldur's Gate games I did play other rpgs with similar style, like Pillars of Eternity. I really loved Pillars of Eternity, seemed to me that game did the same as BG and BG2 but did it correctly, and one of the best points of that game was the reputation system, which I haven't seen it done as well anywhere else. Anyway PoE pre-conditioned me to being more accepting of the style, so when there were more news about BG3 coming out I did check it a bit. And what I saw impressed me.

First, the studio: Larian Studios is an independent studio, they make their own games the way they want them with no interference from a bigger publisher or mother company, like it's commonplace at the moment. So, they have a certain vision and can stick to it. They had experience in other RPGs, turn-based, and everyone said they were really good too, although I had not played them. They are European-based, there's even an office in Barcelona, they seem to treat their employees well and try to respect people. In a year where big companies have fired thousands just so they can claim profits to their shareholders, the approach Larian seems to be having is certainly refreshing.

Then, the process: They've been developing the game for years, and there has been a public beta going on where the input of players has been taken into account as the game progressed. They've been re-releasing better and better versions until they were satisfied with the result and then released the game, focusing on the devices that worked and not stressing about making one single global release or anything like that.

Then the acting: They've gotten really really good actors, charismatic, really good at their job,and they've dedicated a lot of resources in recording lines and lines and acting them out, fleshing out the characters with the help of the actors and the team, and really taking care of getting the right expressions and voices at each moment.

Regarding the gameplay, instead of real-time combat, since this is D&D roleplaying, the devs had done it in a turn-based system. That was reassuring, and it made sense, a lot of powers and skills are meant for turns, converting them to real-time was more complex than just leaving them as they were. With turn-based you can calmly plan what you're doing, check the orders, and create strategies for each combat and try different things.

The graphics look very vey good, especially considering the massive areas the game has, and the character design and details are very well thought. Maybe there's games with better graphics, but with so many characters and combinations it's perfectly fine if the game still looks like a game, although the character's expressions are very detailed and communicate their feelings very well. 

Finally, the story and the quests: It seems they polished these to absurd amounts. The moment I saw some videos about the game, I saw the liberty they were given to the player. You could use your skills talking with people or interacting with the world, you could jump, you could fly, you cold throw things, you could do quests in a thousand of ways, and the game let you try them and also was prepared for it. 

So, I had to get it. And I did. And it's one of the best games ever. All the things I've mentioned come together into such a work of art, of love, of inspiration, where people did their best and offered their best that you can feel it while playing. I mean, it's not perfect 100%, there's a few things that have issues or could be improved, and in then end it's D&D, with its shortcomings of being very battle-focused, but anyway, this game is almost perfect, it's a glorious example of what to do when doing games. 

The game also offers cross-platform and multiplayer. The cross-platform is especially impressive, you can save your game in the cloud and then play form your pc, ps5 o xbox, as long as you have the game in each one of these systems. This means buying the game twice, but I confess I did just that, I was so impressed by them after playing a bit on my pc first that I thought they deserved it, and I've played in my pc and my ps5 at different moments. 

What is impressive is the sheer amount of combinations that are allowed, pre-thought and codified inside the game itself, with dialogue included to address them all. It needs to be experienced, but there's one case I saw which I will explain:

In the first act of the game, you find two camps, a druid camp with refugees inside and a goblin camp that is attacking the refugees and druids. Plot-wise, it makes sense to fight the goblins, since they're working for the big bads of the game, but you're given liberty about how to act. The druids have one good leader missing and the second-in-command is an asshole, that wants to basically kill the refugees living with them and perform a magic ritual that will isolate the druid camp from the rest of the world, to protect themselves from the goblins. 

So, my first though is that I wanted to save the refugees, and maybe some druids, but wanted to kill the second-in-command. But most games are binary, so its either one camp or the other, and the first times I played I just killed the goblins, where you get a lot of freedom since you can infiltrate them first and talk with several characters there and get info and do quests as well. Anyway, after the first time I revisited, and tried to side with the goblins up to a point where I was supposed to betray the refugees and it was too evil for my taste, so I ended up killing the goblins again anyway. So I played a third time. And the third time I discovered an option where you propose to the refugees to kill the bad druid. And you do, but then I was found out, and refugees and druids started to kill each other in a massive fight. And then the goblins came and congratulated me for this, but I didn't do it, it was accidental! But that the option that I really wanted was there was quite refreshing, and that this scenario was not talked in any of the guides I was checking to see options speaks of the level of detail this game has, most people may not even know this is a possibility, especially for "evil" play-throughs in which you don't want to slaughter the camp straight away.

Things just get more complex from there, with entire plot points being different depending on what you did and what characters survived, like the fact that one evil character that I just killed at first can be a companion later on depending on these same actions. 

In general the "Good" options are more polished, with less bugs, I guess because more people were selecting them and reporting issues, but the "Bad" options are still quite complex and different and there's just so many paths you can follow to your objective...

The game is actually pretty hard. In normal difficulty, if you just barge into fights unprepared, unequipped and don't use the right skills, you will die and die fast. You need to think carefully and plan and anticipate, and sometimes to have a bit of luck too. Some endgame fights are especially challenging and unfair, especial mentions to the Shar practitioners fight (like, a 20 against 4 pileup) and the Raphael fight (this one is purely optional, being the hardest fight in the game, but the music and the epicness of it omg, it's a must to experience it....)

Another good point of the game is that it just trashes the "Good"/"Bad" system and instead you have more or less affinity with your companions. Being bad once does not prevent you from doing good later, and in general you're just tied to your stats, but you're free to investigate options and do things anyway you want. It's also worth mentioning that thanks to the writing and the acting, the characters feel alive an deep, they do feel like your companions and you want to help them and progress the plot with them. Especial mention to the main actors, that have seen a lot of well-deserved success thanks to BG3 and all the interactions they're having with fans, their streaming of playing with themselves and in general being great people.

Finally, what they did with the support deserves another comment: They just keep improving the game and releasing new content. I mean, at a certain point maybe it's too much, but they added an epilogue, they improved several key functionalities that players complained about, they fixed bugs, changed texts, clarified things and in general just kept adding to the game, even when everyone had already bought the game.  

It's no surprise they've won "Game of the year" in every contest they've participated, it's that good, yes.

And as a last note, this is what happens when everything is done right, and when people make games thinking about the players, about what they would like to play themselves, about having fun, and about being fair and good and treating their employees fairly.

If more companies were doing things like this, the game industry would be much better...

Disco Elysium: Hope in a defeated dying world

Sometimes I've mentioned before the discussions about games being art, and that some games are especially good at transmitting this. And today I wanna talk about Disco Elysium, which is such a spectacular example.

Disco Elysium is a game about communism, and how it failed. About a dying world. About second chances. About the past dragging us down and preventing us to evolve. About how there's major powers that are not letting us thrive. About the ridiculousness of purity culture and how we're our own worst enemy sometimes.  About insanity, religion, decadence, corruption and state violence. About resignation and resistance and about doing what you can instead of trying and failing to do everything. The game affects you deeply, takes hold of you and doesn't let you go. The game is funny, sarcastic, tender, sad, deep, profound. The game can be played in lots of different ways, and have different outcomes to different situations while being the same game. This game changes you.

The game itself is a kind-of roleplaying game with isometric perspective, where you can equip things from your inventory, click on things to inspect them and choose between options when talking or analysing things. You start the game and have to select how to split 12 points between 4 main characteristics, which have each 6 sub-characteristics. You can assign from 1 to 6 in each of these, without passing the 12 points total. This will stay like that in your game, but as you level up it's possible to increase sub-characteristics. These 24 different sub-characteristics determine how you interact with the world. Everything you do gets a skill check against one of those (at least, sometimes against several of those), and a dice roll plus your points in that sub-characteristic determines if you succeed or not. That's the whole game, you explore things, you talk with people, and you roll the dice (or it's done in the background as you speak) and, well, things happen and are narrated to you. As you finish quests and gain xp you can level up and either increase the points in a sub-characteristic or unblock a though process or remove a thought. Thoughts happen to you as you advance, and if you work on them they can give you special abilities or bonuses, plus they develop your thoughts as well. 

You start the game naked, on the floor of a hotel room with no memories. What is clear is that, 1-you've had some kind of auto-destructive binge that was the last straw in a chain of auto-destructive binges related to an ex-wife and 2-You're insane: the 24 sub-characteristics of you mind are talking to you, all the time, recommending things to do, giving you insights and their thoughts on all the matters. 

Soon after recovering some clothes and talking with people, you discover that you're a police officer, that you have a new partner that has come to join you today, and that there's a very dead body of a mercenary hanging from a tree behind the hotel, quite ripe after more than a week there. You need to find who did it and why, prevent the rest of the mercenaries from killing the union workers who they suspect killed the guy and try to put peace in this neighbourhood of this city, Revachol, the centre of the world, the cadaver of a region that tried to be communist and got bombed to hell and invaded by the coalition of the rest of the world. 

The world is dying, and so are you most probably, as you're an older guy that has abused substances too much out of depression and finally managed to get enough brain damage to somehow start from scratch and piece yourself together. 

What follows is an investigation in which you talk with everyone, you manage to influence local politics, you try to keep peace and really find the truth, plus to find some tether to keep you going and find beauty in the destroyed buildings and bombed areas, where you try to find inexistent animals, where you meet corrupt union leaders, good people, a fanatic liberal, the last few real communists that are too busy arguing and making pamphlets, old warriors, young drug addicts, fascists, assassins, strike-breaker scum, people lost in the edges of society and a mess of a city that feels alive and decaying at the same time. And also, you find hope. In little things, in recovery, in healing, and in revolution, in a way. Hope made from other people and from friendliness and collaboration. Hope as resistance from an uncaring world, against all odds and reasons.

This game is a statement. It's precious. It's a fucking work of art. And to really experience it you need to try it and discover what it contains by yourself.

This game is such a good political discourse that their creators got cheated by the publishing company and they lost the rights to their world and their story. They're not getting money out of it, so yeah, find copies, download it and play. Their message is important, the money for the publisher is not.

Rich bastards will kill us all if they can

The title here is misleading, I'm not ranting, I wanna talk about the second part of Horizon, Forbidden West and the DLC, Burning Shores :p . But it's a pretty good summary of the game, actually...

So, the sequel came out, and I played it and loved it. And recently they made DLC for it, and I also loved it, and want to comment on it. 

The first game was tough to follow up, the stakes were pretty high, the discovery of what had happened was incredible and the feeling of the full plot was really amazing. So, Forbidden West had to expand on it. And I think it did a very good job, although it has a few flaws. 

We start again following Aloy, who explains that even if we stopped the previous threat that wanted to kill everythign again, the world terraforming is not working properly with rogue AIs not doing their job, and therefore we need to find a solution, which would be to get a copy of the main AI involved in the job and restore it. 

At the end of the previous game this wasn't that clear, but it makes sense. The previous AI had to sacrifice itself in order to stop another AI from going rogue and killing everything, so it makes sense that the terraforming is failing all around us. And even if the original rogue AI that wanted to kill us is gone, there was another rogue AI that was less aggressive but in charge of building machines that was causing problems on the first game, so it makes sense this will be a prominent antagonist. 

Let's start with the basics: The graphics are amazing again, with a level of realism that is just beautiful. The different natural environments are relaxing to watch and traverse, and the enemies are detailed and cool to see. The game feels alive with nature and breeze, and some places that you discover are amazing to look at. 

The gameplay is similar as before. This time you can climb more surfaces, although not all, and you become a lot more mobile thanks to a number of inventions, like a grappling hook or a kind of glider that lets you fly a bit, or at least fall down slowly. Combat lets you use more melee combos this time, although there's lots of new remote weapons you can also try and experiment. In my opinion a bit too much variety in weapons and skills, I ended up focusing on a few that worked for me and ignoring the rest, although I'm told some of the new ones really do damage. 

You still scavenge resources, parts, plants and such, and then can craft or exchange for new weapons or upgrades. 

The game suffers a bit from this tendency of open-world games to make a lot of options available, when you could get rid of several of them and still be a fully enjoyable game, but I guess it depends on how you play it. But in general it's good, very open. The extra mobility is quite welcomed, feels a lot better to be able to jump from high places. 

The focus changes a bit, and now you can use it as if it was a sonar Ping, revealing things around you. This is very practical because it lets you use it without going into focus mode and then leaving, and it highlights elements that you can interact with that are close to you.

There's very hard hunter trials again, and now there's also strike matches (a table game you can play inside the game, very strategic, I liked it), solving little ruin puzzles, finding scanning drones, a few tallnecks and cauldrons, melee combo trials (hard to do, combo instructions are not always very clear) and machine races (pretty hard and annoying sometimes because the hardest races do these annoying tricks all race games do of using rubber bands and moments where rivals are just faster than you for no reason). There's also an arena mechanic, but you unlock that on the last segment of the game, so you can accidentally just skip it completely. 

The world-building is superb, and special mention goes to the Utaru, with their amazing gardens and houses in giant disc antennas, a tribe that actually grows things and makes food.

So, this is a general feeling of the game, some improvements from the first, more content, more options, bigger map and plot. 

About the negative, it feels a bit like nitpicking, but the following is true: one of the tribes of the game is this Spartan -like tribe where only warriors thrive, that bases all their culture on leftover vids displaying some kind of military air force group. This and other details feels like the USA air force and army paid to the developers to work these subplots and details as if it was a recruitment advertisement. We know they've done it more evidently in other games and movies, so I don't discard this is what happened here. It's not a lot, but it bothers me how there's moments where they're trying to make military stuff cool somehow, and feels a bit shoehorned. Then there's also the Vegas section, talking about the city of dreams as if Vegas was amazing, when it's a capitalistic hellscape made to trick people out of their money. Again, feels like a Vegas advertisement. Apart from that, some of the rewards for completing relic puzzles or drone scans feel underwhelming since it's just cosmetic details.

But well, that's about all I have to say about negative points.

The plot is amazing, and the characters are lovely and great. Without spoiling too much, it becomes apparent soon that Aloy is trying to do too many things without asking for help, and this just makes things worse. Once she actually asks for it, things improve a lot, and the sense of creating a network of real friends that will work together to prevent the end of the world is great, like a family that supports and helps each other. Also worth mentioning that I love that the real antagonist here become a group of rich bastats that managed to escape in a spaceship, became immortal, came back to earth and, as the rich bastards they are, decided to destroy the world to remade it to something they like, and the people already living in it can get fucked for all they care. It was quite cathartic to fight this type of people and to point clearly that they're at fault and that they were the problem originally. It's good that this message is made across the game loudly and repeatedly. 

The game ens with the discovery of the real final enemy: Nemesis, made of the mind of the rich bastards, that is trying to come to earth and destroy the humans that created it. We will need to wait for the third part to finally fight it though. 

Meanwhile, the DLC deals with one of these rich bastards causing chaos in a separated area. The DLC is quite nice, very epic (the final boss is spectacular and you'd need to see it for yourselves) and introduces a love interest that, finally, seems to be a good match for Aloy (and also a woman). There were several characters in the first game that seemed they could be interested in her, but nothing was done, and the most obvious one was kind of projecting from his dead lover to you, so didn't feel like the right choice. This new character, although introduced a bit suddenly, feels quite nice, the interactions are natural and it's kind of cute how both her and Aloy are flirting in a kind of clumsy way. 

In general, I enjoyed both the game and the DLC very much. A lot of questions left unresolved from the first game are finally clear, several of the best characters have returned and improved upon, there's new amazing characters and the plot continues to be amazing, interesting and kind of relevant with the current world. 

Totally recommended.

 

 

 

 

Disappointed but not surprised

I haven't written in a long time again, and also not about politics, because situation is shitty. But wanted to comment on a certain aspect of it. 

First, to say that the two majoritarian "independentist" parties, ERC and Junts, haven't done much at all lately. They've used elections just to get into power, get salaries, and then keep the status quo, making pacts with parties that, in theory, should never agree with them like PSOE/PSC and PP.

These two other Spanish parties have responded by betraying them at any chance too, so it's really really stupid that ERC and Junts still try to pact with them when there's solid proof their word is worthless and they will not fulfil what has been said. Although Junts and ERC are also very very guilty of that. 

So, people are pissed at these two independentist parties. The third big one, CUP, has acted much better in general while not being perfect, but has been added to the group for some reason(even though it never had enough power to act on much), maybe because people, once they distrust their original choice, apply the thought that "the rest are the same" when it's not actually true at all.

So now, there's an undercurrent of thought that these three independentist parties must be punished. And way too many people have decided that they will punish them by not voting at all.

That's the stupidest, STUPIDEST thing I've ever heard. 

For three reasons:

1-The less votes there are in an election, the more votes the right gets (and here I mean PSC/PSOE, PP and VOX. These three parties represent right-wing politics, from moderate on the first case to extreme in the second two ones).

Parties don't give a fuck that people didn't vote as long as they get representation. 

Basically, if there's 100 people able to vote and only 10 people vote, let's say, and they vote 4-PSOE, 3-PP and 3-VOX, these parties will not say "oh, why no more people didn't vote". They will say "oh yes, we won a lot of representation, we're the best!". And they will do whatever the fuck they want. And it will be BAD. 

These parties are the enemy of everything good. Simply put. Independentist or not, you should NEVER let these parties win at anything. If your actions are making their life easier for them, your actions are automatically BAD. 

2-Not voting doesn't give any power to your cause. 

If you want to change things, there's two options, revolution or voting for things that represent you in some way. 

To all these people that don't vote: will you automatically take arms and start a revolt in the streets? No? Then what you're doing is harming your cause. 

Nobody, nationally and internationally, gives a fuck about why you didn't vote. They only care about the people that voted. It's been proven time and time again. There's been lots of elections in the world where for several reasons people didn't vote that much. Nobody has ever commented. The final results were the only ones that counted, and that was taken as "the will of the people". 

I totally agree not voting should be considered as a bad sign. But nobody cares, so not voting will be ignored, and if something it will be considered as a fact that "independentism has lost strength, nobody wants it anymore". So, do with that what you will.

3-Dont vote for the parties that you don't like, but change your vote!

It seems like once there's a party that is yours, it's them or death. If they don't do a good job, lots of people stop voting altogether. A lot of people didn't change their vote from ERC to Junts or CUP or some other combination of this, they just stopped voting altogether. 

This is stupid! You don't like your last vote? Change it!

If people don't vote, less votes means more representation. Let's say that you have 10 people voting in total. 5 vote to ERC and 5 want to punish ERC. If the 5 that want to punish ERC don't vote, ERC gets 100% of the votes, so 100% of representation ->great success! We're on the right path, people love what we do!

Do you want that?

If instead, the 5 people that want to punish ERC vote Escons em blanc, CUP, PACMA, anything really that is not ERC, ERC gets 50% of representation ->they're punished. 

I will concede that there may be not many options available that seem good. But not voting will do NOTHING whatsoever to help you or your cause. 

See what the right-wing parties do.

They never, ever, miss a vote. That should give you a clue. 

Fresh stories

 I have been playing some more games, and I'd like to comment of them.

The first one of them is one that I've been replaying now but I actually finished last year and a half or so, and it created a big impact on me. Somehow the story and the characters felt very real and well-made. The game is called Horizon: Zero Dawn, and recently they made a second part, that I'll also explain a bit at some point.

Let's start with general mechanics: The game is an open world sandbox style of game, where you play as Aloy, a girl from a primitive tribe. The game is based on sneaking around and using bow and arrows mostly in order to debilitate and kill the enemies, which can be other humans or machines that look and behave like animals. You gather resources from killings, can craft ammo, potions and traps, and has also some close-combat mechanics with a spear. There's some skill trees where you can get upgrades as you level up, and it has a strange healing mechanic where you collect herbs and use them to transform them into health, as if they're communicating fluids somehow. Early on you gain the skill to scan your surroundings to find enemies and items and analyse their path and weaknesses,  and a bit later you also get a skill to "hack" some of the machines in order to gain control of them. The animal machines tend to have differentiated parts that you can target, and you usually use this to target weak parts with specialised arrows that damage more that part, in order to weaken the machine or remove some of their weapons. Later on you do get more specialised bows and some specific weapons, like one that lets you put traps or another ones that ropes down machines. You can buy and sell things, and there's mods you can apply to armour and weapons to improve them, with different rarity and power. All in all some original ideas but nothing groundbreaking either.  You're gathering resources as you find them and kill things and build more stuff and level up, in a kind of flow that is nice and feels fun most of the time, as you explore the world. You can climb some places but not everything, they're special marks where you can do it and usually they indicate a certain path you need to follow as you move up.

The graphics are really great, with different types of regions including jungles, deserts and snowy mountains, and you're always surrounded by nature, being able to gather resources by hunting too. The machines are beautiful and original, just copies of real animals but in a robot format, and how they behave, the lights they emit and how they move and react it's really cool, and definitely one of the big selling points of the game. Some are like current animals but others are like dinosaurs, with the most fancy one being a T-Rex in machine form and full of weapons. The game is set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptical setting, but at first you don't know anything, you just see there's ruins of buildings, of cities and towns, and there's sometimes caves where there's facilities with old advanced technology while you're just using a spear and bow. People seem to live in little towns without modern technology, but the ruins hold more advanced stuff.

To get you into moving around in this world, you find quests talking to people, where they ask you to find something or help them with something, where you use your scanning device, called focus, and find things that cannot be found without this technology. Quest tend to be interesting, although sometimes the middle of the quests adds some machines to kill to add action, when I think just the quest as they are would be nice enough and there's no need to make you kill enemies, but I know big companies tend to think that if you're not killing stuff the game will be boring and they force developers to add fights in the middle, so oh well. 

Anyway, all this is not that special, just quite nice and expected form a modern big game, apart from the machines that are amazing.

Where I think they made a huge difference is in the plot. I loved the plot, the world-building and the twists and surprises.

So, in the game you're Aloy, who is from a tribe, the Nora, that are particularly closed and not accepting of modernities, very traditional. You have lived apart from them all your life because you were born without a mother, one of the ancient abandoned ruins one day made a baby appear out of nowhere, and they were superstitious about it and thought that was evil somehow, because they're matriarchal and a person without a mother cannot be a good sign. Another shunned person raises you and becomes your dad, and in the process you find a special ancient device that lets you read and learn stuff about the ancient civilisation (our civilization but in the future) that somehow got killed for unknown reasons. 

Don't want to spoil too much of the story itself, but once you manage to leave that first closed area and explore more ruins with your device, you learn that some capitalistic CEO idiot made an army of automated killer robots that feed on organic matter for fuel and self-replication, and then was unable to stop them. However some humans started a massive project, Zero Dawn, to try and do something about it. 

Since you see that there's humans, vegetation, and some small animals the world seems fine now, but there's also the machine robots, of course, that seem to be performing tasks of bigger animals that are no longer present in this world. So, you assume something was done that worked. 

As you investigate, you see that people thought Zero Dawn was a weapon, but eventually discover that it was just a project to create underground facilities that hid AI-controlled storages that would be able to kickstart life back on earth, including humans, after everything on the top got killed. And the last people just did their best to try and save as many species, data and people as they could, knowing they wouldn't get to see it. And the world did end, it's just the project worked enough to restore life.

There's another plot on top of this as things happen nowadays that are threatening everybody in the world again, but this setting I found it amazing, very sci-fi, very anti-capitalistic, and I don't know, it was an experience to see what had been done in this world and how it made sense and created an incredible sci-fi apocalypse story while remaining positive and encouraging. 

Then there's the fact that Aloy herself is charismatic, nice and funny and smart, and several characters you encounter also feel well-developed and interesting. You feel this is a group of people you wanna help and improve things, and the general tone is very positive, even when things seems quite bad and hopeless. I also loved how progressive is everything that happens on the game, where foolish traditions and prejudice are frowned upon and marked as stupid since the beginning.

As you move around the world and discover different societies, their styles, their customs, and uncover more and more information the game sets up a very interesting premise and world-building that kind of makes sense, while keeping things epic enough.

The game also manages to end the current plot in a satisfactory manner, while leaving details to solve and discover in future sequels and letting you made theories about what happened and what's going to happen.

In an era of game clones and repetitions, this game felt very original, very fresh and hopeful and full of life, and I loved it. It definitely influenced me in wanting to get a PS5 so I could play more of it. Definitely worth playing. 

Just walking

Happy new year! 

I didn't post many things nor many political rants lately because I haven't been inspired and things didn't change much since last time, and it's tiring to repeat how fucked we are and all that, and I'd rather talk about video games when I can, really. 

However, I thought I rant a bit anyway, just cause it's been a while, and apparently next year there's going to be some elections.

Instead of explaining Spanish and Catalan situation (it's shitty), I wanna talk about a quote, by Eduardo Galeano:

    "Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking."

This, beautifully said, is a very important point to make regarding progressive ideas and policies. Conservatives, fascists and totalitarians have it easy, because their preferred state is one of paralysis, of right reduction, of stasis, and therefore they're content with status quo, with dictators and idiocy, violence and repression and being brain dead.

Opposite to this we have the progressive parties.

And we have to be realistic here: they all suck. 

Of course they do. They try to defend progressive ideas but they tend to be too moderate, or with ideas too improbable or too hard, or too idealistic, or they may have corruption in their files (conservatives are corrupt by definition though, make no mistake here). They're falible and not good at their job sometimes, and they make mistakes. 

And none of them will be a perfect option. 

However, this means that what you should do is pick the least bad. What you should never do is to stop walking, to stop voting and participating in polítics. 

We're aware they're not perfect because no one can be perfect. We should strive for perfection and walk towards it, while accepting there's flaws we need to work on. 

Not participating in polítics is giving free reign to the other side. And the other side is evil incarnate. The other side will fuck you up, chew you, spit on you, burn the fucking world down and give the ashes to the rich. Never forget that.

Leftist and progressive parties are not perfect, but they're definitely less bad than this. We should demand perfection from them, but not to the point of punishing all of them out of being able to make changes. Because for sure the others won't be punished for being the abhorrent monsters they're used to be, that's their default, what people expect of them and what their voters want and support. 

And remember, we're just walking towards an impossible goal, the point is to get closer.

Feelings of achievement

 I have a backlog of games to talk about. Haven't written in a while after all...

The first one I wanna talk about is Elden Ring. 

Elden Ring is the latest game made by From Software. From Software are famous for making the same game over and over again, with slight variations. The most famous of their games till now was Dark Souls. They did Demon Souls before that, but it wasn't as successful as Dark Souls. Dark souls became a trilogy, and they also did Bloodborne (which I've played a bit) and Sekiro. 

All these games, including Elden Ring, feel....extremely, extremely similar.

They're all RPGs, where you start with a chosen class. In most of them the initial class has different attribute distribution but does not limit you and you could level up different attributes to change class or favour a particular play style. In most of them the initial class may change a bit your initial equipment, and your initial equipment tends to be really really good, actually. In all of them you get better by upgrading your equipment more than levelling stats, and equipment scales with certain stats. In most of them you have skills and spells. In all of them you need to find "safe points" (not to be confused with save points, the games save all the time) from where you can reset the whole word, resurrecting all enemies except bosses and special ones, and when you die you start from the last one visited. In all of them you level up in these safe points. In all of them you use the same currency to level up than to buy things. In all of them it seems that the plot is something that is just hinted at, that you need to figure out with item descriptions and cryptic conversations. In all of them you dodge-roll, and sometimes parry. In all of them you just have a basic weak attack and a stronger attack, plus some skills/spells that you can equip. In all of them you  explore huge areas that interconnect with each other, sometimes finding shortcuts, but not always with a clear defined path or a clear reason why you're advancing there or where do you need to go next. In all of them if you see some big structure far away, it tends not to be decoration and you can actually get there, traversing the world. In all of them there are rooms with bosses, separated with a fog wall that you need to traverse to get there. In all of them you play "multiplayer" all the time, and you can invade other games or be invaded for PvP or offer help to other players or request help, in certain moments only. In all of them the game saves your current status up to a second ago and you cannot reload the game before you did something or died, so actions have consequences that you cannot easily fix sometimes in that playthrough. In all of them when you die you need to find again your body to recover the currency lost, and if you die before that you lose what you had before.

And all of them are REALLY HARD. Like exasperating, unfairly hard. For example, you fight a boss that is pretty hard, and then when you've managed to kill half of its life, a copy of the same one appears and it's 2 against one.  Or you enter an area and the boss jumps from behind and kills you. Or there's an enemy hidden next to a cliff so they can attack you and push you. Plus just the fact that most enemies deal incredible damage, are really hard to evade or block, and it's just really hard to advance or do anything.

I've played Dark Souls, managed to reach a hard area after a long time, and stopped playing because I was afraid I'd be very frustrated in that area and didn't feel like trying again. And I've played Bloodborne a lot less, getting into an area with a boss fight that felt unfair and too hard, and abandoned it. 

So, I was wary of Elden Ring. At the same time, it seemed a fascinating game. The engine of the game seemed exactly the same as before, with some differences, but the graphics had been greatly improved, and it just looked beautiful. The mechanics that people talked about seemed very flexible and with lots of options to explore, more than in any previous game. The atmosphere seemed very mysterious, a very strange world. And most importantly, while all other games were linear, kind of, Elden Ring was the first one that was an open world. That meant that you could find a place too hard, and instead of being totally blocked there was the option to explore a different area, train, level up, and get back there and try again. This and the fact that there was a new mechanic that allowed you to summon AI helpers made me think that maybe this time I could give it a try and play the whole thing. 

And that's what I did. 

The game is really good. Really really good. It's addictive in a way. It looks beautiful, and just makes you wanna explore it and find everything it has to offer. The game is also as hard as advertised, but it's true that summoning helpers is a game-changer, and it's the difference between impossible and doable, sometimes. 

Yes, it's frustrating. But it's part of the fun, to repeat a section or boss, to get better, to finally win and to succeed. The feeling you get when you do that is amazing, and you cannot get it from an easier game, it has to be that difficult to feel that good once you manage to beat it. 

The plot is weird and confusing as said. Apparently George RR Martin helped with some initial ideas, names and lore, and then From Software did the rest and the actual details. The end result is interesting, although it's very very hard to figure out what is going on really, plot-wise. You're in charge of getting the Elden ring, a magic device, and rule the lands as the Elden lord. However, it's not really even a ring, more like a collection of powers that you can somehow receive after defeating people, until you get enough fragments that you can challenge the current ruling powers, to replace them. Where you are and why, and what is happening is really obscure and requires you to read item descriptions and fragments and piece things together, and even then it's like very very strange. The world itself is rather grim and almost everything that you encounter is trying to actively kill you, with some npc exceptions. Nevertheless it achieves in making you always curious to see what will be the next monster or the new trap, and if you'll be able to survive it. 

The game has "quests" that happen besides the main task, but they're as obscure, if not more. Using a guide seems like a must, but I have to say it's still fun to just wander around and see what you discover and find. But without guides, it's really really easy to miss steps or not understand what you need to do. I also have to say that most quests end "badly", with NPCs turning against you and you killing them or just dying as an effect of advancing the story, and it gets tiring after a while. It feels you'll end up ruling an empty land with nothing interesting in it because you killed everything. That's also why it feels nice to be able to protect and save some of them, which can be achieved only by following guides to avoid bad outcomes. In order to save one, for example, in my main playthrough I forced myself to do the hardest bosses of the game, that are optional, in order to get the right combination of elements that saved a particular NPC.

The game has several endings, and some of them are hard to get. The standard ending feels very short and rushed, like just saying "oh you won! congrats!" and that's about it. Then there's like three other variations of the standard ending, that require too much effort considering the result is the same ending, with a different colour filter, and with one different sentence, but that's about it. Finally, there's two endings that are more worthwhile, a bit longer and . In one of them, you help an NPC enough that you become partners and marry or something, and at least it seems less lonely and that you achieved something because you're guiding the world to a different purpose. The other ending is the "worst" one, where you burn and destroy the world as it is, but also it's not so bad, considering the world is shitty and all interesting NPCs may have died or been killed, so a lot of people say it's the true ending and the one that you're supposed to get. 

The nature of the game makes it that you cannot re-load and get a different ending, you need to play from the start. However there's a game+ mode where you start with all your level, skills and items, and enemies are just a bit stronger than before, and if you do that you can play again and beat the game in record time. I got the partner ending and then I replayed the whole game just going towards the end and got a second ending, one of the more generic ones, out of curiosity, and watched the rest online. 

Even if the endings are not that great, the whole experience of completing the game is still very nice and feels quite amazing, as if you have finally managed a very hard task and you can feel a bit proud of yourself. 

Definitely worth playing.

Mind browsing

Recently Double Fine finished and published Psychonauts 2. Considering the first one was 20 years ago and finished with a cliffhanger situation and plenty of unexplained details, that's a lot of time to pass.

The original game was amazing. Original, colourful, deep and full of innovative mechanics. Basically the game allowed you to navigate people's minds and each mind is different, of course. Each mind represented a number of traumas and obsessions and problems, and lot of them introduced unique gameplay for their sections. 

The game was not successful commercially and caused issues for Double Fine, that took a long time to recover and stabilise. I didn't play it originally, only much later. I usually love all their games, so I'm glad they managed to recover and continue with this plot, even if it took that long. 

The second part continues just a few days after the previous game, and answers all the mysteries the first game left. The mechanics are the same, this is a platformer game with special "psychic" powers like levitation or telekinesis, and sometimes you enter minds and have to deal with special mechanics of that particular mind. 

The graphics of the game are cartoonish, better than the original with more details but still with the same look, that could seem more childish and cartoonish, also because the main character is a small kid. They've improved and polished them though, with vibrant colours and effects, making them more alive and cinematic. 

The controls remain a bit strange. 3D worlds are hard to navigate if you need to jump and move fast, that's a problem that has always plagued 3d platformers, and this is no exception. Sometimes it's hard to figure out where are you and if you'll fall in a ledge or not. However this feels just charming, and part of the game.

The combat is functional, but a bit chaotic too, with lots of powers to balance depending on the situation, while you only have 4 mapped to buttons. The common enemies also feel sometimes like "extras", not integral parts of the normal game, added because you need to fight enemies sometimes in a game but not because it makes sense thematically, while the proper bosses of each area are great.

All these traits don't look impressive. However, the plot is where this game shines, like most of Double Fine games. The plot is amazing and deep. Quite moving at times, quite inclusive, and surprising and mysterious, even if I called some of their twists. The characters are also great, developed and funny and interesting. And the mind levels are a treat, visually stunning, imaginative, complex, etc. 

Special mention is needed for the sensory overload level, which needs to be experienced, Jack Black song included. This game is pure art, plain and simple.

The game may not attract people initially, like the first one,  because the synopsis of the plot, the character description, the style of game, etc...all conspires against it somehow. By the game description you would not expect to have complex puzzles like a graphic adventure. By the game characters, you wouldn't expect too much depth. By the graphics, you would not expect serious topics discussed. But the game has all that, and it's infuriating that a studio as good as Double Fine seems to have to be begging for scraps while horrible bland games are made by the hundreds. 

So yeah, I'm recommending it strongly: Even if it seems like it's not your kind of game, give it at try. And try to buy the first one too, they're a pack and they're incredible, even if there has been 20 years between each other.